Reflections on Female and Trans* Masculinities and Other Queer Crossings 9781443877978, 1443877972

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 6
List of Illustrations......Page 8
Acknowledgements......Page 10
Introduction......Page 14
1. Marlow Moss: Dress Address Name......Page 24
2. Near Invisi‘BI’lity......Page 40
3. A Minister’s Speech and Homosexual Identity......Page 61
4. Refractions through Selves......Page 76
5. What can ail thee, knightess-at-arms?......Page 93
6. The Rainbow Tribe......Page 111
7. Trans*tastic Morphologies......Page 125
8. Drag King Practices and the Struggle against Cis-normativity......Page 178
9. Claude Cahun and the Practice(s) of Cross-dressing, Drag and Passing......Page 195
10. Illustrating the Coming Out Story......Page 210
11. How Might Literary Disability Studies Inform an Approach to Trans* Poetics?......Page 224
12. Resisting Freakery......Page 241
Contributors......Page 261
Index......Page 266

Citation preview

Reflections on Female and Trans* Masculinities and Other Queer Crossings

Reflections on Female and Trans* Masculinities and Other Queer Crossings Edited by

Nina Kane and Jude Woods

Reflections on Female and Trans* Masculinities and Other Queer Crossings Edited by Nina Kane and Jude Woods This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Nina Kane, Jude Woods and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8285-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8285-9

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Jude Woods and Dr Nina Kane 1. Marlow Moss: Dress Address Name ..................................................... 11 Dr Lucy Howarth 2. Near Invisi‘BI’lity: Representing Female Bisexuality through Plurality in Susan Glaspell’s The Verge ................................................................... 27 Charlotte Mallinson 3. A Minister’s Speech and Homosexual Identity ..................................... 48 Dr Matheus Odorisi Marques 4. Refractions through Selves: Claude Cahun’s Icons of the Inner Search, Psycho-dramas and Photography ............................................................... 63 Dr David Annwn Jones 5. What can ail thee, knightess-at-arms? When woman jousts or woos, be it in life, art or literature, gender wants review ..................................... 80 Dr Susan Clayton 6. The Rainbow Tribe: Sets and Spectacles: A Performance Proposal ....... 98 Jade Montserrat 7. Trans*tastic Morphologies: Life-Modelling Theatre and The Lady of Shalott.................................................................................................. 112 Dr Nina Kane 8. Drag King Practices and the Struggle against Cis-normativity: Some Insights from the Italian Scenario .................................................. 165 Dr Olivia Fiorilli and Dr Michela Baldo

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Contents

9. Claude Cahun and the Practice(s) of Cross-dressing, Drag and Passing: Gender, Eroticism and the Process of Becoming Subject........................ 182 Eve Gianoncelli 10. Illustrating the Coming Out Story: Self-disclosure and the Twelve Dancing Princesses .................................................................................. 197 Dr Catherine Stones 11. How Might Literary Disability Studies Inform an Approach to Trans* Poetics?.................................................................................... 211 Dr Cath Nichols 12. Resisting Freakery ............................................................................. 228 Jude Woods Contributors ............................................................................................. 248 Index ........................................................................................................ 253

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Van Dijk`s Ideological Square, 1998 Le Chemin des Chats V (JHT/1995/00035/w) A photograph of the scene today (the author’s collection) Claude Cahun c. 1945 (JHT/1995/00034/n) Illustration for The Suffragette by Hilda Dallas (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) 6. Character of Manju in Flying With One Wing dir. Asoka Handagama, 2002 7. Abigail Mary Allen; James Allen, 1829, by Thomas Jones (National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG D40306) 8. Flying With One Wing, dir. Asoka Handagama, 2002 9. Documentary photograph taken by Alethea Raban at ]performance s p a c e[, London, during Sets and Spectacles, performed by Jade Montserrat, 2014 10. ‘Keeper at the Gate’ from Foil and Feathers, Cast-Off Drama, 2008 11. The Lady of Shalott, 1894 (oil on canvas), John William Waterhouse (1849-1917), Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery) UK/Bridgeman Images, LMG100082 12. Workshop on The Lady of Shalott, Nina Kane (model-tutor), The Art of the Life-Model, Education Studio, Leeds Art Gallery, 2002 13. Who is this? and what is here? after Tennyson by Phil Sayers, 2003 14. Front Cover image (author photograph) 15. The Lady of Shalott, 1853 (ink on paper) (b/w photo), Siddal, Elizabeth Eleanor (Lizzie) (1834-62), The Maas Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images 16. Untitled, Claude Cahun (JHT/2003/00001/8) 17. Weaving Webs in the Gallery Space. The Elements Project, Cast-Off Drama in response to Margaret Harrison’s Northern Art Prize submission, 2013 18. The Awakening, 1891 (oil on canvas), Solomon, Solomon Joseph (1860-1927) / Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery) U.K. / Bridgeman Images LMG2956958. a. Landscape. b. Portrait 19. Shalott (after J.W. Waterhouse) by Phil Sayers, 2008 20. Water, ‘Modelworks’ project, Cast-Off Drama, 2010 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

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List of Illustrations

21. Becoming the Knight –a singing exploration of Shakespeare’s Mercutio, Unquiet Susan, Cast-Off Drama (2014) working from Tender Possessions by Tony Bevan 22. Dance with the Dead Cock, Anthony Clair Wagner, 2009 23. Freakified, Jude Woods, 1989

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would like to acknowledge and thank the following individuals and organisations: The steering group, volunteers, artists, performers and speakers who contributed to the AGender: Conference of Female and Transgender Masculinities at Leeds Art Gallery, June 2014; put on as part of PoMoGaze Festival 2014. Leeds Museums and Galleries and Arts Council England for their funding and management of the community engagement initiative at Leeds Art Gallery which supported both the development of the AGender conference and the Queer Eye partnership. Our thanks go to Gabrielle Hamilton (Community Engagement Manager), John Roles (Head of Museums and Galleries), Camilla Nichol (Head of Collections at Leeds Museums and Galleries until 2014), Catherine Hall (Site Manager/Keeper at Leeds Art Gallery until 2016) and the Cast-Off Drama Advisory Board (Rebecca Thorley, Christine Smith, Dr Razia Parveen, Liz Pollard and Kerry Ely) for support of these projects and partnerships. We would also like to thank the Queer Eye workshop participants who greatly extended our discussions and curatorial/directorial practices on questions of gender and queer, and whose enthusiasm, energy, stories, experiences, challenges, insights and generosity helped build both the theoretical underpinnings for this book and our working relationship as editors and collaborators. We thank specifically, Leeds Art Gallery, for their hosting of the AGender conference and related workshops and projects: Thanks go to the Front Desk and supervisory staff, site managers, cleaners, catering staff and Visitor Assistants who helped with organisation and practical management of the AGender Conference, and our associated workshops and projects. The assistance and advice of the staff when working with members of the public in the gallery spaces has been invaluable, and community working such as ours would not be possible without this frontline help and expertise.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sarah Brown (Curator, Exhibitions) for her organisation of the Parallel Lives: Marlow Moss/Claude Cahun exhibition (6th June-17th September 2014, Leeds Art Gallery), Sheel Douglas (Administrator) for office support, Audience Development for marketing support, and Catherine Hall (Site Manager/Keeper) for her warm encouragement and support of the conference and its aims. The exhibition gave a welcome opportunity to study the work of these two important queer artists in depth, providing a strong and timely impetus for the conference. We would like to thank Nigel Walsh (Curator, Contemporary Art, Leeds Art Gallery) for his generous help and advice on permissions and licenses, on artists and agent liaison, on uses of photographs and for his general support of our practical working from the exhibitions and collections. We thank him and Tanja Pirsig-Marshall for their curation of Changing Places: Phil Sayers and Rikke Lundgreen (Leeds Art Gallery, June-September 2008); an inspiring exhibition that usefully opened up and extended dialogues around gender and queer-working in public galleries and from C19th collections. We extend warm thanks to Amanda Phillips (Learning and Access Officer, Leeds Art Gallery) for her long-standing and inspiring commitment to feminist and gender studies within gallery education practice, and for maintaining the space for dialogue and intervention at Leeds Art Gallery. Her insight, rigour and reflection have proved invaluable to the development and sustainability of this work in the public gallery arena. We especially thank her for her support of Cast-Off Drama’s projects over the years. We extend a huge thanks to the performers, artists, researchers, community workers and volunteers who contributed to PoMoGaze projects in the 2013-2015 period. The editors would also like to thank the artists, photographers and licenseholders who kindly gave permission for their images to be reproduced in this book: Tony Bevan, Bridgeman Art Library, Cast-Off Drama, DACS, Margaret Harrison, Jersey Heritage Trust, David Annwn Jones, Nina Kane, Heliotrope Films, Leeds Art Gallery/Leeds Museums and Galleries and Nigel Walsh/Amanda Phillips, Rupert Maas and the Maas Gallery, Jade Montserrat, National Portrait Gallery, Payne Shurvell Gallery, Alethea Raban, Phil Sayers, Victoria and Albert Museum, Anthony Clair

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Wagner, Jude Woods and Woods Consultancy. We thank the staff working with these individuals and organisations for their assistance in processing these licenses. We extend a warm thanks to Professor Paul Ward and the University of Huddersfield for access to library facilities and research desk space. We would like to thank Sam Baker, Victoria Carruthers and Anthony Wright at Cambridge Scholars Publishing for the initial approach to us and for all their encouragement, advice and assistance. Finally, our warmest thanks goes to our fellow contributors who have generously given their time, energy, resources, enthusiasm and encouragement to this book: Michela Baldo, Susan Clayton, Olivia Fiorelli, David Annwn Jones, Eve Gianoncelli, Lucy Howarth, Charlotte Mallinson, Matheus Odorisi Marques, Jade Montserrat, Cath Nichols and Catherine Stones. We have loved working with you and enjoyed so much the chapters you provide here. Thank you all.

INTRODUCTION JUDE WOODS AND DR NINA KANE

This anthology emerged out of a queer cultural project PoMoGaze (20132015), built around the exhibition Parallel Lives which presented artworks by Marlow Moss (1889-1958) and Claude Cahun (1894-1954) at Leeds Art Gallery in 2014.1 One element of the PoMoGaze project was the AGender conference in June 2014. This included presentations and discussions, gallery tours, art workshops and performances inspired by the exhibition, the lives of Moss and Cahun and the broader queer cultural themes of trans* and female masculinities. Many of the papers presented at the conference with additional material generated since are included in this book. PoMoGaze brought together Jude Woods in a curatorial role and Dr Nina Kane (Cast-Off Drama) as Artistic Director for collaborative gallery-based projects. The methodology of PoMoGaze was intentionally queer and inclusive, valuing and providing opportunities for community participation in the programming and delivery of gallery events, through steering groups and open performance platforms. We developed a partnership under the name of Queer Eye and ran programmes of free community arts drop-in workshops, performance interventions and Queer Tours open to anyone.2 Open calls regularly went out throughout the two years inviting those who were ‘interested in queer culture’ intentionally rather than using an identity category like ‘queer people’. As a result, we gathered an intergenerational and diverse group of creative people all sharing an interest in playing, learning and creating gallery-based queer interventions; exploring and deconstructing intersectional hegemonies using discussion, our bodies, various objects and props, the gallery spaces, artworks from the collection, 1

The word PoMoGaze is formed from combining ‘PoMo’, a shortening of PostModern, with the multiple meanings suggested by ‘Gaze’. 2 See ‘PACE 10 Queer Eye’ on the Cast-Off Drama blog for more on this. Cast-Off Drama, [web blog], 2002, http://www.castoffdrama.blogspot.com, (accessed 18 February 2016).

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Introduction

displays and exhibitions. The discussions and curatorial/directorial practices on questions of gender and queer from these projects helped build both the theoretical underpinnings for this book and our working relationship as editors and collaborators. The AGender conference project invited participation from anyone keen to join in, whatever their background, culture, experience, knowledge-base or skills-set. The steering group, made up of local volunteers of all ages interested in LGBT*IQ cultures and ideas, created a magnificent programme of workshop facilitators, performers and speakers, some from the world of academia (from early-career researchers to emeritus professors) and others representing work in queer activism, arts practice and journalism. The call for submissions on ‘female and transgender masculinities’ resulted in a diversity of papers. Some stayed close to the theme and others broadened it to explore more general issues of LGBT*IQ experience, politics and identities. Some papers dealt directly with the artists Marlow Moss and Claude Cahun in reference to the Parallel Lives exhibition, and contributions focusing on the modernist period bear reference in part to that influence. The spread of themes from female and transgender masculinities to other ‘queer crossings’ of relevance to LGBT*IQ cultural analysis is reflected in this book.3 Speakers were selected in a series of open meetings with the steering group and the programme arrived at by consensus, in some cases with long and impassioned debate – an ultimately enriching and informative process that reflected the diversity of strongly-held feelings and opinions on the subject of gender and contemporary feminisms. These discussions also reflected the speed at which social networking is informing gender debate, and the flux of emerging terminologies, ideas, identities and languages at play and open for contestation and discussion in contemporary society. The dissension made its way into the conference with some papers generating heated exchange between the speakers and the ‘floor’ – particularly in relation to questions of Transgender identity or experience and feminisms. Our practice both in the conference project and in this book, has been to encourage dissenting voices to sit side-by-side with one another on an equal platform reflecting diverse political positions and different modes of gender interpretation. We have encouraged each 3

S. Antosa (ed.), Queer Crossings: Theories, Bodies, Texts, Italy, Mimesis International, 2014.

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contributor to write from their own perspective, to use terminology as they see fit, and to present their research with confidence, recognising that their political or theoretical positioning may well be contested or contradicted by other contributors to the book. The reader will possibly become aware of these differences as they make their way through the text. A frequent topic of discussion in the PoMoGaze projects concerned uses of language in relation to LGBT*IQ experience or identity, and as facilitators and event organisers we frequently found ourselves defining, defending or explaining our chosen set of designations for the projects. After much discussion amongst ourselves in the planning stages we opted to use ‘queer’, ‘LGBT*IQ’ and ‘trans*’ in our professional practice with community forums, and have kept to this schema in our editorial comments here.4 Language-choice, however, remains a highly-contested area in gender discussion. A fierce exchange arose in the middle of the AGender conference with regards to the use of the word ‘tranny’ by a speaker who found this an affirmative and political choice of selfreference and appropriate to the context of his discussion and community. Other speakers, however, took issue with his usage of it arguing it held negative connotations for transsexual people. Other arguments arose when speakers used the terms ‘transman’ or ‘transwoman’, or ‘MTF/FTM transsexual’ with commentators sharply divided as to the appropriateness of the language choices. A frequently contested term, discussed at length in the Queer Eye workshops, was our choice of the word ‘queer’. Whereas younger people were drawn to this usage, and recognised it as a term that has been reclaimed both in activist politics and formal scholarship since the 1980s, many older homosexual gentlemen (particularly those who had come of age before 1967) found it a challenging concept having experienced the term applied to themselves abusively for much of their early lives.5 They 4

ibid. Homosexuality was decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967 for those aged 21 or over; followed later by Scotland in 1980 and Northern Ireland in 1982. It was not decriminalised for those serving in the Armed Forces or Merchant Navy until 1994; but the inclusion of a provision allowing UK Armed Forces and Merchant Navy personnel to be discharged for ‘a homosexual act’ is still being challenged by Human Rights campaigners at the time of writing (January 2016). For more on this see The National Archives, ‘The Cabinet Papers 1915–1986: Homosexuality’, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/themes/homosexuality.htm, (accessed 8 January 2016); also P. Johnson, ‘UK Parliament poised to repeal final 5

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Introduction

opted to use the word ‘homosexual’ in relation to themselves and others, frequently eschewing ‘gay’ as well as ‘queer’ as having associations of flippancy or effeminacy; finding ‘homosexual’ an affirmative choice that reflected a reclamation of that particular word, and one that marked their own life journeys and processes of ‘coming out’ openly as adults with sexual autonomy and agency in post-1967 England and Wales. Given the complexities on the question of language, we have taken a decision as editors not to standardise the uses of terminology across the book, but to allow each writer to apply the languages emerging from their own discipline and political position as they deem appropriate. As such the reader will come across differing and sometimes conflicting uses of terminology, acronym or capitalisation, and may find they are challenged by the choice of particular words on the part of the writer. Some common examples here include Trans*, trans, Transgender, queer, Queer, LGBT, LGBT*, LGBT*IQ, LGBTIQA, dyke, genderqueer, ftm, FTM, MtF, MTF, Transboy, dragking and Drag King; also varied uses of pronoun, including the use of ‘they’ and ‘their’ to replace ‘he’ or ‘she’/‘his’ or ‘her’, or s/he. Some authors have consciously mixed their own usage of the different designations to reflect the particularly fluid evolving and contested nature of these terms. Contributors have also taken a varied approach to uses of punctuation in their chapter titles, and we have opted to leave those as they are, at the request of the authors.6 We invite the reader to consider their own response to the language and to reflect on how the writer uses it in the context of their particular discussion. Queerness runs through this collection of essays with multiple themes explored in relation to experiences of the gender binary. There are category-crossing reflections, a plurality of voices and contrasting cultural interests. The contributors’ foci covers historical, art-historical, literary and linguistic enquiry, analysed narratives from diverse cultural texts, lived experience and work created from life stories, explorations about remaining discriminatory legislation relating to homosexuality and the armed forces’, ECHR Sexual Orientation Blog, [web blog], 7 January 2016, http://echrso.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/uk-parliament-poised-to-repeal-final.html, (accessed 8 January 2016). 6 The book as a whole is standardised, however, to the Oxford Referencing System, and follows the schema advocated by the University of Western Australia; ‘Oxford Referencing Style: All Examples’, University of Western Australia, [website], ND, http://guides.is.uwa.edu.au/c.php?g=325241&p=2177430, (accessed 18 February 2016).

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looking at artworks and reflections on embodying or performing artworks. Together they bring a wealth of insight, knowledge and well-constructed argument from multiple disciplines. Much like the AGender conference this book offers a queer hotchpotch; a jumbled, sometimes swirling, assortment of texts that deconstruct and reconstruct gender and desire, moving rhizomatically through to related questions of race, class, economics, religion, culture and embodiment. Dr Lucy Howarth in Marlow Moss: Dress Address Name provides an overview of Moss, her life and work, and historically contextualises her masculine expression of dress in a context of modernism. She provocatively problematises the unquestioning inclusion of Moss in a lesbian canon of visual reference, also the suggestion that Moss was actively trying to look like a man, and argues that her self-presentation could index other social and cultural categorisations. In Near Invisi‘Bi’lity: Representing Female Bisexuality through Plurality in Susan Glaspell’s ‘The Verge’ Charlotte Mallinson offers a literary and queer analysis of the play, resituating Glaspell as an important writer on sexuality, identity and other modernist feminist concerns. Mallinson picks up gender ideas sitting between the binary to develop an incisive critique of monosexuality, an affirmation of the much marginalised topic of bisexuality, a noting of queer terminologies at play in The Verge and a situating of the play in the sapphic cultural works of the 1920s; concluding with a persuasive analysis of the phallic/yonic associations of flower metaphors in Glaspell’s text. Dr Matheus Odorisi Marques charts a lack of pluralism in A Minister’s Speech and Homosexual Identity. Focusing on the public speeches of Minister Silas Malafaia (Brazil), he efficiently applies a linguistic analysis to undo Evangelical propaganda, revealing the gendered and ideological binaries found in homophobic hate speech. His work usefully documents current political tensions in Brazil with regard to the rise and spread of both queer rights and anti-homosexual evangelism. Moving to the second contribution inspired by the Parallel Lives exhibition, Dr David Annwn Jones’ chapter Refractions through Selves: Claude Cahun’s icons of the Inner Search, psycho-dramas and photography, focuses on the life and work of the artist Claude Cahun and her collaborator and life partner Marcel Moore, shedding light on Cahun’s esoteric interests. Jones suggests that in the enthusiasm for analysing

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Introduction

Cahun in relation to gender concerns, a vital area of potentially rich scholarship has been ignored, which recognises the artists’ mutual attraction to a range of mystical and occult practices and movements. Noting Cahun’s interest from an early age in cats, yoga, Spiritualism, Kabbalah, alchemy, the hermeneutic life, Masonic and Egyptian symbolism, her uncle’s friendship with Aleister Crowley and the influence of Judaism on her art, Jones unravels how the esoteric manifests itself repeatedly in her writings and in Cahun/Moore’s photographs. ‘What can ail thee, knightess-at-arms?’ is the compelling refrain of Dr Susan Clayton in her historically-located exploration of female chivalry, gallantry and wooing referencing literature, art and contemporary popular culture. Clayton’s text explores the question of female husbands, with reference to the real-life and cultural figures of Mary Hamilton, James Allen, Brandon Teena, Joan of Arc, Manju, Britomart and La Belle Dame sans Merci, arguing that ‘female husbands and knightesses represent alternatives to straight-jacketed expressions of gender’. She raises topical and potentially controversial gender questions about representation and gender assignation in her discussion of Brandon Teena whose death was represented in the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry; positioning him both in life and representation as a female husband rather than his more conventional designation as a Trans* man; thus offering an alternative reading of him in cultural discourse. Jade Montserrat’s chapter details challenging and innovative site-specific and installation-based contemporary performance work with the body; performances in which race, gender and sexuality intersect, and in which questions of appropriation, resistance and looking are foregrounded and pushed to the limit, obliging the audience member to look at their own processes of reception and possession. It offers a rhizomatic reflection on Montserrat’s project The Rainbow Tribe and the iterations and occupations emerging from this process entitled The Rainbow Tribe Chorus Line, Sets and Spectacles, Communion and Shadowing Josephine; performance works that emerge from study of and an immersion in the life and work of Josephine Baker. In Trans*tastic Morphologies: Life-Modelling Theatre and ‘The Lady of Shalott’, Dr Nina Kane explores the potential of Tennyson’s literary figure The Lady of Shalott and J.W. Waterhouse’s 1894 painting of the subject to act as a creative catalyst for exploration of the gender binary and gender crossings. Drawing specifically on her own life-model theatre practice

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(essentially dramaturgical and performative), on the gallery education and community projects of Cast-Off Drama and referencing the visual arts work of Phil Sayers, Margaret Harrison and Tony Bevan, Kane charts a progression of the life-model performer from one side of the binary (female) to the other (male). This Trans*tastic passing is enabled through shifting identification with both the Lady of the poem and Lancelot, the Knight, and is presented to the reader here in a rhizomatic and hairy weaving of textual and visual threads. Gender-crossing and drag practice as activism is the focus of Dr Michela Baldo and Dr Olivia Fiorilli’s contribution in Drag king practices and the struggle against cis-normativity: some insights from the Italian scenario. Drawing on their own performative experiences of the scene, Baldi and Fiorilli chart the growth of Drag King workshops in Italy from the 1990s to the present, persuasively arguing for the benefits of discussing Drag King as a set of practices rather than as an identity. Pluralism, gender crossing and Cahun again take centre stage in Eve Gianoncelli’s Claude Cahun and the Practice(s) of Fancy Dress, Crossdressing and Masquerade, Gender, Eroticism and Subjectification. In this chapter, Gianoncelli explores masquerade, masculinisation, lesbianism, eroticisation and androgyny in the artist’s work; her visual and textual cross-dressing, her practice as an actress and performer in photography and her parodic display of femininity, ultimately arguing that Cahun’s work can be seen as an act of her ‘becoming subject’. In Illustrating the Coming Out Story: Self-disclosure and the Twelve Dancing Princesses, Dr Catherine Stones discusses current research into the processes of coming out for lesbian women and the formation of an illustration project based on the stories which takes inspiration from the fairy tale of The Twelve Dancing Princesses. The chapter offers reflection on the function and nature of coming out, drawing on folk tales and the work of writers Alison Bechdel and Jeanette Winterson to explore this, and suggests that the ‘queer coming out story’ holds truths and experiences within it that extend to parent-child relationships in general. How Might Literary Disability Studies Inform an Approach to Trans* Poetics? is the question explored by Dr Cath Nichols using poetry and metaphorical analysis to invoke trans* narratives of embodiment, invisibility and loss. Nichols applies literary disability theory to trans* experience, inviting comparison between the experiences of trans* and

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disabled people of oppression. Her chapter includes examples of her own poetry through which ideas can be extended and explored. Atypical corporeal experience is the focus of Resisting Freakery as Jude Woods completes the collection, charting pathologising projections using examples of refusals and rejections of these ideological impositions. Woods combines disability, transgender, visual arts and freak theory to explore different processes of ‘enfreakment’ and ‘freakery’, ultimately arguing for agency through an analysis of the ‘stare’ rather than the ‘gaze’. Woods concludes their discussion with reference to two photographs Dance with the Dead Cock (2009) by Anthony Clair Wagner and their own early self-portrait Freakified (1989), to extend discussion of how art can be used to resist the processes of freakery by turning the stare back on the viewer. Investigation of Trans* and female masculinity themes inevitably recalls Halberstam’s key scholarly work Female Masculinity (1998).7 In the preface Halberstam describes the common reactions encountered when talking about the project: People tend to nod and say ‘Yes of course, female masculinity’, as if this is a concept they have grown up with and use every day. In actual fact, there is remarkably little written about masculinity in women, and this culture generally evinces considerable anxiety about even the prospect of manly women.8

Since the publication of Halberstam’s foundational book the canon has expanded, but the lack of parity between scholarship and cultural production focused on male femininity and female masculinity described by Halberstam still persists. This book, I hope, will eventually form just one part of a cultural onslaught on the privileged reservation of masculinity for men.9

The editors of this book echo Halberstam’s desire and hope that this project will be considered one more valuable contribution to this worthy endeavour, encouraging an exploration of Halberstam’s original ideas in the context of new understandings and cultural progressions. Part of this 7

J. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1998. 8 ibid, p xi. 9 ibid, p xii.

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re-consideration of Halberstam’s ideas involves recognising the huge impact that Transfeminisms are having on debates around female masculinity and masculine identities, and on notions of the binary and its existence as a stable or immovable frame of reference for lived identities. As many of the debates at the AGender conference, and currently raging in the media, our universities and on social networking forums reveal, our contemporary position is one of flux. The process of discussing gender in the current climate is not an easy one. Whilst many gains have been made in legal, theoretical, medical, technological and cultural understandings in recent decades, there remain many battles to be fought. In some cases the battles are with rising waves of bigotry, backlash and gender terrorism against women and queers fuelled by a resurgence in the powers of patriarchal capitalism, that need addressing internationally. In other cases, the battles are happening amongst ourselves within queer, Trans* and feminist communities as we struggle to define new structures of feeling occasioned by the massive growth of gender literacy, and as we strive to develop languages that can accommodate contesting modes of self-identification within increasingly fragmented and unstable gender parameters. Arguably, philosopher Luce Irigaray’s vision of the centrality of sexuate difference to our age is proving prescient. Writing in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, first published in 1984, she said: Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age. According to Heidegger, each age has one issue to think through, and one only. Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our ‘salvation’ if we thought it through […] sexual difference would constitute the horizon of worlds more fecund than any known to date – at least in the West – and without reducing fecundity to the reproduction of bodies and flesh.10

The editors of this book believe that open, honest, debate on this ‘major philosophical issue’ and the sharing of knowledge between us can only serve to enrich understanding and growth not only on questions on female and transgender masculinities and other queer crossings, but within our communities and lives. We offer this collection with this ethos in mind. Jude Woods and Nina Kane, West Yorkshire, 2016. 10

L. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, London, The Athlone Press, 1993, p. 5. First published in French as Ethique de la Difference Sexuelle by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, in 1984.

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Bibliography Antosa, S. (ed.), Queer Crossings: Theories, Bodies, Texts, Italy, Mimesis International, 2014. Cast-Off Drama, [web blog], 2002, http://www.castoffdrama.blogspot.com , (accessed 18 February 2016). Halberstam, J., Female Masculinity, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1998. Irigaray, L., An Ethics of Sexual Difference, London, The Athlone Press, 1993. The National Archives, ‘The Cabinet Papers 1915–1986: Homosexuality’, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/themes/homosexual ity.htm, (accessed 18 February 2016). ‘Oxford Referencing Style: All Examples’, University of Western Australia, [website], ND, http://guides.is.uwa.edu.au/c.php?g=325241&p=2177430, (accessed 18 February 2016). Johnson, P., ‘UK Parliament poised to repeal final remaining discriminatory legislation relating to homosexuality and the armed forces’, ECHR Sexual Orientation Blog, [web blog], 7 January 2016, http://echrso.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/uk-parliament-poised-to-repealfinal.html, (accessed 8 January 2016).

1. MARLOW MOSS: DRESS ADDRESS NAME DR LUCY HOWARTH

Upon encountering one of the several portrait photographs of the British constructive artist Marlow Moss, taken by Stephen Storm (Stefan Nijhoff) over a period from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, the initial assumption is that she is a man.1 If the image is labelled, the name of the sitter neither confirms nor disputes this. Once the twenty-first century viewer is furnished with the information that Moss is in fact a woman, the next assumption is that she is a lesbian; whilst this is accurate it is also a gross simplification of Moss’s sartorial choices, chosen name and selfpresentation. This essay attempts to unpick the various strands of meaning in the fabric (or fabrication) of Moss’s identity, woven into her manly attire and represented in Storm’s photographs. The semantic interdetermination of clothing and identity is succinctly described by Gertrude Stein, the great figure of the Parisian ex-pat bohemian scene of which Moss was part: ‘dress address name’.2 The inter-war period was an opportune time to reassess one’s identity. The horrors of the Great War had revealed the instability of Western civilisation; once eternal identities, British and French, were seen as in decline, or in ruins. A key reference for feminist art history is John Stuart Mill’s essay ‘The Subjection of Women’ in which he points out that

1

The photograph under discussion here is dated c. 1955 and was taken by Stephen Storm (Stefan Nijhoff), the son of Moss's partner A.H. (Netty) Nijhoff. It has not been possible to obtain permission to reproduce this image. 2 G. Stein, How to Write, Paris, Plain Edition, 1931, cited in S. Gubar, ‘Blessings in Disguise: Cross Dressing as Re-Dressing for Female Modernists’, The Massachusetts Review, vol. 22, 1981, p. 497.

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1. Marlow Moss: Dress Address Name

‘everything which is usual appears natural’.3 The evidential changes in what had been constants in society provoked fundamental questions regarding the ‘naturalness’ of gender roles. Culture and nature were irrevocably split; what had seemed natural/cultural, was now revealed as purely cultural, and therefore unstable. ‘NATURE’ is identified as humanity’s ‘greatest enemy’ by Moss in an essay of 1933.4 Her seminal philosophical influence, Nietzsche, had foretold this state of affairs: […] the individual is convinced that he can do almost anything, that he can play almost any rôle, whereby everyone makes experiments with himself, improvises, tries anew, tries with delight, whereby all nature ceases and becomes art.5 (emphasis mine)

Acknowledging this ‘cultural mortality’6 and the mobility of gender roles which had conflated and become referents for each other, novelist and social commentator Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, wrote: This civilisation no longer has clothes, no longer has churches, no longer has palaces, no longer has theatres, no longer has paintings, no longer has books, no longer has sexes.7 (emphasis mine)

The division of the sexes is placed alongside art, as one of civilisation’s greatest achievements, acknowledging gender as cultural artifice, and condemning the blurring of gender boundaries as a portent of the collapse of civilisation. It was during this period of catastrophe that artists (women including Moss, Romaine Brooks, Gluck, Claude Cahun, Hans Anton Prinner, to name a few, and also men such as Marcel Duchamp) began to plot their own positions within the contested field of gender. Moss has been quoted as having said: ‘I destroyed my old personality and created a new one’.8 Whilst it is conceivable that in 1919, at the age of 3 J. Stuart Mill, ‘The Subjection of Women’, London, Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1869, cited in L. Nochlin, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, Women, Art and Power and Other Essays, London, Thames and Hudson, 1994, p. 152. 4 M. Moss, in Abstraction Création: Art Non-Figuratif, no. 2, 1933. 5 Moss’s bedside book: F. Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom, trans. T. Common, New York, Frederick Ungar, 1960, p. 303. 6 I take this phrase from M.L. Roberts, Civilisation Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 2-3. 7 P. Drieu la Rochelle, La Suite des Idées, Paris, Au Sens Pareil, 1927, cited in ibid., p. 2.

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thirty, she conclusively changed her outward appearance, the notion of a complete and self-conscious forging of a new personality in an instant of metamorphosis, clearly owes something to a certain amount of selfmythologising. This is indexical of a tradition, present in the discipline of art history since Vasari but particularly prevalent in twentieth century avant-gardism, of artist as martyr/hero. More specifically it has been argued that the mythologising of self is a tactical strategy engaged by lesbian writers and artists to establish a distinct lesbian genealogy, because ‘mythology is history’.9 This sentiment has strong connections with what writing there is on Moss, particularly the account of her partner Netty Nijhoff, (the novelist A.H. Nijhoff, cited above). Kati Rötger has characterised the accepted account of Moss’s life as ‘a staging of initiation into manhood’.10 This notion is one of ‘rites of passage’, a common trope in literature and mythology. The ritual process essentially consists of three stages; in the case of Moss, severance can be seen to have taken place in relation to her family in London and her British nationality, as well as (most significantly) her gender; Cornwall provided the liminal space necessary for her ‘ordeal’ and re-birth (she convalesced there as a child, and found sanctuary there on several occasions as an adult); the replacement of her original name Marjorie with the new name Marlow signified the return to the community, albeit a new community of the Parisian avant-garde where she worked for a decade alongside artists including Piet Mondrian, with whom she is most associated. Moss evoked the dictum to ‘make of one’s life a work of art’ in her unfinished essay on abstract art.11 She considered her persona and appearance to be equal to her artistic output, in terms of self-expression. Her self-reflection had an eye to posterity; she was enacting her own

8 M. Moss, translated from Dutch, quoted from memory by A.H. Nijhoff, in the exhibition catalogue Marlow Moss, Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, 1962. 9 C. Wolff, Love Between Women, New York, Harper and Row, 1971, cited in T.T. Latimer, Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris, New Brunswick, New Jersey and London, Rutgers University Press, 2005, p. 37. 10 K. Rötger, translated from German, ‘Nachwort -Anmerkungen Zum Titelbild: White, Black, Red and Grey Von Marlow Moss’, p. 358, in K. Rötger and H. Paul (eds.), Differenzen in der Geschlechterdifferenz –Aktuelle Perspektiven der Geschlechterforschung, Berlin, Erich Schmidt Verlag GmbH & Co., 1999, pp. 357-360. 11 M. Moss, ‘Abstract Art’ unpublished, handwritten manuscript, c. 1955, private collection.

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biography.12 It is also an existential position, and has parallels with Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘eternal return’, a thought-experiment to evaluate the beauty or goodness of one’s own life; live that you wish to live again. Moss’s re-invention of herself was precipitated by a period of such reflection, after a moment of crisis, probably the discovery of her sexual orientation. Although her decision to drastically change her self was unlikely to have been rationalised in terms of the eternal return at the time, the episode was potentially legitimised in this way upon becoming acquainted with Nietzsche’s writing in the Reading Room of the British Museum during her time in London in the 1920s. Nietzsche dwelled on the conscious act of choosing one’s ‘rôle’ in life.13 He considered the artist to be a ‘dangerous conception’ and wrote with ambivalence of: Falsity with a good conscience; delight in dissimulation breaking forth as power, pushing aside, overflowing, and sometimes extinguishing the socalled ‘character’; the inner longing to play a rôle, to assume a mask, to put on an appearance; a surplus of capacity for adaptations of every kind.14 (emphasis mine)

Moss could not have but related this to her own experience, whether or not she considered her ‘mask’ to have been assumed or relinquished at the point of her transformation. Michel Seuphor, in his 1958 book entitled History of Abstract Painting, states: There is no such thing as sex where sensibility is concerned, and I know many a highly-regarded canvas which would meet with derision if it were signed with a woman’s name.15

The historical precedents of creative women replacing given names with elected masculine ones are many. The female artists mentioned above, either adjusted their given names to make them more androgynous (Brooks, Gluck) or invented new masculine names (Cahun and Prinner). On occasions a masculine name has been adopted with the express 12

A phrase taken from E. Kris and O. Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1979, p. 132. 13 Nietzsche, op. cit., pp. 302-303. 14 ibid., p. 318. 15 M. Seuphor, A Dictionary of Abstract Painting, preceded by a History of Abstract Painting, trans. L. Izod, J. Montague and F. Scarfe, London, Methuen, 1958, p. 70.

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intention of fooling not only strangers into thinking they were dealing with a man, but to disguise the individual’s female gender in general; in the terminology of queer theory, to ‘pass’. The sculptor Prinner is an example of a female artist who purposely passed as a man. The painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham enjoyed the confusion her nickname ‘Willie’ caused, and believed it freed her from the gender prejudice of collectors initially.16 Moss’s name-change occassionally fooled people into thinking she was a man, even if this was not her explicit intention. In the fifties Moss was mistaken for a man in several newspaper reviews, often resulting in a more favourable reception of her work. John Russell claimed to have not known if Moss ‘was a man, a woman, or a vegetable growth’.17 Moss is also assumed to be male, on account of her name and the constructivist art she produced rather than her appearance, in memos from the Director of the New York Museum of Modern Art, and anecdotally on numerous other occasions.18 Despite these incidents of confusion, Moss’s primary intention was rather for her new name to symbolise her transgender identity. ‘Marlow’ is an ambiguously gendered name, not a specifically masculine one; Virginia Woolf’s character Orlando is perhaps an appropriate comparison.19 It must be noted that the desire to de-gender one’s name isn’t the preserve of lesbian artists, as is demonstrated by Barns-Graham and also Paule Vézelay, who were heterosexual as far as is known, as was Orlando in both incarnations. It is not recorded where the name ‘Marlow’ came from; it may have simply been a nickname derived from Marjorie. Moss seemingly was not insistent on the using of her preferred name; as late as 1932 she is listed as ‘Marjorie Moss’ in the first issue of the Parisian cahier Abstraction Création, although she is simply ‘Moss’ in subsequent issues (perhaps indicating an increasing resolve). Signatures on earlier works tend to be the neutral ‘M. Moss’, until the forties when she began to sign her works unequivocally ‘Marlow Moss’. In letters to her friends however, and on all official correspondence, she always called herself 16

N. Yakir, ‘Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Margaret Mellis: the Gendered Construction of “St Ives” Display, Positioning and Displacement’, PhD Thesis, Falmouth College of Art and the University of Plymouth, 2002, p. 260. 17 J. Russell, ‘Predicaments’, Sunday Times, 22 November 1953, (cutting in scrapbook, Hanover Gallery records, Tate Archives, London). 18 A.H. Barr, Memos, August 1942, held in the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, AAA AHB 2168, frames 32 and 33, MoMA Archives, New York; and, for example, G.S. Whittet, ‘London Commentary’, Studio, vol. 147, February 1954, p. 59. 19 V. Woolf, Orlando, London, The Hogarth Press, 1928.

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‘Marlow Moss’, from the earliest existent example of 1934.20 In turn she was addressed as ‘Miss Moss’ or ‘Marlow’, by everyone but her family. Moss preferred not to have a gendering title preceding her name, as can be seen on her 1942 application form to the Artists’ International Association which she filled in very clearly ‘Moss, Marlow (Marlow Moss)’, but ignored the requirement to ‘Please state whether Mr., Mrs., or Miss’.21 The photographic portraits of Moss display her auto-constructed gender identity; it may have been Storm who pressed the shutter but Moss possesses authorship of her image. Each highly posed gesture carries weight. The costumes, which include stiff collars and cuffs, silk cravats, jodhpurs and riding jackets, and the props, most noticeably a half-smoked cigarette, are all carefully considered signifiers. They invoke the country gentleman, the sportsman, and the aristocratic dandy. Masculinity is not the only ‘false’ claim amongst these; Moss was an artist not a jockey, a Jew not a gentile, and from the urban merchant class rather than ‘to-themanor-born’. All types of clothing-fashion functions in this way, projecting a conciously or unconciously selected identity by means of a language of culturally ascribed indicators. In the portrait photographs Moss’s appearance of maleness is extreme to the extent that she could ‘pass’, more so than in person. The format of the portraits ascribe her with the characteristics of a hero/protagonist. The lack of contextual information disguises her diminutive size. Her slightly rakish attitude evokes masculine femininity, a kind of foppishness, rather than female masculinity; she is not butch. The representation of a woman as a dandy and flâneur, which are, in fact, feminised masculine identities, is in common with the self-portraits of other early- to mid-twentieth century female artists: Prinner, Brooks and Gluck, and also with individuals portrayed by Brassaï in his Le Monocle photographs of the same period (costumes worn recall the sartorial grammar of male homosexuality, stereotypes such as the dandy-aesthete and the sailor).22 Moss bears more than a passing resemblance to the 1924 constructivist personification of modernity by Sándor Bortnyik, a painting entitled The New Adam. 20

Letter from Moss to Georges Vantongerloo, dated 2 October 1934, held in the Vantongerloo Collection, Haus Bill, Zumikon. 21 M. Moss, Application to Join the A.I.A., Tate Archives, London. 22 Latimer, op. cit., p. 24. The feminised masculine identities of dandy and flâneur is discussed in B. Elliot, ‘Performing the Picture or Painting the Other: Romaine Brooks, Gluck and the Question of Decadence in 1923’, in K. Deepwell (ed.), Women Artists and Modernism, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 1998, pp. 70-82.

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If Moss’s representation can be, in part, ascribed to the man behind the camera, another layer of meaning is added. Moss, as the partner of his mother, was in effect Storm’s stepfather. It is possible that he could have projected such a role upon her, or that she intuitively took on that persona whilst under the scrutiny of his lens. As a surrealist, in apprenticeship to Man Ray, Storm would have been aware of the possibilities of gender slippage. His own homosexuality adds a further layer of complexity to the interchange; Moss, the usurper of his father, who, in Oedipal terms, had succeeded Storm himself and was in some ways an equivalent for him. As his model/subject and muse, Moss destabilised Storm’s own masculinity; and his portraits of her continue to destabilise the viewer now. Photography is itself of course technically a process of inversion (from the negative to the positive image), and therefore perhaps the appropriate tool for this.23 In none of the photographs does Moss engage the viewer’s gaze. Although she is clearly aware of the camera and the eyes of her audience, she stares into an introspective space. A woman’s averted gaze can index many things: modesty, submission, coquettishness, or a vulnerable state of reverie, but generally a complicity in her objectification. Conversely a man’s averted gaze indicates his preoccupation with his inner, intellectual life, and his indifference to the viewer. Moss is clearly to be read in the male mode. Gender-play was not exclusive to artists and lesbians. In society portraits, such as Tamara de Lempicka’s, of Moss’s friend the socialite/patron Marika de la Salle (Portrait of the Duchess de la Salle, 1925), and in advertising images such as Vilmos Huszár’s for cigarettes (Miss Blanche, 1927), the same discourse is played out. It is less likely that images such as these can be read as straightforwardly lesbian. A pitfall in gender and queer theory is indicated, that is to project values back erroneously, causing a mis-reading or at least an over-reading of figures such as Moss. It is necessary, if fraught, to attempt instead to see things as Moss would have done.

23

S. Wilson, ‘Femininities - Masquerades’, in J. Blessing (ed.), Rrose Is a Rrose Is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1997, p. 143.

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1. Marlow Moss: Dress Address Name By determining precisely what notions of female identity were available to individual […] women, we can understand what cultural resources they drew on in conceiving and living a social self.24

In the 1920s, it was not unusual for a certain type of aristocratic and educated woman to dress in a ‘mannish’ way. Such a woman, a new woman, or boyette, would have been considered liberated, and very fashionable. Her appearance would be a signifier for modernity, not necessarily sexual identity. The fashion for tailored masculine suits could be connected to the recent war. The aesthetic of military uniform became desirable because it denotes the conspicuous leisure of an officer class and has associations with an honourable endeavour.25 The same connection can be made with Moss’s fondness for riding attire, as there is no account of her actually riding a horse. On a broad level women wearing clothes previously reserved for men, was a consequence and reflection of the women’s movement. Campaigners and suffragists in the nineteenth century (Amelia Bloomer, Mary Walker) fought for women’s rights particularly to wear clothes that offered freedom of movement. In 1919, around the time of Moss’s transformation, the French journalist Henriette Sauret described the fashion for the cutting off of one’s hair as a ‘gesture of independence; a personal endeavour’, as if the flowing tresses of the pre-war period were actual shackles to be thrown off.26 Sauret’s words seem to characterise Moss’s decision; whether they directly precipitated it is a matter of supposition. Masculine tailoring on women was only overtly connected with lesbianism at the point of the obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928.27 Following Hall’s account, lesbian sexuality was widely seen as masculine behaviour in a woman, and the sartorial style of Hall, and her protagonist, was inextricably linked to this. Moss was 24

Roberts, Civilisations, op. cit., p. 14. ‘Conspicuous leisure’, is a tendency in clothing fashion discussed in Q. Bell, On Human Finery, new and revised 2nd edition, London, Allison and Busby, 1992. The concept was originally identified in 1899 in T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, 2nd edition, London, Unwin Books, 1925. 26 H. Sauret is quoted in M.L. Roberts, 'Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Fashion in 1920s France', in W. Chadwick and T.T Latimer (eds.), The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris B Between the Wars, New Brunswick, New Jersey and London, Rutgers University Press, 2003, p. 68 and p. 80. 27 R. Hall, The Well of Loneliness, London, Jonathan Cape, 1928. 25

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certainly not perturbed by the signal her manner of dress potentially broadcast, and continued to sport this look for the rest of her life. If before she was seen as bohemian and eccentric, from this point she was seen as lesbian also. The message was mitigated however by the fact that lesbianism itself was not illegal in either France or Britain, unlike homosexuality amongst men. Not being defined by law allowed lesbianism to remain indeterminate, and masculine female identities to be nuanced and shifting. Moss’s most important initial connection in Paris was to the Académie Moderne, which, like the lesbian scene, was a largely international community, but significantly it was French at its Purist roots (teachers included Fernand Léger, and Amédée Ozenfant who founded the art movement Purism alongside the architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, a.k.a. Le Corbusier). This casts a new light upon the assumption that Moss was dressed as a man, taken as a given by Rötger for example when she suggests that Moss formulated a male identity in order to gain entry to a male canon.28 Shari Benstock makes the same assumption when she accuses lesbian cross-dressers of binding homosexuals to a heterosexual paradigm.29 Purism, and other modernist tendencies, equated femininity with nineteenth century aestheticism and the decadence that had been purged from France by the First World War; modernity was masculine.30 The link between a modernist/Purist aesthetic and masculinity is implied by Le Corbusier in his discussion of the decorative:

28

Rötger, op. cit., p. 359. S. Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940, London, Virago Press, 1994, p. 266. 30 This is argued in K.E. Silver, ‘Purism: Straightening up after the Great War’, ArtForum, vol. 15, no. 7, 1977, pp. 56-63; and C. Duncan, ‘Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting’ in D. Lewer (ed.), Post-Impressionism to World War 2, Oxford, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 320-336; and L. Tickner, ‘Men's Work? Masculinity and Modernism’, in N. Bryson, M.A. Holly and K. Moxey (eds.), Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, Hanover and London, University Press of New England and Weslyan University Press, 1994, pp. 42-82; and A.C. Chave, ‘Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power’, in F. Frascina and J. Harris (eds.), Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, London, Phaidon Press and Open University, 1992, pp. 264-281. Nietzsche too welcomed the ‘Virilising of Europe’, although he saw this tendency in opposition to ‘modern ideas’ which have ‘pampered’ women, Nietzsche, op. cit., p. 320. 29

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1. Marlow Moss: Dress Address Name Previously, decorative objects were rare and costly. Today they are commonplace and cheap. Previously plain objects were commonplace and cheap; today they are rare and expensive […]. Today decorative objects flood the shelves of the Department Stores; they sell cheaply to shop girls.31

The equation between the female, the working class, and kitsch/decorative design, implies the unity of its opposite: modernist design, the educated class and the male. The argument is developed as Le Corbusier connects the decorative and the feminine with ‘primitive’ societies, making the traditional misogynist link between woman and nature, alongside the racist implication. In his view, which was reflective of a popular view in interwar France, for the nation to regain its former glory it must return to the classicism of its heritage, and shed the frivolous, romantic and effeminate. This was characterised as a ‘call to order’, a ‘l’esprit nouveau’ in Apollinairean terms. To a certain extent l’esprit nouveau was a reaction against a perceived feminisation of art and culture, in the wake of the women’s liberation movement. To counter this Ozenfant and Le Corbusier argued: Purism offers an art that is perhaps severe, but one that addresses itself to the elevated faculties of the mind.32

Feminists, in effect, have condoned the assumption that such a sensibility is a male prerogative. As Judith Lorber has argued, feminist writing frequently fails to tackle the foundations of female inequality: binary gender categorisation. While racial, ethnic, class and sexual divisions have been significantly challenged, the belief that gender divisions are normal and natural; is still an underlying frame for modern social life. […] feminists who seek change in the structure and value system of gendered social orders rarely challenge the binary divisions.33

31

Le Corbusier, ‘The Decorative Art of Today’, Paris, 1925, cited in B. Fer, D. Batchelor and P. Wood, Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between the Wars, New Haven and London, Yale University Press and Open University, 1993, p. 155. 32 Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) and Amédée Ozenfant ‘Le Purisme’. First published in L’Esprit Nouveau, no. 4, 1920, the translation used here is that of R.L. Herbert, from his edited anthology Modern Artists on Art: Ten Unabridged Essays, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1965, cited in Silver, op. cit., p. 59. 33 J. Lorber ‘Using Gender to Undo Gender: A Feminist Degendering Movement’, Feminist Theory, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 79-95, 2000, p. 80.

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If the feminised masculine signified modernity, then homosexuality denoted intellectual and artistic superiority. It was a commonly-held belief during the twenties that the ‘invert’ possessed a rare and special insight and creativity, resulting from the synthesis of the genders. Sexologists such as Edward Carpenter spoke of a ‘peculiar aristocracy […] of the higher mental and artistic element’.34 This can be connected to the balance between the masculine and feminine elements that Theosophists (such as Mondrian) sought, but the ‘invert’ was rather a whole other type of being; s/he transcended the gender divide all together. The idea of the mannish lesbian as a man tragically trapped in the body of woman was powerful, and often perpetuated by lesbians themselves; the prime example of this being The Well of Loneliness.35 Other Parisian Sapphists Djuna Barnes, Natalie Barney and Colette, objected to the notion of a lesbian as internally male, and did not cross-dress.36 As Jack Halberstam has argued: […] ‘thirdness’ merely balances the binary system and, furthermore, tends to homogenize many different gender variations under the banner of ‘other.37

The notion of an ideal unified being of the third sex, an androgyne or hermaphrodite, can be traced back to Plato’s Symposium, and formed Mondrian’s conception of the artist as at once both man and woman38: because the artist is sexless […] the artist accordingly represents the female and the male principle.39

Mondrian, whose artistic influence on Moss was profound, was perhaps asexual but not androgynous, considered himself to be entirely male; the polarities of the masculine and feminine were not symmetrically equal and 34 E. Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women, London, George Allan and Unwin, 1908, cited in Latimer, op. cit., p. 6. 35 Hall, op. cit. 36 Benstock, op. cit., p. 11 and p. 59. 37 J. Halberstam, ‘The Art of Gender: Bathrooms, Butches, and the Aesthetics of Female Masculinity’, in Blessing, op. cit., p. 179. 38 ‘Plato’s Symposium’ [website], ND, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html, (accessed 8 January 2016). 39 P. Mondrian, written in pencil in ‘Sketchbook 1’, reproduced and translated into English in J.M. Joosten and R.P. Welsh (eds.), Two Mondrian Sketchbooks (19121914), Amsterdam, Meulenhoff International, 1969, p. 22.

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opposite to him, but hierarchical and representative of the ‘inward’ and spiritual (good) and the ‘outward’ and material (bad) respectively. In painting […] domination by the female element was abolished when the male element in our mentality became more determinate. Then art changed its expression: representation disappeared, and the plastic itself grew increasingly toward female-male equilibrium.40

Although he often displayed a dislike for women, Mondrian still distinguished the feminine principle (the enemy of art), from the biologically female body; femininity could be present, and vanquished, from a person of either sex. He had a particular interest in purifying woman of the feminine principle, as a metaphor for the purification of art. This is played out in his 1911 painting Evolution. As the nude figure undergoes her transformation, she becomes progressively less female. Her hair shrinks from sensuous abundance to nothing, her hips narrow in relation to her shoulders, and the focus shifts from the glowing belly and breasts of the first two figures (far left and far right), to the head of the central figure who has become an 'equilibrated, androgynous force’.41 The narrative of this painting is more than a little reminiscent of Moss’s own awakening, and discovery of constructive art. Mondrian himself ascribed significance to clothing fashion, as is evidenced by some notes in his hand of 1930. He too underwent an image-change in accordance with his aesthetic positioning, as described by David Sylvestor: Mondrian felt it mattered that an artist should present himself in a manner appropriate to his artistic aims. A photograph taken of him in 1908 shows a bearded floppy-haired Victorian man of sensibility. A photograph of 1911 shows a twentieth-century technologist, clean-shaven with a centre parting and brilliantined hair; the spectacles were an inevitable accessory. Soft and hairy becomes hard and smooth.42

As an equivalent to Neoplasticism, his style of painting adopted by Moss, Mondrian advocated the ‘tautened lines and unified planes’ of crisp

40

P. Mondrian, ‘The New Plastic in Painting’, 1917, trans. H. Holtzman and M.S. James (eds.), The New Art - the New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, London, Thames and Hudson, 1987, p. 69. 41 M.A. Cheetham, ‘Purity or Danger: Mondrian's Exclusion of the Feminine and the Gender of Abstract Painting’, in E.D. Harvey and K. Okruhlik (eds.), Women and Reason, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1992, p. 194. 42 D. Sylvester, ‘A Tulip with White Leaves: An Essay on Mondrian’, Studio International, vol. 172, no. 884, 1966, p. 293.

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tailoring ‘to oppose the undulating lines and soft forms of the body’.43 When a portrait photograph of Mondrian of the twenties is juxtaposed with one of Moss, their appearances are strikingly similar. The photographic portraits of Moss form testimony to her identity for posterity, and now, perhaps to a greater extent than when they were made, act as agents for ‘gender trouble’.44 The argument, that for a lesbian to dress as a man is to comply with gender stereotypes, reinforces the assumption that she is dressed simply as a man. When examined with reference to a contemporary lexicon of signification, Moss is dressed not as man, but as a modernist. ‘Womanliness is masquerade’, posited Joan Rivière in her famous 1929 essay.45 And so is manliness, replies Moss. However, she did not simply masquerade as a man, there was no subterfuge or deception, rather she constructed a transgender position, and performed it in all aspects of her life and work. According to Simone de Beauvoir, only the female is gendered; the male being the universal person.46 In order to become modern Moss used the existent grammar of costume. All gendering is masquerade; all clothing is drag.47 To paraphrase Nietzsche, she put on the clothes in which the world could know her, respect her and seek her as an artist; the clothes that would enable her to mingle in the society she desired.48 Perhaps the closest Moss came to making a statement about her gendered identity are these words, unpublished and faltering as they are: ‘Art is as – Life – forever in the state of Becoming’.49

43

P. Mondrian, ‘A Note on Fashion’, 1930, in Holtzman and James, op. cit., p. 226. 44 I use this phrase in the sense established in 1990 in J. Butler Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York and London, Routledge, 1999. 45 J. Rivière, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis no. 10, 1929, pp. 36-45. 46 S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. E.M. Parshley, New York, Vintage, 1973. This is discussed in Butler, op. cit., p. 13. 47 Kotz’s characterisation of a simplified reading of Butler’s position, L. Kotz, ‘The Body You Want: Liz Kotz Interviews Judith Butler’, ArtForum vol. 31, no. 11, 1992, p. 85. Butler responded however by seemingly affirming this position: ‘becoming gendered involves impersonating an ideal that nobody actually inhabits’. 48 Nietzsche, op. cit., p. 324. 49 Moss, ‘Abstract Art’, op. cit.

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Bibliography Barr, A.H., Memos, August 1942, held in the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, AAA AHB 2168, frames 32 and 33, the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Bell, Q., On Human Finery, new and revised 2nd editon, London, Allison and Busby, 1992. Benstock, S., Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940, London, Virago Press, 1994. Butler, J., Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York and London, Routledge, 1999. Chave, A.C., ‘Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power’, in F. Frascina and J. Harris (eds.), Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, London, Phaidon Press and Open University, 1992, pp. 264-281. Cheetham, M.A., ‘Purity or Danger: Mondrian's Exclusion of the Feminine and the Gender of Abstract Painting’, in E.D. Harvey and K. Okruhlik (eds.), Women and Reason, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1992, pp. 187-200. de Beauvoir, S., The Second Sex, first published 1949, trans. E.M. Parshley, New York, Vintage, 1973. Duncan, C., ‘Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting’, in Lewer, D. (ed.), Post-Impressionism to World War 2, Oxford, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 320-336. Elliot, B., 'Performing the Picture or Painting the Other: Romaine Brooks, Gluck and the Question of Decadence in 1923', in K. Deepwell (ed.), Women Artists and Modernism, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 1998, pp. 70-82. Fer, B., D. Batchelor and P. Wood (eds.), Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between the Wars, New Haven and London, Yale University Press in association with The Open University, 1993. Gubar, S., 'Blessings in Disguise: Cross Dressing as Re-Dressing for Female Modernists' The Massachusetts Review, vol. 22, 1981, pp. 477508. Halberstam, J., ‘The Art of Gender: Bathrooms, Butches, and the Aesthetics of Female Masculinity’, in J. Blessing (ed.), Rrose Is a Rrose Is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1997, p. 176-189. Hall, R., The Well of Loneliness, London, Jonathan Cape, 1928. Harrison, C. and P. Wood, (eds.), Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, pp. 237-240.

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Herbert, R.L (ed.), Modern Artists on Art: Ten Unabridged Essays, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1965. Jeanneret, C-E., and A. Ozenfant, ‘Le Purisme’, first published in L’Esprit Nouveau, no. 4, 1920, pp. 369-386. Joosten, J.M and R.P. Welsh (eds.), Two Mondrian Sketchbooks (19121914), Amsterdam, Meulenhoff International, 1969. Kotz, L., 'The Body You Want: Liz Kotz Interviews Judith Butler', ArtForum, vol. 31, no. 11, 1992, pp. 82-89. Kris, E. and O. Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1979. Latimer, T.T., Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris, New Brunswick, New Jersey and London, Rutgers University Press, 2005. Lorber, J., ‘Using Gender to Undo Gender: A Feminist Degendering Movement’, Feminist Theory, vol. 1, no. 1, 2000, pp. 79-95. Mondrian, P., trans. H. Holtzman and M.S. James (eds.), The New Art the New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, London, Thames and Hudson, 1987. Moss, M., Letter to Georges Vantongerloo, handwritten, dated 2 October 1934, held in the Vantongerloo Collection, Haus Bill, Zumikon. —. Application to join the Artists' International Association, Tate Archives, London. —. ‘Abstract Art’, unpublished, handwritten manuscript, c. 1955, private collection. —. contributions to Abstraction Création: Art Non-Figuratif - Authorised Reprint Ed. Complete in One Volume, original issues 1-5: 1932-1936, New York, Arno, 1968. Nietzsche, F., Joyful Wisdom, with an Introduction by Kurt F. Reinhardt, 1882-1886, trans. T. Common, New York, Frederick Ungar, 1960. Nijhoff, A.H., Marlow Moss (exhibition: 30th March-30th April), Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, 1962. Nochlin, L., 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?' in Women, Art and Power and Other Essays, London, Thames and Hudson, 1994, pp. 145-78. ‘Plato’s Symposium’ [website], ND, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html, (accessed 8 January 2016). Rivière, J., 'Womanliness as Masquerade', The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, no. 10, 1929, pp. 36-45. Roberts, M.L., Civilisation without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1994.

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—. 'Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Fashion in 1920s France', in W. Chadwick and T.T Latimer (eds.), The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars, New Brunswick, New Jersey and London, Rutgers University Press, 2003, pp. 65-94. Rötger, K., 'Nachwort -Anmerkungen Zum Titelbild: White, Black, Red and Grey Von Marlow Moss', in K. Rötger and H. Paul (eds.) Differenzen in Der Geschlechterdifferenz -Aktuelle Perspektiven Der Geschlechterforschung, Berlin, Erich Schmidt Verlag GmbH & Co, 1999, pp. 357-60. Russell, J., ‘Predicaments’, Sunday Times, 22 November 1953, cutting in scrapbook, Hanover Gallery records, Tate Archives, London. Seuphor, M., A Dictionary of Abstract Painting, Preceded by a History of Abstract Painting, trans. L. Izod, J. Montague and F. Scarfe, London, Methuen, 1958. Silver, K.E., ‘Purism: Straightening up after the Great War’, ArtForum, vol. 15, no. 7, 1977, pp. 56-63. Sylvester, D., ‘A Tulip with White Leaves: An Essay on Mondrian', Studio International, vol. 172, no. 884, 1966, pp. 293-299. Tickner, L., 'Men's Work? Masculinity and Modernism' in N. Bryson, M.A. Holly and K. Moxey (eds.), Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, Hanover and London, University Press of New England and Weslyan University Press, 1994. Veblen, T., The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, 2nd edition, London, Unwin Books, 1925. Whittet, G.S., ‘London Commentary’, Studio, vol. 147, February 1954, p. 59. Wilson, S., 'Femininities - Masquerades', in J. Blessing (ed.), Rrose Is a Rrose Is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1997, pp. 134 -55. Woolf, V., Orlando, London, The Hogarth Press, 1928. Yakir, N. 'Wilhelmina Barns-Graham & Margaret Mellis: the Gendered Construction of "St Ives" Display, Positioning and Displacement', PhD Thesis, Falmouth College of Art and University of Plymouth, 2002.

2. NEAR INVISI‘BI’LITY: REPRESENTING FEMALE BISEXUALITY THROUGH PLURALITY IN SUSAN GLASPELL’S THE VERGE CHARLOTTE MALLINSON

‘Queer means to fuck with gender.’1 ‘Bisexuality is the queerest of the queer.’2 Yet, in accepting these definitions it is surprising to hear Burrill state: Bisexuality is a valid sexual orientation [... yet] is rarely addressed, examined or theorised.3

Perhaps this can be attributed to the unpopularity of bisexuals. Their very existence challenges the status quo by confusing the accepted and enforced boundaries between the ‘monosexual’ concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality, whilst simultaneously introducing the notion that sexuality may be fluid, thus raising the unsettling possibility that ‘we’ as sexual beings or our partners, may never be truly sexually satisfied. However the ‘truth’ behind Burrill’s statement is not an absolute, as Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) demonstrates in her 1921 play The Verge.4

1

Anon, Queer Power Now pamphlet, place of publication unknown, 1991, cited in C. Black, ‘“Making Queer New Things”: Queer Identities in the Life and Dramaturgy of Susan Glaspell’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, vol. XX, no. 1, 2005, p. 49. 2 A.S. Callis, ‘Playing with Butler and Foucault: Bisexuality and Queer Theory’, Journal of Bisexuality, vol. 9, no. 3-4, 2009, p. 217. 3 K.G. Burrell, ‘Queering Bisexuality’, Journal of Bisexuality - Archives, vol. 9, no. 3, p. 491. 4 S. Glaspell, Plays, Milton Keynes, Lightning Source UK, 2009.

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2. Near Invisi‘BI’lity: Susan Glaspell’s The Verge

The Verge was first performed at the Provincetown Playhouse in 1921 and was negatively reviewed by critics. Black illustrates: Woollcott disparaged the writing as ‘miscellaneous, unselective, and helplessly loquacious.’ What Woollcott called ‘rubbishy language’ another called ‘babble a la Gertrude Stein.’5

Nelligan describes the protagonist Claire Archer as: An unquestionably disturbing character [...]. A woman, who rejects her daughter, abuses her sister, betrays her husband and murders one of her lovers.6

However the play has a multi-layered narrative and is not just a simple tale of female rejection of patriarchal family values. Arguably the crux of this play is the narrative which subversively depicts Claire’s bisexual desires. As bisexuality is both rarely addressed and unpopular, it is unsurprising that a bisexual reading of the play has not been included in the plethora of scholastic analyses. Many academics have been curious to discover ‘What is hidden in the truth?’ – a line of dialogue taken from the play, although the theme of bisexuality has never been considered. To present the argument that The Verge has a narrative that deals with bisexuality, the following issues will be examined. Firstly, the difficulties of engaging with the discourse pertaining to bisexuality (specifically female bisexuality) will be discussed. Secondly, a brief examination of how Glaspell’s work has been received in the past will be provided. Next, Glaspell’s connections with ‘sapphic sub-cultures’ and, duly, her understanding and usage of contemporary lesbian colloquialisms within The Verge will be considered.7 This essay will also examine how contemporary sapphists receive this work. Details will also be provided of how the protagonist Claire Archer relates to her male counterparts and how Claire’s killing of Tom could be a reaction to his need to save Claire from her sexuality. This essay will also illustrate how Glaspell engaged with the ‘Language of Flowers’ to subversively introduce Claire’s dual-sexuality. The penultimate 5

C. Black, The Women of Provincetown, 1915-1922, Alabama, The University of Alabama Press, 2002, pp. 65-66. 6 L.M. Nelligan, ‘The Haunting Beauty from the Life We’ve Left: A Contextual Reading of Trifles and The Verge’, in L. Ben-Zvi (ed.), Susan Glaspell: Essays on her Theatre and Fiction, Michigan, The University of Michigan Press, 2005, p. 91. 7 L.J. Rupp, Sapphistries, A Global History Of Love Between Woman, New York, New York University Press, 2009.

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section of the essay will closely examine Act 2 of the work; it will detail how this particular set design is a phallic/yonic hybrid representation; it will argue that in this scene Claire Archer (with her limited discourse) tries to inform the rest of the characters of her bisexual identity. Finally a recording of all conclusions will be made. Evidently in Claire Archer, Susan Glaspell is defiantly making a statement about what gets left unchallenged when hetero-monosexuality is assumed! The term ‘bisexual’ is almost impossible to define; Rapoport suggests the term results in ‘conceptual chaos.’8 Callis states, ‘Bisexuals claim to love people not genitalia.’ Seidman adds, ‘Bisexuality is not a sexual identity at all, but a sort of anti-identity.’9 Leyland argues, ‘Bisexuality is what disappears when we divide desire into gay and straight.’10 Foucault provides an explanation for the confusion of terms, when stating: The category of bisexuality seems to have been spared the rigours of this ‘never-ending’ demand for truth.’11

He further suggests, ‘[Sexuality] is an economy of discourse.’12 As bisexuality has been largely ignored in terms of research, no discourse has ever been provided to detail and define it. Consequently, when discussing bisexuality as the old adage states, ‘words fail me.’ Therefore, to navigate around the lack of discourse, I have opted to broach the subject in terms of dual-sexuality – the coexistence of homosexuality and heterosexuality within one being. Matters are further complicated when discussing the sapphic desires of Claire Archer as the discourse which pertains to sexuality was created within the phallocentric economy. As such, it has no value when discussing female to female romantic and sexual desires. Quite simply if 8 E. Rapoport, ‘Bisexuality in Psychoanalytic Theory: Interpreting the Resistance’, Journal of Bisexuality, vol. 9, no. 3-4, 2009, p. 280. 9 S. Seidman, ‘Identity and Politics in a “Postmodern” Gay Culture’, in M. Warner (ed.), Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, Minnesota, University of Minneapolis, 1995, p. 122. 10 J. Leyland, ‘Bisexuality’, Newsweek, 17 July 1995, p. 45. 11 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, New York, Random House, 1990, cited in A.S. Callis, ‘Playing with Butler and Foucault: Bisexuality and Queer Theory’, Journal of Bisexuality, vol. 9, no. 3-4, 2009, p. 225. 12 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, New York, Random House, 1990, p. 68.

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2. Near Invisi‘BI’lity: Susan Glaspell’s The Verge

the penis is not desired, its currency is worthless! Accordingly there are limitations in the language pertaining to lesbian sexuality. As such Glaspell relies on a number of visual examples of lesbian erotic symbolism to subversively illustrate Claire Archer’s ‘tribadic’ desires.13 Whilst discussing the sapphic part of Claire’s nature, various lesbian terms will be used to help illustrate the instability of sexuality as a whole. It has been suggested that Glaspell had often ‘flirted’ with female homosexuality in her work. Referencing Glaspell’s 1919 novel Bernice, Black says how: J. Ellen Gainor suggests that Glaspell may have discreetly depicted a lesbian relationship between Margaret Pierce, a labor activist and Bernice.14

Furthermore, Black explains: Outside of Provincetown, Glaspell’s plays were championed by two lesbian producers – Edy Craig and Eva Le Gallienne who produced Alison’s House. According to Le Gallienne biographer Robert Schanke, Le Gallienne was attracted to Alison’s House precisely because of its lesbian overtones, which she highlighted in production.15

Glaspell’s work was not only received as having lesbian overtones within its contemporary setting, but it is still being celebrated as ‘queer’ theatre. Bill Kaiser the editor of The Purple Circuit - a website which promotes GLQBT theatre advertised in 2004, ‘a marathon reading of Glaspell’s plays at the Provincetown Fringe Festival.’16 Naturally, The Verge was one of the plays read. A contributing factor to Glaspell’s works being accepted as having a lesbian undercurrent was the choice of discourse Glaspell opted to use, especially in The Verge. To a twenty-first century audience it is impossible to ignore the usage of (what is now accepted to be) homosexual terminology. Throughout The Verge the terms both, ‘gay’ and ‘queer’ are used excessively. When referring to the use of ‘queer’ in the piece, it prompted Black to ask: 13

Pertaining to female homosexuality or lesbianism, meaning ‘to rub’. Black, ‘Making Queer New Things’, op. cit., p. 56. 15 ibid., pp. 57-58. 16 B. Kaiser, ‘Burbank. On The Purple Circuit’, Openings of 2004, ND, http://www.buddybuddy.com/pc-op-04.html 2004 , (accessed 26 March 2015). 14

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The word’s excessive repetition in this work is puzzling […]. Did Glaspell’s ‘queerness’ encompass lesbian sexuality?17

Black continues: During Glaspell’s heyday [...] the depiction of overtly homosexual relationships on stage were extremely rare and widely condemned.18

This, however, does not mean Glaspell did not subversively stage female bisexuality. Arguably Glaspell held an educated understanding of the homosexual terminologies she used within The Verge; although she is never overt in the context in which she uses these terms. When examining Glaspell’s understanding of sapphic terminologies, it is essential to investigate the world in which Glaspell spent her time prior to her writing The Verge. In 1908 Glaspell and her friend Lucy Huffaker (Lulu) embarked upon a European tour. After twelve weeks the couple settled in Paris; whilst there Huffaker and Glaspell expanded their social circle by spending time with Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas and Sylvia Beach, all members of Natalie Barney’s lesbian salon. Rupp elaborates: As in all great salons, intelligent conversation among talented writers and artists was the order of the day. But what was special about Barney’s salon was the prominence of lesbian and bisexual women.19

Naturally, this merely refers to a minority of the Parisian population, however Winning explains: Paris, [witnessed, at this time] the possession of cultural space by sapphists engaged in the creation of art and literature. Here, we witness one of the first substantial instances of sapphic cultural production and a definitive historical ‘moment’ in which the sapphic begins to imagine itself.20

There is no evidence to suggest that Glaspell and Huffaker had a sexual relationship. However, what is evident is Glaspell and Huffaker were both geographically and socially central to the ‘sapphic modernist movement,’ therefore both would have had a complete understanding of the 17

Black, ‘Making Queer New Things’, op. cit., p. 60. ibid., pp. 55-56. 19 Rupp, Sapphistries, op. cit., p. 176. 20 J. Winning, ‘The Sapphist in the City: Lesbian Modernist Paris and Sapphic Modernity’, in J. Garrity and L. Doan (eds.), Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and English Culture, Gordonsville, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 3. 18

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2. Near Invisi‘BI’lity: Susan Glaspell’s The Verge

terminologies used by lesbian writers. Indeed Glaspell’s association with Natalie Barney alone answers the question Black raised, ‘Did Glaspell’s ‘queerness’ encompass lesbian sexuality?’. Barney entirely embraced all aspects of her identity and was confident in expressing her sexuality. Rupp imparts the words of Barney: I consider myself without shame: albinos aren’t reproached for having pink eyes and whitish hair, why should they [society] hold it against me for being a lesbian? It’s a question of nature: my queerness isn’t a vice, isn’t deliberate and harms no-one.21

Here Barney illustrates the word ‘queerness’ refers to her lesbian sexuality. As Glaspell was a member of her Lesbian Salon and close friend of Barney she would have fully understood the term ‘queer’ as having overt sexual overtones which pertain to sapphic desires. Accepting this, one wonders exactly what Glaspell was implying when she wrote this line of script for Harry, Claire’s husband, who states he wished Claire would ‘quit this queer business’.22 During the period, Glaspell, also struck up a close friendship with Gertrude Stein. Arguably this bond held a significant creative impact on Glaspell. The Verge itself was once critiqued as being ‘babble a la Gertrude Stein.’ This reinforces the argument that the play deals with lesbian sexuality, as Stein herself a lesbian, published a sizable amount of ‘sapphic’ fiction. However it is the terminology Stein used in Miss Furr and Miss Skeene, written circa 1910-12, a decade before The Verge was written, which categorically defines the word ‘gay’ as representing lesbian sexuality. Stein wrote: They were gay, they were gay the same length of time every day, they were gay, they were quite regularly gay.23

Clearly Stein used the word ‘gay’ to illustrate Miss Furr and Miss Skeene were involved in an extremely passionate sexual relationship. Accordingly as Glaspell was privileged to this discourse, she was able to use it to subversively introduce ‘dual-sexuality’ into her own work.

21

Rupp, Sapphistries, op. cit., p. 175. Glaspell, Plays, op. cit., p. 43. 23 G. Stein, ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’, in U.D Dydo (ed.), A Stein Reader: Gertrude Stein, Illinois, North-Western University Press, 1993, p. 257. 22

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After Glaspell’s return to the America she became involved with Heterodoxy. Many famous names were connected to this club, as Black states, ‘Djuna Barnes, Edna St. Vincent Millet, and Louise Bryant were also members.’24 Heterodoxy essentially became home to Greenwich Village’s own sapphic subculture. Schartz explains: Painstaking research reveals, [up to] twenty-four ‘Heterodites’ were lesbian, some of them living as couples. A nascent lesbian subculture seems to have taken place in Greenwich Village.25

This demonstrates that Glaspell was yet again central to artistic lesbian ‘scene’. Nelligan states: Glaspell’s participation in Heterodoxy and the wide-ranging friendships she must have made there, probably inspired her to write [The Verge] and it also provided her with the audience she most wanted to reach.26

Evidently, the same group of sexually diverse women that inspired Glaspell to write The Verge, wholly embraced the piece. Black imparts Heterodite Elsie Dufour’s opinion of the play: It seemed to me, while these women were talking about The Verge that I was in a church, that they were worshiping at the holy shrine: their voices and their eyes were full of religious excitement.27

Clearly, women of all sexual persuasions could relate to the sexually ambiguous Claire Archer; thus placing The Verge, in the genre that Doan and Garrity have deemed: Sapphic Modernity – a fundamentally complex yet crucial relationship between lesbian sexuality and textuality in the modernist period.28

As The Verge is a modernist work with a subversive Sapphic sub-text, it is clear that Glaspell engaged with this complex yet crucial relationship.

24

Black, ‘Queer Identities’, op. cit., p. 9. J. Schwartz, K. Peiss and C. Simmons, ‘“We Were a Little Band of Wilful Women”: The Heterodoxy Club of Greenwich Village’, in K. Peiss, C. Simmons and R.A. Padgug (eds.), Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1989, p. 120. 26 Nelligan, ‘Haunting Beauty’, in Ben-Zvi, Susan Glaspell, loc. cit., p. 91. 27 Black, ‘Queer Identities’, op. cit., p. 66. 28 Garrity and Doan, op. cit., p. 4 and p. 17. 25

34

2. Near Invisi‘BI’lity: Susan Glaspell’s The Verge

When comparing the Heterodite reaction to the play with that of the theatre critics, it becomes understandable that The Verge is often referred to as ‘Glaspell’s most misunderstood play.’29 Quite apparently the misunderstandings can be attributed to the ambiguity of the script. Evidently women involved in sapphic sub-cultures embraced the piece. Yet critics, who were not privileged to the language Glaspell used, dismissed it. Heterodoxy member, Ruth Hale states: [The Verge] is as clear as glass to those who will draw on their own experiences of clashing with ‘accepted physical or social habit.’30

Hale’s reaction to the play reiterates there can be difficulty in understanding the nuanced narrative; evidently if you have never had a ‘clashing with accepted physical or social habits’ you may never understand The Verge. When examining the performance of the piece it can be stated women of diverse sexualities did not just enjoy the play, they wanted to be involved in the production of it. In fact, it was 40 year-old Heterodite, Margaret Wycherly who eventually played the role of ‘fraudulent female’31 Claire Archer, when the play opened in 1921. However bisexual actress Alla Nazimova was also considered. The GLQBT Encyclopaedia describes Nazimova as having ‘a reputation as something of a lady-killer.’32 Furthermore, bisexual actress Sybil Thorndike enquired about playing the role to Edy Craig, after Craig acquired the rights to produce The Verge in England. Thorndike stated the reason she wanted to play the role was ‘That woman [Claire] says everything, I want to say.’33 Seemingly Claire Archer was a character women with dual-sexuality related to. She may also have been a vessel through which they could discuss their own sexuality in a socially accepted environment. What appeared to entice these actresses was the possibility of portraying a character with dual-sexuality. And it is Claire’s association with the three main male characters which introduces the audience to the heterosexual 29

M. Noe, ‘The Verge: L’Ecriture Feminine at the Provincetown’, in Ben-Zvi (ed.), Susan Glaspell, op. cit., p. 103. 30 ibid., p. 247. 31 Black, ‘Queer Identities’, loc. cit., p. 66. 32 C.J. Summer (ed.), ‘Film Actors: Lesbian’, The World’s Largest Encyclopaedia for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Culture, 2002, http://www.glbtq.com/arts/film_actors_lesbian.html, (accessed 26 March 2015). 33 J. Holledge, Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre, Virago Press, London, 1981, p. 146.

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part of Claire’s character. Naturally to a hetero-monosexual assuming audience that would be the confirmation that Claire is ‘straight.’ However, on closer inspection Claire’s relationships with the ironically named characters of ‘Tom, Dick and Harry, her ‘soul-mate, lover and husband,’34 actually strengthen the argument that Claire is bisexual. Certainly between them, the three male characters would have met all of Claire’s contemporary heteronormative needs; her husband, Harry, provides financial security and companionship; Tom, her ‘soul mate’ would provide her with all the understanding a ‘complicated’ woman requires. And the most ironically named of all – Claire’s lover Dick, who, ordinarily in a heteronormative context would have entirely quenched Claire’s sexual appetite. However, this character was written as someone whose sexual performance was, at best, lacklustre. Seemingly a woman like Claire needed more than just Dick to satisfy her libidinal desires! Friedman further suggests: [To Claire], Tom, Dick, and Harry are dispensable if not interchangeable. Her relationships with all of them fail to bring about any sustained intimacy.35

Indeed, the lack of intimacy between Claire and two of her sexual partners is detailed in this section of script, when Claire openly discusses her extra marital affair in the presence of her husband. CLAIRE: Was I a fascinating hostess last night, Dick? (softly sings) 'Oh, night of love – ’ [moments later] DICK: Claire darling, I wish you wouldn't say those startling things. You do get away with it, but I confess it gives me a shock - and really, it's unwise. CLAIRE: Haven't you learned the best place to hide is in the truth? 36

This clearly demonstrates Claire’s lack of sustained intimacy, with either her husband or her lover. And it simultaneously introduces the level of ‘game-play’ Glaspell uses in her work. Claire’s affair with Dick is confirmed in the presence of her husband and yet it is not acknowledged, because language referring to this affair was ‘hidden in the truth.’ 34

Ben-Zvi, Susan Glaspell, op. cit., p. 240. S, Friedman, ‘Honor or Virtue Unrewarded: Susan Glaspell's Parodie Challenge to Ideologies of Sexual Conduct and the Discourse of Intimacy’, New England Theatre Journal, vol. 17, 2006, p. 50. 36 Glaspell, Plays, op. cit., p. 37. 35

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2. Near Invisi‘BI’lity: Susan Glaspell’s The Verge

Arguably then, it would have been very easy for Glaspell to push the ‘game-play’ further as this section of script between Claire and her husband demonstrates: HARRY: Now, Claire, you're going to be gay to-day, aren't you? These are Tom's last couple of days with us. CLAIRE: That doesn't make me especially gay.37

If Glaspell here is subversively engaging with the discourse that pertains to Claire’s sapphic desires, it would indeed be true; the presence of Claire’s third potential lover Tom, would not make her ‘especially gay,’ particularly as Claire views Tom as the biggest obstacle in the fulfilment of her tribadic desires, Friedman states, ‘Claire is astute to Tom's fear of her sexuality.’38 In the final act of The Verge Claire rids herself of this intriguingly named obstacle Tom Edgeworthy. Nelligan states the reason for his murder is ‘he wants to save [Claire] from madness.’39 Interestingly then, that Bauer suggests ‘madness’ and homosexuality were inextricably connected: From the nineteenth century onwards, homosexuality was subjected to medical analysis […]. In the wake of this research homosexuality [was inextricably linked] with madness.40

As Glaspell has subversively introduced dual-sexuality for Claire it is unlikely she would want saving from this ‘madness’. Evidently if Claire had embarked on a relationship with Tom, it would only have been ‘Edgeworthy.’ Accordingly, Claire would never have crossed ‘the verge’ of her own sexuality. Claire reiterates this sentiment during the act of strangling Tom, by saying ‘You are too much! You are not enough.’41 Evidently Tom could never be ‘enough’ to quench Claire’s libidinal thirst for a ‘same-sex’ relationship, because anatomically ‘he was too much.’

37

Glaspell, Plays, op. cit., p. 39. Friedman, ‘Honor or Virtue’, op. cit., p. 52. 39 Nelligan, ‘Haunting Beauty’ in Ben-Zvi, Susan Glaspell, loc. cit., p. 91. 40 D. Bauer, ‘Homosexuality with the Context of Social Institutionalisation and Moral Sense’, Ethical Perspectives, http://www.ethical-perspectives.be/viewpic.php?TABLE=EP&ID=964 (accessed 26 March 2015). 41 Glaspell, Plays, op. cit., p. 87. 38

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In terms of the representation of Claire’s libidinal desire Glaspell used metaphoric representations. These were the floral results of Claire’s experimental horticulture, Ben-Zvi explains: [Claire’s] metier is plant breeding and in her greenhouse laboratory she cross fertilizes specimens to produce what she calls ‘the big leap’ [....]. Her goal is not to produce more useful varieties, not even more beautiful ones.42

As Claire’s plants are a metaphor for her sapphic desires, it is interesting that Glaspell is not suggesting lesbian sexuality is either more ‘useful’ or more ‘beautiful’ than heterosexuality. Chisholm reiterates, ‘On the hole [...] all that ‘glitoris’ is not gold.’43 Glaspell wrote Claire’s bisexuality to not ‘privilege sexual object-choice.’44 In simple terms, Glaspell wrote Claire to be equally sexually attracted to both men and women. However, more important than Claire’s sexual gender preference is Claire’s desire to create: strange new comings together –mad new comings together [...] Queer new things.45

Arguably Glaspell is making a bold statement here: Claire wants to end the monosexual view society holds and replace it with ‘strange new comings together’ and a general acceptance for all sexually diverse peoples. The Breath of Life is the representational manifestation of Claire’s ‘Queer new things’.46 Claire describes this plant as being ‘alive in its otherness;’47 as it is the ‘phallic economy’ which values sexuality in ‘phallic terms’, Claire’s plant is ‘other’ in terms of it being a representation of sexuality from within a ‘yonic economy’. To illustrate this, Glaspell chose to rely on the ‘Language of Flowers’ to represent female ‘homosexual’ desire. Bennett suggests: The ‘Language of Flowers’ has enabled the articulation of sexual feelings [...], Indeed, flower language was so widely deployed for sexual purposes 42

Ben-Zvi, Susan Glaspell, op. cit., p. 239. D. Chisholm, ‘The ‘Cunning Lingua’ of Desire. Bodies-Language and Performativity’, in E. Grosz and E. Probyn (eds.), Sexy Bodies The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, London, Routledge, 1995, p. 20. 44 Seidman, ‘Identity’ in Warner Queer Planet op.cit., p. 121. 45 Glaspell, Plays, op. cit., p. 41. 46 ibid. 47 ibid., p. 37. 43

38

2. Near Invisi‘BI’lity: Susan Glaspell’s The Verge that Freud, writing in the first decades of the twentieth century, could casually refer to its ‘erotics’ as ‘popular symbolism’ […] This type of discourse offers a specific non-phallocentric direction from which to approach [the] topic: woman-to-woman love […]. A sexual vocabulary [which can be] mediated through images rather than words [...] It is a nuanced discourse of female erotic desire.48

The ability to use this ‘popular symbolism’ was embraced by many sapphic writers at the time. It was the only way in which these women had a voice, as the lack of discourse would otherwise have left them silent. As The Breath of Life is an example of the ‘Language of Flowers’ it is interesting to note the flower remains in bud for almost the entire piece, given that Bennett suggests that, ‘buds are clitoral representations.’49 To further the argument that this flower is a subversive representation of Claire’s sapphic desire, the following line of dialogue was written for Claire: ‘[The Breath of Life is] A secret... A secret? .... One stab of red, its quivering heart.’50 Glaspell here has engaged with this nuanced ‘lesbian’ discourse to ‘represent and inscribe women’s genitalia [using] a clitoralbased female sexuality,’51 whilst implying a ‘quivering’ suggestion of a female orgasm. However not all of the suggestions between yonic representations and The Breath of Life are so symbolic, and this is acknowledged by this line of dialogue, spoken by Tom, ‘Claire as you were stood there looking into the womb you breathed to life, you were beautiful.52 Here Glaspell appears to be hiding a yonic reference ‘in the truth,’ by overtly comparing the focus of Claire’s desires, The Breath of Life, with a womb. The Breath of Life was not the original name for this creation. Ben-Zvi states, ‘Rose of the Rainbow appear[ed] as [its] early name.’53 The appearance of the rose with the rainbow becomes a multi-layered representation of lesbian symbolism. Seaton helps decode ‘The Language of Flowers’ by stating:

48 P. Bennett, ‘Critical Clitoridectomy: Female Sexual Imagery and Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory’, Signs, vol. 18, no. 2, 1993, p. 239. 49 ibid., p. 236. 50 Glaspell, Plays, op. cit., p. 70. 51 Bennett, ‘Critical Clitoridectomy’, op. cit., p. 242 and p. 246. 52 Glaspell, Plays, op. cit., p. 84. 53 Ben-Zvi, Susan Glaspell, op. cit., p. 246.

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The rose often appears as a shapely woman [...]. It is usually the emblem of femininity and feminine values.54

Evidently the appearance of a ‘rose’ is a representation of a woman. The appearance of the ‘rose’ alongside the rainbow adds weight to the argument that this flower represents lesbian sexuality, as since time immemorial the symbol of the rainbow has been synonymous with homosexuality often pertaining only to sapphic sexuality. Maybe Glaspell had been inspired by D.H. Lawrence’s 1915 novel The Rainbow. Rayner argues: The Rainbow, became the subject of an obscenity trial a month after its release. As well as being a highly sexually-charged work, The Rainbow also alluded to a lesbian relationship.55

As there was only a six-year time span between the two publications, Glaspell was wise to alter the original name of the plant to The Breath of Life in order that she could maintain the plurality of the narrative, whilst still introducing this exemplary representation of tribadic desires. Glaspell introduces the use of visual symbolism at the very beginning of the play. Even before the character of Claire enters the stage in Act 1, Glaspell has already introduced a hidden meaning to the play simply by demonstrating a series of visual images. The play opens to the character of Anthony (Claire’s horticultural assistant) working in the greenhouse. Whilst there he is provided with these stage directions: (ANTHONY) [...] looks minutely at two of the plants—one is a rose, the other a flower without a name because it has not long enough been a flower. Peers into the hearts of them. Then from a drawer under a shelf, takes two paper bags, puts one over each of these flowers, closing them down at the bottom.56

Naturally, as the play deals with horticulture, it may seem insignificant that two plants are the focus of this section; however, the peering into the ‘heart’ of ‘a rose’ (symbolically, a woman) and a plant ‘without a name’, which then become hidden under paper bags could indeed provide 54

B. Seaton, The Language of Flowers: A History, Virginia, The University of Virginia Press, 1995, p. 31 and p. 92. 55 J. Rayner (ed.), ‘D.H. Lawrence’, Fyne Times: Gay and Lesbian Magazine UK Online, 2006, http://www.fyne.co.uk/index.php?item=346, (accessed 26 March 2015). 56 Glaspell, Plays, op. cit., p. 34.

40

2. Near Invisi‘BI’lity: Susan Glaspell’s The Verge

evidence of the sapphic subtext of the entire play. Bennett illustrates the subtleties of this piece by suggesting, ‘Words such as “heart” [....] pose[d] [an] erotic connotation.’57 Arguably the appearance of this rose when partnered with a flower with no name (a nameless object) is indeed typical of lesbian symbolism. When discussing the ways of representing sapphism without the aid of a relevant discourse Bennett states: ‘There is no way [to] represent lesbian desire, except by an intensification of lack - lack of words.’58 This notion of ‘lacking’ is explained by Roof: In the work of Freud is an illusion premised on the presence/lack dichotomy of a phallic economy [...]. The lesbian, instead of imparting the implicit phallic desire of a ‘normal’ woman, conveys a different, concerted absence which frustrates both symmetry and visibility.59

Roof’s argument completely annihilates Lacan’s sentiment which states, ‘Of that which cannot be seen, of what is hidden there is no symbolic use.’60 Clearly Lacan cannot conceive an existence of a sexuality which does not in any way rely on the phallic economy. The theme of the ‘Language of Flowers’, moreover the ‘rose’, is yet again explored later in this scene, when Claire’s husband Harry arrives in the greenhouse. He is there to raise the question of why there is no heating in the family home to Claire’s assistant Anthony: HARRY: I am not a flower - true, but I too need a little attention - and a little heat. Will you please tell me why the house is frigid? ANTHONY: Miss Claire ordered all the heat turned out here, (to the greenhouse). [...] You see the roses need a great deal of heat. [Moments later] ANTHONY: [...] Miss Claire herself. Hasn't she given her heat to the roses?61

As Seaton confirms the appearance of the ‘rose’ is symbolic of ‘woman,’ this section of Act One appears to suggest, the reason Harry has no attention, or heat or indeed lives in a frigid home is attributed to Claire 57

Bennett, ‘Critical Clitoridectomy’, loc. cit., p. 239. ibid., p. 253. 59 J. Roof, ‘The Match in The Crocus’ in M. Barr and R. Feldstein (eds.), Discontented Discourses: Feminism, Textual Intervention, Psychoanalysis, Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1989, p. 101. 60 L. Mykyta, ‘Lacan, Literature and the Look: Women in the Eye of Psychoanalysis, Sub/Stance’, cited in ibid., p. 101. 61 Glaspell, Plays, op. cit., p. 33. 58

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giving her ‘heat’ to the roses. In terms of a metaphoric representation this symbolism seems to explicitly imply Claire has an identity which pertains to dual-sexuality, at the cost of her relationship with her husband. Again, this appears to be Glaspell’s sophisticated literary game-play. This allows her once more to arguably hide the subtext of Claire’s dual-sexuality firmly in the truth. The pinnacle of Glaspell’s sophisticated literary game play is realised during the second act of the play. It is set in a tower, Claire’s very own space. It is a place which demonstrates her ‘imprisonment;’ it is the place she goes to when she is at her most hysteric. The theme of Claire’s hysteria is revisited many times throughout The Verge. This is unsurprising as Glaspell throughout this piece engages with Freud’s contemporary views on sexuality. Rapoport explains: Freud’s career began with the study of bisexuality, and it was not too long before he discovered the ‘bisexual nature of hysterical symptoms’. The hysteric remained forever preoccupied with the question, ‘Am I a man or woman?’62

Accordingly Claire’s hysteria is a symptomatic representation of this contemporary view of bisexuality. The space where Claire goes to imprison herself and engage with hysteric behaviour is described as being: A tower, which is thought to be round but does not complete the circle. The back is curved, then jagged lines break from that, and the front is a queer bulging window - in a curve that leans. The whole structure is as if given a twist by some terrific force - like something wrong. It is lighted by an old-fashioned watchman's lantern hanging from the ceiling; the innumerable pricks and slits in the metal throw a marvellous pattern on the curved wall.63

This tower is certainly phallic symbolism. When referring to the Lacanian theory of the ‘phallus’ Butler states: The ‘phallus’ is to be the ‘signifier’ of the desire of the other [...]. In other words, it is to be the object, the other of a ‘heterosexualised’ masculine desire.64

62

Rapoport, ‘Bisexuality’, op. cit., pp. 287-289. Glaspell, Plays, op. cit., p. 59. 64 J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and The Subversion of Identity, London, Routledge, 2007, p. 59. 63

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2. Near Invisi‘BI’lity: Susan Glaspell’s The Verge

However, the symbolism in respect to ‘Claire’s thwarted tower’65 develops much further as the description indicates the phallic symbol in this instance is imperfect, ‘twisted’; interesting terminology when considering Krafft-Ebing discussed bisexuals as being ‘organically twisted’.66 The phallic tower has the ‘queer’ addition of a bulging window. The ‘queer bulging window’ itself creates as Ben-Zvi suggests, ‘a womblike structure’.67 Indeed, Claire’s prison ‘falls outside the phallocentric order,’68 as the phallic tower is feminised. For Glaspell to have constructed the appearance of this unique symbol of diverse sexuality, is in itself not unique as many feminist writings of this period started to experiment with sexual imagery. Smith-Rosenberg imparts: Metaphor by metaphor, feminist modernists of the 1920s and 1930s had inverted men’s language. By imbuing male imagery with feminist meaning, they transformed the sexologists’ symbolic system. Boldly they asserted their right to participate in male discourse, to function in a public male arena, and to act as men did, both in and out of bed.69

The introduction of this womblike structure to the phallic tower creates a hybrid of both phallic and yonic imagery, the ‘perfect’ representation of Claire’s ‘imprisoning bisexuality’, not an uncommon state as Cixous suggests, ‘[Bisexual] women are the most imprisoned.’70 This imprisonment can be attributed to the complete lack of discourse used to define their bisexuality, and the abject loneliness that comes when one is associated with a sexual identity which is doubly marginalised. Claire confirms she is ‘imprisoned’ by her sexuality by raising this question to her sister: ‘Why need I too, be imprisoned in what I came from?’71 This clearly references Freud’s notion of a Pre-Oedipal stage. Claire acknowledges the only way

65

Glaspell, Plays, op. cit., p. 60. Callis, ‘Playing with Butler’, op. cit., p. 224. 67 Ben-Zvi, Glaspell, op. cit., p. 244. 68 Bennett, ‘Critical Clitoridectomy’, op. cit., p. 248. 69 C. Smith-Rosenburg, ‘Discourses of Sexuality and Subjectivity: The New Woman, 1870-1936’, in M.B. Duberman, M. Vicinus and G. Chaucer Jr. (eds.), Hidden From History, Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, London, Penguin Books, 1991, p. 279. 70 H. Cixous and C. Clement, Newly Born Woman. Theory and History of Literature, Oxford, University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. 56. 71 Glaspell, Plays, op. cit., p. 61. 66

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to escape would be ‘To go mad […]. So life may not be imprisoned.’72 As homosexuality was accepted and treated as a ‘mental impairment,’ the sentiment here is if Claire was to fulfil her sapphic desires, she may no longer be imprisoned. However as in keeping with the rest of this piece, Glaspell has engaged with the plurality of language. It must again be left to the individual to decide what they believe is ‘hidden in the truth.’ It is in this unique representation of dual-sexuality, this entire scene is set. The characters in the scene are Claire, her husband Harry and her sister Adelaide. HARRY: I want Claire to be gay. CLAIRE: Funny – you should want that... Did you ever say a preposterous thing, then go trailing after the thing you've said and find it wasn't so preposterous? Here is the circle we are in (describes a big circle). Being gay, it shoots little darts through the circle, and a minute later gaiety all gone, and you looking through that little hole the gaiety left. ADELAIDE: [...] (To HARRY) Mother – Father - all of us, always loved Claire best. We always loved Claire's queer gaiety. CLAIRE: (moved, but eyes shining with a queer bright loneliness) But never one of you — once — looked with me through the little pricks the gaiety made —never one of you — once, looked with me at the queer light that came in through the pricks. ADELAIDE: And can't you see, dear, that it's better for us we didn't? And that it would be better for you now if you would just resolutely look somewhere else? You must see yourself that you haven't the poise of people, who are held— well, within the circle... [Moments later] ADELAIDE: [...] Go to Paris .and have one grand fling at the gay world. You really love that, Claire, and you've been awfully dull lately. I think that's the whole trouble. HARRY: I think so too.73

There are a number of critical points made within this small section; firstly, the striking parallels between the set design and Claire’s second piece of dialogue in this section: the description of the tower being almost circular and being covered in, ‘innumerable slits and pricks’ of light, is near identical to Claire’s speech to her sister:

72 73

ibid., p. 48. Glaspell, Plays, p. 62.

44

2. Near Invisi‘BI’lity: Susan Glaspell’s The Verge Here is the circle we are in (describes a big circle) being gay. It shoots little darts through the circle. Never one of you—once, looked with me at the queer light that came in through the pricks.’74

Arguably Claire’s character is physically sitting in a circle, covered in the ‘slits’ of light that ‘gaiety’ caused. During the time Claire is sat in the ‘imprisonment’ of this phallic and yonic hybrid space, she tries to define how she wants to be viewed in a ‘queer light’. Arguably, Claire is trying to ‘come out’ to her sister; Sullivan describes this process as, ‘publicly declaring one’s personal and political identity.’75 However Claire is unsuccessful in doing so. Clearly one cannot disclose an identity which does not exist using language which has not been created. This is symptomatic of the phallocentric discourse which pertains to sexuality. Interestingly Adelaide’s response to Claire’s attempted declaration is to suggest that, what Claire needs to resolve her madness is a trip to Paris to ‘have a grand fling at the gay world’, although Adelaide also states, that she herself does not want to view Claire ‘in this light’ and implies to Claire, ‘it would be better for her now if she would just resolutely look somewhere else.’ This firmly suggests she accepts Claire’s hysteria is caused by issues relating to her dual-sexuality. In conclusion, it can be stated that Susan Glaspell in her 1921 play, The Verge communicated a subtext which tells of Claire Archer’s bisexual desires. When words failed Glaspell, she engaged with the unpopular theme of bisexuality by the subtle inclusion of both ‘erotic lesbian imagery’ and a nuanced discourse. Glaspell wholly engaged with the ‘Language of Flowers’ (the symbolism that values sexuality within a ‘clitoral economy’) not just to visually illustrate the yonic appearance of ‘The Breath of Life’, but to communicate Claire’s interest in ‘roses.’ Furthermore, The Verge’s audience were privileged to view the overt hiding of the flower lacking a name and a ‘rose’; these physical representations of lesbian desire were then, ‘hidden in the truth.’ Ingeniously Glaspell continued with her use of visual representations in Act Two with the appearance of the thwarted tower – the physical representation of Claire’s imprisoning bisexuality. Indeed, it was whilst in this set Claire tried to declare her ‘personal identity’, however failed in doing so, due to a lack of discourse. Yet it is this same lack of discourse 74

ibid., p. 63. N. Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2003, p. 31. 75

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which Glaspell spectacularly exploited to subversively introduce Claire Archer’s dual-sexuality; whilst simultaneously maintaining complete ambiguity in the piece. Evidently this can only be attributed to Glaspell being an exemplary playwright and a cunning linguist. As Hale stated: [The Verge] is as clear as glass to those who will draw on their own experiences of clashing with ‘accepted physical or social habit. 76

Clearly this explains why women in sapphic sub-cultures embrace the play, whilst many who were not privy to the discourse, despised and misunderstood it. Seemingly Glaspell privileged the audience of The Verge to decide for themselves what the essence of the play is. However, for me, what Glaspell ‘hid in the truth’ is the ‘queerest of all gender fucks’; the almost invisible bisexuality of Mrs Claire Archer.

Bibliography Anon, Queer Power Now pamphlet, in Black, C. ‘“Making Queer New Things”: Queer Identities in the Life and Dramaturgy of Susan Glaspell’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, vol. XX, no. 1, 2005. Bauer, D., ‘Homosexuality with the Context of Social Institutionalisation and Moral Sense’, Ethical Perspectives, http://www.ethical-perspectives.be/viewpic.php?TABLE=EP& ID=964, (accessed 26 March 2015). Bennett, P., ‘Critical Clitoridectomy: Female Sexual Imagery and Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory’, Signs, vol. 18, no. 2, 1993. Ben-Zvi., L. (ed.), Susan Glaspell: Essays on her Theatre and Fiction, Michigan, The University of Michigan Press, 2005. Black, C. ‘“Making Queer New Things”: Queer Identities in the Life and Dramaturgy of Susan Glaspell’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, vol. XX, no. 1, University of Michigan Press, 2005. —. The Women of Provincetown, 1915-1922, Alabama, University of Alabama Press, 2002. Burrell, K.G., ‘Queering Bisexuality’, Journal of Bisexuality – Archives, vol. 9, no 3. Butler, J., Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London, Routledge, 2007. Callis, A.S., ‘Playing with Butler and Foucault: Bisexuality and Queer Theory’, Journal of Bisexuality, vol. 9, no. 3-4, 2009. 76

Ben-Zvi, Susan Glaspell, loc. cit., p. 247.

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Cixous, H., and C. Clement, Newly Born Woman. Theory and History of Literature, Oxford, University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Foucault, M., The History of Sexuality An Introduction: Volume One, New York, Random House, 1990. Friedman, S., ‘Honor or Virtue Unrewarded: Susan Glaspell's Parody Challenge to Ideologies of Sexual Conduct and the Discourse of Intimacy’, New England Theatre Journal, vol. 17, 2006. Garrity, J., and L. Doan (eds.), Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and English Culture, Gordonsville, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Glaspell, S., Plays, Milton Keynes, Lightning Source UK, 2009. Holledge, J., Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre, Virago Press, London, 1981. Grosz, E., and E. Probyn (eds.), Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, London, Routledge, 1995. Kaiser, B., ‘Burbank. On The Purple Circuit’, Openings of 2004, http://www.buddybuddy.com/pc-op-04.html 2004 , ND, (accessed 26 March 2015). Leyland, J., ‘Bisexuality’, Newsweek, 17 July 1995. Nelligan, L.M., ‘The Haunting Beauty From the Life We’ve Left: A Contextual Reading of Trifles and The Verge’, in Ben-Zvi, L. (ed.), Susan Glaspell: Essays on her Theatre and Fiction, Michigan, The University of Michigan Press, 2005. Noe, M., ‘The Verge: L’Ecriture Feminine at the Provincetown’, in BenZvi, L. (ed.), Susan Glaspell: Essays on her Theatre and Fiction, Michigan, The University of Michigan Press, 2005. Rapoport, E., ‘Bisexuality in Psychoanalytic Theory: Interpreting the Resistance’, Journal of Bisexuality, vol. 9, no. 3-4, 2009. Rayner, J. (ed.), ‘D.H. Lawrence’ Fyne Times: Gay and Lesbian Magazine UK Online, 2006, http://www.fyne.co.uk/index.php?item=346, (accessed 26 March 2015). Roof, J., ‘The Match in the Crocus’ in M. Barr and R. Feldstein (eds.), Discontented Discourses: Feminism, Textual intervention, Psychoanalysis, Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1989. Rupp, L.J., Sapphistries, a Global History of Love Between Woman, New York, New York University Press, 2009. Schwartz, J., K. Peiss and C. Simmons, ‘“We Were a Little Band of Wilful Women”: The Heterodoxy Club of Greenwich Village’, in Peiss, K., C. Simmons and R.A. Padgug (eds.), Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1989. Seaton, B., The Language of Flowers: A History, Virginia, The University of Virginia Press, 1995.

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Seidman, S. ‘Identity and Politics in a “Postmodern” Gay Culture’, in M. Warner (ed.), Fear of Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, Minnesota, University of Minneapolis, 1995. Smith-Rosenburg, C., ‘Discourses of Sexuality and Subjectivity: The New Woman, 1870-1936’, in M.B. Duberman, M. Vicinus, and Jr G. Chaucer (eds.), Hidden From History, Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, London, Penguin Books, 1991. Stein, G., ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’, in U.D. Dyd (ed.), A Stein Reader: Gertrude Stein, Illinois, North-Western University Press, 1993. Sullivan, N., A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Summer, C.J. (ed.), ‘Film Actors: Lesbian’, The World’s Largest Encyclopaedia for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Culture, 2002, http://www.glbtq.com/arts/film_actors_lesbian.html, (accessed 26 March 2015). Warner, M. (ed), Fear of Queer Planet Queer Politics and Social Theory, Minnesota, University of Minneapolis, 1995. Winning, J., ‘The Sapphist in the City: Lesbian Modernist Paris and Sapphic Modernity’, in Garrity, J. and L. Doan (eds.), Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and English Culture, Gordonsville, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

3. A MINISTER’S SPEECH AND HOMOSEXUAL IDENTITY DR MATHEUS ODORISI MARQUES

Introduction For a long time, Brazil was considered the biggest Catholic country in the world. In the last few years, two big changes occurred in this religious scenario: the growth of Evangelical churches in Brazil and the influence they began to exercise on the media, and most importantly, on politics. This influence raises questions about the impartiality of the secular Brazilian state, as Evangelical politicians defend measures and bills based on their religious beliefs, in line with huge campaigns against important progressive themes like legalisation of abortion, adoption, drug laws, and LGBT rights. Regarding LGBT rights, it is remarkable how the religious discourse has, in a way, built the homosexual identity: a being not only against God’s laws, but a pariah and an enemy that threatens the family unit and the welfare of all people. This identity construction is based not only on religious beliefs, but on a conservative outlook that can be observed when we analyse what we commonly regard as ideology. The analysis of ideology in discourse enables us to look more closely at what is being said when we read or hear affirmations like these quoted in the following extracts: The Bible says that God made male and female, to be united in marriage for the purposes of procreation, and the Bible clearly emphasises just that: male and female, the institution of the heterosexual marriage and the family, not this religious aberration.1

1

Youtube, Silas Malafaia: Homosexualismo, https://youtu.be/YejcatjQ_D8, (accessed 18 February 2016). Transcription and translation by the author.

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Homosexuality is a behaviour. No one is born homosexual. […] If they want to legalize homosexual marriage, then they may as well legalize the marriage between one man and four women.2

In these two statements the minister Silas Malafaia reiterates basically, the same point: the unnatural condition of homosexuality. But while in the first example the minister appeals to a religious argument, quoting indirectly from the Bible and the holy creation, in the second one he mentions the psychological term ‘behaviour’, dismissing homosexual individuals’ innate identities, and altogether ignoring that social identities are also built in social processes. Which one of these ‘attack lines’ is more dangerous? This is hard to know, but it is possible to assert that both these statements share the same world-view, composed of the same ideological basis. The objective of this chapter is to analyse ideology and attitude in the speech basis of one of today’s most influential Brazilian Evangelical ministers, Silas Malafaia, founder of the Vitória em Cristo church. In his church, TV, and event speeches, the minister very often talks about homosexuality and homosexual identity, inciting with his discourse a war where the fight is for family, life, freedom and the political security of the country; as if the mere existence of this sexuality can be a door for social chaos. The way ideology is communicated in discourse can be identified in the way the minister chooses his referential strategies; which means, the words used to reference gay people, words which are always set as opposing the Evangelical group, and which guide the reader or hearer to specific meanings.

Ideology Ideology is a historical and fundamental concept through which to analyse power relations in society, whether on philosophy, sociology, social psychology and linguistics, being part of the study of the human itself. For this analysis, ideology allows us to understand the power relations between the Evangelical and the homosexual in discourse, and also, in social relations. Studies about ideology, as can be noted, usually bear a strong 2

Youtube, Silas Malafaia: Manifestação Pacífica em Brasília, https://youtu.be/5U3c2y1hXZs, (accessed 18 February 2016). Transcription and translation by the author.

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3. A Minister’s Speech and Homosexual Identity

Marxist influence, which places the concept as a mask that covers reality; a false conscience that does not let people see properly the relationships of control and power between social classes. With the concept of reality as a social construction, another way to understand ideology is conceived that distances itself from the binary apposition between true world vs. ideological lie. This approach sees ideology as a basis itself for the construction of reality. One of the most important thinkers in this version of ideology is Slavoj Žižek, philosopher and psychoanalyst who argues: The theoretical lesson to be drawn from this is that the concept of ideology must be disengaged from the 'representationalist' problematic: ideology has nothing to do with 'illusion', with a mistaken, distorted representation of its social content. To put it succinctly: a political standpoint can be quite accurate ('true') as to its objective content, yet thoroughly ideological; and, vice versa, the idea that a political standpoint gives of its social content can prove totally wrong, yet there is absolutely nothing 'ideological' about it.3

To Žižek, there’s no world vision of reality: every single concept is understood by ideological basis, necessary to people who live socially, and disengaged from the true vs. lies issue. Teun Van Dijk, the most important linguist in the analysis of ideology in discourse, has a more unaligned standpoint; he believes that ideology only emerges when there is a conflict of interest, which means that the consensus is a place with no ideology. To Van Dijk, the function of ideology is to build a polarisation of ideas, guided by group interests, and he defines ideology as ‘the fundamental beliefs of a certain group and its members.’4 In turn, ideological beliefs are products of thoughts about something in the world, experienced by the individual, but that affects the whole group, not just the individual himself. To Van Dijk, these beliefs are fed by the social memory; the kind of shared memory that constitutes our knowledge, on an epistemological society, about the world.5 While ideologies are shared beliefs and applicable to many situations (essentially, general and 3

S. Žižek, Mapping Ideology, London, Verso, 1995, p. 5. T. Van Dijk, Ideología y Discurso, Barcelona, Ariel, 2003, p. 12. See also T. Van Dijk, Ideología: Una Aproximación Multidisciplinaria, Barcelona, Gedisa, 1998, and T. Van Dijk, ‘Discourse and Ideology’ in T. Van Dijk (ed.), Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, London, Sage, 2009, pp. 379-407. 5 Van Dijk, Ideología, ibid., p. 48. 4

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abstract), attitudes, on the other hand, are shared beliefs about specific subjects, that resonate with a group’s interests.6 Ideology can be seen not just on the surface, when we observe the themes and the macro structure of texts, but, also more importantly (and more dangerously), in deeper ways, such as when the basis of the discourse, the whole columns that support the built reality, can express homophobic beliefs; beliefs that construct homosexual identity as being dangerous and inhuman. We can analyse homophobia as ideological belief because homosexual social existence is a fact seen as an issue by certain Evangelical groups and also as being part of an ideological network that connects it with sexism and other beliefs that produce violence, real or symbolic, against women. This approach extends homophobic ideology to social control of the body and sexuality, since there is a kind of order determined by some groups in terms of behaviour - and that includes the expression of sexuality - an order which is broken by homosexuals. Religions, and not just Evangelical ones, exercise many ways of controlling, relying on notions of tradition to reinforce the institution’s authority. In this chapter, we will note linguistics evidence related to the fear of that tradition being broken; since tradition maintains the family organisation supported by the heteronormative vision. In these terms, homophobia is the fear itself, and the reaction to this fear, of the broken order of the sexual norm, in terms of sexual desire object: In this regard, we believe that the cause of the aversion towards gays and lesbians is that, by breaking with the norm of male/female complementarity in their choice of object, they alter gender rules. This can be observed in one of the main injuries directed to gays and lesbians: to question their masculinity and femininity respectively. Therefore, we consider transphobia (monitoring of correspondence sex/gender) in the root of homophobia, which regulates a particular aspect of it: the choice of sexual partner in terms of masculine/feminine complementarity.7

6

Van Dijk, ‘Discourse and Ideology’, op. cit., p. 289. ‘En este sentido, consideramos que la causa de la aversion hacia gays y lesbianas es que, al romper con la norma de la complementariedad hombre/mujer en su elección de objeto, alteran las reglas de género. Esto se visualiza en que la injuria por exceencia a gays y lesbianas es poner en entredicho su masculinidad y feminidad respectivamente. Por lo tanto, consideramos la transfobia (la vigilancia de la correspondencia sexo/género) está en raiz de la homophobia, que regula un aspecto concreto de la misma: la elección de la pareja sexual en terminus de complementariedad masculino/feminino.’ G. Coll-Planas, La Volontad y el Deseo: 7

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3. A Minister’s Speech and Homosexual Identity

Taken here is the concept of homophobia shared by authors like CollPlanas, who sees it as a penalisation caused by the selection of a same sex person as object of desire, not even regarding the question of gender. This kind of regularisation is a concrete position, which means, an attitude, based on a major conservative ideology that imposes a patriarchal model of family organisation. The construction of the homosexual identity in the minister’s speech is connected with other attitudes, also identifiable through focus on his discourse, such as sexism on men and women’s social roles and the abortion issue. These are all attached to a major ideology and are rooted in the patriarchal social structure, connected to oppression and social control of the individual’s body.

Ideology and discourse The main point is how discourse can express certain beliefs in a way that it creates a particular reality. Language creates reality, not in ways that just catalogue things in the world or indicate pre-existing elements, but actually in creating concepts and knowledge.8 The creation of reality is a property of discourse seen by a social-cognitive approach, that puts it as one of the angles of the Van Dijks communication process triangle, formed by cognition, society and discourse.9 So, as ideology is one of the columns of discourse; by serving as a basis for shared knowledge, it is also responsible for how reality is built. In other words, the way we understand things in the world is a complex equation that involves basic information, ideology that ‘treats’ the basic information, the personal experience, and application of this product on real communication situation, like where we talk about a determined issue, to certain people, in certain events for example. An important macro ideological strategy in discourse is Van Dijk’s ideological square with which the author schematises the way discourse is structured, based on one major presumption: the discourse existence of ingroups and the out-groups.10 The in-group is the one in which the individual participates and shares beliefs, so we can call it we; and the outgroup refers to the other group, the they group, whose beliefs conflict La construcción del género y la sexualidad: el caso de lesbianas, gays y trans, Barcelona, Editorial Égales, 2010, p. 101. 8 W. Croft and D.A. Cruse, Cognitive Linguistics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. 9 Van Dijk, Discurso e Poder, op. cit. 10 Van Dijk, ‘Discourse and Ideology’, op. cit., p. 396

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directly, in a passive or active way, with what the we group believes. In this way, claims Van Dijk, there’s a polarisation in discourse, and this macro structure can be represented by the ideological square:11

Emphasize our good things

Emphasize their bad things

De-emphasize our bad things

De-emphasize their good things

Figure 1. Van Dijk`s Ideological Square, 1998. Therefore, ideology already traces a logical path to the discourse, putting lines to a macro structure to what is going to be built linguistically. If the discourse represents a group with positive characteristics in one way, the out-group is going to be represented with negative attributes in the other way. The negative points of the group will be hidden, whereas the outgroup’s points that will be hidden are the positive ones. This schema is performed through many different kinds of linguistic strategies and processes, like topics, presuppositions, modality, and so on. In this analysis, I will focus on the ideological property of the referencing process.

Referencing The linguistic observations in this chapter come from a perspective of Text Linguistics, more precisely with the cognitive viewpoint of the theory that emerges from the 1980s, when the text is viewed as: […] the result of mental process: it’s the procedure approach, according to which the communications partners have accumulated knowledge about

11

Van Dijk, Ideología, op. cit.

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3. A Minister’s Speech and Homosexual Identity the many types of social life activities, have knowledge represented in the memory that need to be activated for the activity have success.12

This viewpoint matches to what Van Dijk and other linguists from a sociocognitive approach present as discourse: a construction that depends on both a cognitive and social dispositive. Being a construction, we find in discourse the (re)production of social structures, besides conceptualisations guided by ideology. The linguistic trace would be just like a bigger matryoshka, the Russian nesting doll, who has smaller dolls inside, that cannot be seen, but are still there: the general knowledge, the shared ideology and the personal experience of the world gives basis to each word choice. The exposed matryoshka in this analysis is the referencing process. Referencing is traditionally studied as a property, specifically of the pronouns and also of other nouns with analogue meaning, to be used to avoid the first referent repetition (like the use of he on ‘Ted wants cake because he didn’t have lunch yet’ and the boy in ‘Ted wants cake because the boy didn’t have lunch yet’), thereby, working as a cohesion tool. The traditional viewpoint on referencing starts to be updated by linguists like Apothéloz and Reichler-Béguelin (1999),13 who argue the process is not just by the cohesion, and also pay attention to the importance of the text continuity and development; and Mondada and Dubois (2003)14 who elevate the referent to an unstable level, in the sense that in discourse the referent can be accessed, reassessed, built and rebuilt, since it exists only in the enunciation act. These approaches point to a dynamic concept of text, and the procedural characteristics of referencing. In this way, to refer or reference is to build meaning, not just avoid the repetition of elements: The referential construction is a dynamic process; depends of inter-textual and inter-discursive relations, sometimes, it moves under contextual ambiguities, exacerbating further this dynamism, that demands to the reader an expansion of their expectations. In the whole text/discourse, the

12

I.G.V. Koch, Introdução à Linguística Textual, São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 2013, p. 21. 13 D. Apothéloz and M.D. Reichler-Béguelin, ‘Construction de la référence et stratégies de designation’, in A. Berrendonner and M-J. Reichler-Béguelin (eds.), Du sintagme nominal aux objects-de-discours: SN complexes, nominalizations, anaphores, Neuchâtel, Institute de linguistique de l’Université de Neuchâtel, 1995, pp. 227-71. Translation by the author. 14 L. Mondada and D. Dubois, Construção dos objetos de discurso e categorização: um abordagem dos processos de referenciação. CIULLA, A. et alii. Referenciação. São Paulo: Contexto, 2003, pp. 17-52.

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enunciator builds the reference basing it in a real world interpretation, recategorizing the previous information increasing with new predications, available, in different ways, on people’s knowledge, while the interaction is in process. With this new information input, the enunciator guides the addressee (who co-participate of this construction, being, thereby, a coenunciator) to this reinterpretation or re-focalization of the referentiate element.15

Cavalcante and Santos’ viewpoint of referencing comes closer to the concept of discourse adopted here: a socio-cognitive, active and dynamic process that evolves personal and shared knowledge, creating a linguistic reality. It’s observable in these authors’ definition of referencing, the power of the process: referring is to guide the reader to a determined meaning path, reinterpreting the concept by increasing new properties. There are basically two types of referential processes, (i) the introduction of the referent, when we activate the concept for the first time on discourse, and (ii) the anaphors, that correspond to the continued activation of a previous element on text.16 Referring by anaphors is not an innocent procedure, since we know is a way to guide the reader, matching meaning to the referent. The movement of establishing a referential network on discourse leads the reader to make connections and predications relations, as the process is a matching act. Let’s take the following example: (1). A group of about fifty people1 protested on the main avenue right now. The vandals1 closed the entire avenue for three hours.

In example (1), there is an anaphor in the vandals that refers to the element a group of about fifty people, both labelled as 1. The key to the success of anaphoric process lies on make the reader build a semantic match between the two elements labelled, accepting the terms’ the vandals and a group of about fifty people compatibility, assuming that the referent is predicable with the anaphor, forcing thus a predication in the text structure. This said, the predication can be questionable, as the reader can have analytic thinking to question or even deny the prediction, on the first moment he is obligated by the text structure to make this match. This shows us how ideologically powerful the anaphor can be, since referring is an indirect predicting, more sophisticated than just say The group of fifty people are 15

M. Cavalcante and L.W. Santos, Referenciação e marcas de conhecimento compartilhado. Lingua(gem) em Discurso, vol. 12, no. 3, 2012, p. 660. 16 ibid., p. 661.

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vandals, a ‘clean’ phrase structure that makes the perception of the prediction much easier, as the anaphoric version of this prediction carries underlining assumptions. Schwarz-Friesel explains the function of anaphoric process containing basically three states concerning the element on discourse - activation, reactivation and deactivation: Activation of a text referent takes place when a new mental file (formally represented as a knot in a network) is opened. The referent is activated and stored as a conceptual label, and incoming information about the same referent may be filed under this label. This process is to be characterized as reactivation, since the already established knot in the text-world model is called up again in short-term or in working memory. If a new referent is mentioned in the text, the referent in current focus is deactivated while at the same time a file for the new referent is opened and stored as an additional conceptual knot in the text-world model.17

The three states of referent explain the referential process properties of (i) cohesion and coherence, since this creates a concept network that interconnects the terms formally and semantically on texts, establishing the textual unity; (ii) development, as this creates a mechanism for the textual progress recovering previous information to increase or augment with new information; and (iii) reality creation in discourse, since a socialcognitive approach assumes reality is built on discourse. Since the mental file is opened, it’s a space to express ideological beliefs by the predication act. The principle of the first acceptance that relies on anaphor process, the indirect way to predict and the textual distance between the introduction of the referent and the new information, are all strategies of creating and manipulating concepts in discourse.

Sample Analysis With both theories in hand, we can finally analyse some ideological uses of referencing in Minister Silas Malafaia’s speech, with the goal of building the homosexual identity. The selection of the texts gave consideration to those that focus the homosexual issue for Evangelical 17

M. Schwarz-Friesel, ‘Indirect Anaphora in Text: A Cognitive Account’ in M. Schwarz-Friesel, M. Consten and M. Knees (eds.), Anaphors in Text: Cognitive, Formal and Applied Approaches to Anaphoric Reference, Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2008, p. 6.

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people. All the texts are transcriptions and translations made of videos available on the website YouTube released by the church website or the minister’s social media. It is known that in this oral speech transcription we end up losing some important and significant discourse properties, like voice tone and other elements, but the focus is on the linguistic elements constituted by referencing. The concept of family is one of the most important subjects in Minister Malafaia’s speech, being the central argument of many of his preachings. He even titles himself as a defender of family. Family being unquestionably a positive concept, let us see how this concept is placed on a self-positive evaluation strategy: (1). Family is of vital importance because it is not just the first, but also the more important agent of socialisation. God created family. God, He created norms, He established norms for the welfare of this institution. He created norms for human beings to be able to profit [the family], and be able to grow and develop themselves. What we call family is the man, the woman and their child. This is the nuclear family. Don’t be scared about what I am going to say: family is the man, the woman and their children, the rest becomes relative. […]. The mother figure, and the father figure, they are fundamentally important to the development of the human being. I heard a lot in college, I heard a lot in college that the child’s first love object is the mother. And then the father figure makes the rupture between child and mother. It’s from the father figure that the child makes the differentiation between herself, the mother and the world. And now, what they want to do is destroy this family model. Deconstruction of heteronormativity, and this nuclear family deconstruction. And we gonna say what will happen to future generations as a result: social disorder.18

The central thing to note here, in addition to the strong attempt at validation based on academic speech (also the second common validating strategy of using references to psychology), is the polarisation around the concept of family: on one side, the Evangelist defending the family, and the other, homosexuals attacking it. The self-validation begins with the description of importance of family, how it’s part of God’s rules and how that reflects the existence of divine order, which is supported not only in religious speech but also in academic speech. The symbolic possession of the concept and the responsibility to protect it is in the Evangelical Church’s hands: the we group, concretely manifested in discourse by the 18

Transcription of the video ‘Speech on National Day of Valorisation of Family’: Youtube, Silas Malafaia: Dia Nacional de Valorização da Família, [website], ND, ‘https://youtu.be/dB4STUSb9Wc, (accessed 18 February 2016).

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use of the pronoun. On the other side of the metaphorical battle is the they group, in this extract, presented as self-evident without concrete referent. The they that are responsible for the deconstruction of heteronormativity, it is inferred, is a group of, or a group that supports homosexuals. Positioned against this important concept, they want to destroy order and norms, and go against divine and natural laws. What is important to note is the development of speech: the family is being constructed and defined by God, by we groups, by academia, and then is attacked by the they group, who wants to destroy it all. The we group have a prophetic vision, that they group’s actions will generate consequences resulting in general disorder. There are not many things so feared as much as chaos. Having defined the ideological polarisation of the family concept between Evangelical and homosexual groups established here, let us examine in other speeches how specifically referencing contributes to this key strategy. (2). [...] I wanna tell, how it was already told here, this is not a one person job, this is the work of the Evangelical people who are Brazilian citizens. We don’t need to invent numbers to impress the press or the society, not us! A few days’ ago there was a parade, Datafolha said twenty-two hundred and the guys said one-and-a-half million According to the military police, I don’t, I don’t like fantastic numbers. According to the Brasília military police, here, in this afternoon, there’s more than fifty thousand people. I wanna see the gay movement put twenty thousand here, on a week day. […] In Brazil, politicians are criticised, governors are criticised, judiciary members are criticised, Catholics are criticised, Evangelical people, God, devil, and whatever. If homosexual practice is criticised, it is homophobia […].19

Polarisation is very visible here, from the outset. It can be observed that the discourse is built on the two axes: Evangelical people and gay people. There is a direct and indirect comparison all through the discourse between these two axes, and every subject to be discussed is settled in this macro scheme, like every subject was conceived in this bipartition: we agree with one or with another, one subject matters to one and not to another, one concept is positive to and not for another, and so forth. That’s the representation of social structure in his discourse. The Evangelical group’s mental file is opened with the terms Evangelical people, and then anaphorically refereed with pronouns we and us, while the homosexual’s group mental file is opened with the guys – an informal entrance that places the group in discourse with a very trivial tone, ascribing non19

ibid.

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importance to them through casualised and undefined image - and then fed with gay movement and homosexual practice. It is important to notice that the last anaphoric entry is even homosexual practice, not gay people, a lexical choice guided by the belief that gay people define themselves by a practice, not by human characteristics – while all previous elements are humanised. The polarised structure is prevalent in all texts, and mental files of each group are fed by referencing with the result that towards the end of the extract, we relate all the listed elements – politicians, governors, judiciary members, Catholic, Evangelical people, even God and devil – as being part of the same group. Thereby, the mental file is growing until it constitutes a big normal group, differencing itself only in opposition to the gay group; positing everyone listed in those groups as against homosexuals. Polarisation works also locating values of truth on the side of Evangelical’s group, when the minister affirms the number of people in his meeting, and presenting doubts about the numbers of people reported as being on the gay parade. In another part of the same speech, we can see how far the referential process goes in updating the mental files in this polarisation strategy: (3). Look, I’m gonna make a proposition: they want the marriage, let’s get two islands and take them to there. After fifty years, you came back there to see if there is a human race. […] They are confusing, in Brazil, freedom with debauchery. They want to approve gay marriage, drugs liberation; they want to turn this place here into anarchy. Right now, they are interviewing the new candidate to the Supreme Court, and the guy says that he is in favour of abortion, because of women suffering. […] Tell him, he defends, as a lawyer in the Court, gay union. He defends abortion; it’s him that, here on Senate, listen, look, […] The Supreme Court talks too hard with the mensalão issue.20 I think he is being sent to Supreme Court to take criminals off the jails. I wanna tell the Supreme authorities that Brazilians want to see this mensalão gang in jail. They want to control media, and I wanna tell something to congress men, with a lot of respect […].

In this fragment, we see, basically, the construction of two mental files: one relating to gay people and another relating to a Supreme Court candidate. The strategy here, besides the silent polarisation between these two referents and the group of Evangelical - since textually, Evangelical people aren’t 20

Mensalão was a very famous political scandal in Brazil, in which some politicians were revealed to have accepted bribes to vote on specific amends in Congress.

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directly named - is to manipulate the activation and deactivation of the files, making them seem the same. The result is to associate the minister with both gay people and also with political corruption. They in this speech is activated when the minister links humanity to gay people through speech, equating humanity with the capacity to give birth - an argument that then turns against women who are biologically incapable of giving birth, or people that simply don’t want to. The they group is the agent of a series of phrases that progressively ends on ‘they want to turn this place here into anarchy’. The they group is deactivated when the new candidate to the Supreme Court is referenced and his mental file is filled with information that he defends abortion and gay marriage. The fact that these two issues are together is a concrete example of how the ideological basis behind the homosexual’s characterisation relates to control of bodies: the social regularisation of bodies and sexuality, with the objective to maintain a patriarchal organisation. Going back to the extract, the candidate is associated with corruption, when the minister says that he is defending politics associated to the mensalão scandal. Right after this association, this mental file is deactivated again, with the reactivation of the first one, the gay group, with the pronoun they. This process makes the two elements go together, in the same group, in discourse: gay group and the candidate now are they, since this pronoun can refer to the gay group and includes the candidate. This construction frames gay people as disruptive to the social order: they want to change sexuality, laws, social control of the body and even ethical issues like corruption. Referential strategy on the previous extract is based on use of a particular pronoun that can refer to different new elements, serving not only as opposition of the in-group but also as a semi-empty axis to be filled. The referential process itself doesn’t include new information, which means that the referential element – they – doesn’t bring characteristics to the referent, but allows us to include a different referent in the group. This ‘semi-empty’ referential process serves a different goal in the process we see below: (4). You can write, put it in the papers, that minister Silas Malafaia called gay activism fundamentalists of moral trash […]. We don’t want to scrimp media. Now, I see these left-wingerpaths, who want the media control, to control the content […].21

21 Youtube, Silas Malafaia: Manifestação Pacífica em Brasília, [website], ND, https://youtu.be/5U3c2y1hXZs, (accessed 18 February 2016).

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On (4), unlike (3), the referential serves an informational purpose: those involved in gay activism are ‘left-wingerpaths’, a morphologic construction created by minister that activate ‘left-winger’ people and ‘path’, the latter term meaning sickness, and a heightening of that association with left wing activism. With the implicit co-reference of terms, thanks to the success of referential process, the minister creates a discourse configuring homosexuals as a menace to society, as left-wingers and as sociopaths.

Conclusion We can see that an analysis of extracts from Silas Malafaia’s speeches allows us to observe how ideological beliefs work in discourse, creating a divergent and dangerous homosexual identity. The referential process, in its argumentation strategies, works on a polarised way that puts homosexuals against Evangelical people, and hence against traditional social rules and practices, and even unquestionable positive values like family. This characterization is for the most part imposed by referencing, that not only contributes to polarize discourse with the concrete or virtual presence of pronouns ‘we’ and ‘they’ (‘us’ and ‘them’), but also to characterize groups through anaphoric relation. Discourse, as we observed, is controlled by ideological structures that establish linguistically social structures: a bi-partition of good and evil, through polarized discursive structures. Then, with the help of argumentation process, homosexual identity is associated with abortion and liberation – the minister, notably, does not use the word legalization – of drugs, setting homosexuals as rule breakers, responsible for a social chaos, and creating a fear of gay people, since they challenge heteronomativity, one of the basis of the patriarchal system. Thereby, homophobia, as a reaction against this disruption of normativity, is an ideological belief based on a conservative ideology, established in discourse by many ways, such as the construction of homosexual identity. This construction is not made by the voice of a homosexual, but by a very influential and conservative church leader, making the process ideologically dangerous, since it creates a reality whereby this group is positioned as the enemy.

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Bibliography Apothéloz, D. and M-J. Reichler-Béguelin, ‘Construction de la référence et stratégies de designation’, in Berrendonner, A. and M.D. ReichlerBéguelin (eds.), Du sintagme nominal aux objects-de-discours: SN complexes, nominalizations, anaphores, Neuchâtel, Institute de linguistique de l’Université de Neuchâtel, 1995. Cavalcante, M. and L.W. Santos, Referenciação e marcas de conhecimento compartilhado. Lingua(gem) em Discurso, vol. 12, no. 3, 2012, pp. 657-681. Coll-Planas, G., La Volontad y el Deseo: La construcción del género y la sexualidad: el caso de lesbianas, gays y trans, Barcelona, Editorial Égales, 2010. Croft, W. and D.A. Cruse, Cognitive Linguistics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. Koch, I.G.V., Introdução à Linguística Textual, São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 2013. Mondada, L. and D. Dubois, Construção dos objetos de discurso e categorização: um abordagem dos processos de referenciação, CIULLA, A. et alii. Referenciação. São Paulo: Contexto, 2003. pp. 1752. Schwarz-Friesel, M., ‘Indirect Anaphora in Text: A Cognitive Account’ in Schwarz-Friesel, M., M. Consten, and M. Knees (eds.), Anaphors in Text: Cognitive, Formal and Applied Approaches to Anaphoric Reference, Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2008. YouTube, Silas Malafaia: Dia Nacional de Valorização da Família, [website], ND, ‘https://youtu.be/dB4STUSb9Wc, (accessed 18 February 2016). —. Silas Malafaia: Homosexualismo, [website], ND, https://youtu.be/YejcatjQ_D8, (accessed 18 February 2016). —. Silas Malafaia: Manifestação Pacífica em Brasília, [website], ND, https://youtu.be/5U3c2y1hXZs, (accessed 18 February 2016). Van Dijk, T., Ideología: Una Aproximación Multidisciplinaria, Barcelona, Gedisa, 1998. —. Ideología y Discurso, Barcelona, Ariel, 2003. —. ‘Discourse and Ideology’ in T. Van Dijk (ed.), Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, London, Sage, 2009. —. Discurso e Poder, São Paulo, Contexto, 2012. Žižek, S., Mapping Ideology, London, Verso, 1995.

4. REFRACTIONS THROUGH SELVES: CLAUDE CAHUN’S ICONS OF THE INNER SEARCH, PSYCHO-DRAMAS AND PHOTOGRAPHY DR DAVID ANNWN JONES

What would you like to know? Real occult knowledge as practised by the initiated (I know about the rest for the most part).1

Perhaps we are meant to approach this question and answer from Claude Cahun’s Aveux non Avenus or Disavowals (1930) with some scepticism. After all, so much of that volume is devoted to games, seemingly contradictory psychodramas, verbal puns, a mêlée of emblems of identity, chess-playing, interrogation of selves and lexical feints. Yet the phrase ‘real occult knowledge’ (though perhaps itself a selfreflexive pun), is worth reconsidering especially in relation to one of Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun’s captivating late photographs. This reveals a liminal moment photographed probably during the late afternoon in the summer at the seafront in St Brelade, circa 1948 as, caught between the land (the artists’ own garden-scape carefully tended for years falling away to her left), and the steep drop to the beach, littoral and water to her right, Cahun seems to walk along the top of a sea-wall towards the photographer and viewer.

1

C. Cahun Disavowals, trans. S. Muth and A. Lhermitte, London, Tate Publishing, 2007, p. 53.

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Figure 2. Le Chemin des Chats V (JHT/1995/00035/w). Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections. Mary Ann Caws writes: In 1948, in a half-mask, she walks her cat through the cemetery […]. It is a blindman’s cat for the all-too-seeing Claude Cahun.2

Sophie Pinchetti notes of this scene: Cahun extravagantly attired on one of her notorious, mystical cemetery wanders with her pet cat on leash.’ 3

2

M.A. Caws, The Surrealist Look, An Erotics of Encounter, Cambridge and London, The MIT Press, 1999, p. 99. 3 ‘S. Pinchetti, Purple Diary, 27 July 2011’, Purple Fr. [website], ND, http://purple.fr/diary/tag/sophie+pinchetti/?page=4, (accessed 17 February, 2015).

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o the location n today reveaals (the relev vant wallYet, in factt, as a shot of section fencced-off and cruumbling in plaaces), Cahun is walking no ot through but resoluteely away from m the St Brelaade’s church graveyard beehind her, the sun low in the westerrn sky sending g sharp shadoows of her leg gs and her cat, Nike, accross the conccrete surface.

Figure 3. A photograph of the scen ne today (thee author’s co ollection). Reproduced d with kind permission p off David Annw wn Jones. The distincttion is importaant because ev very detail of the original image has been carefuully orchestratted. The sun bathes the m massive ancien nt church wall abuttinng the beach, and a the right sides of Cahuun’s face and extended arm, as she is caught bettween sharp light l and shaddow. She is wearing w a loose chemiise with cut-aaway sleeves that reveal hher thin arms and dark laces from the loose trouseers which aree tied with criss-crossing c t knees downwards possibly to prevent her tripping andd she is possed as if progressing barefoot overr the top of a barrier led onn by a cat to which w she is connectedd by a twice--twisted leash h. The leash aand its shadow w form a

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clear funnel of diagonal lines to the lower mid-foreground serving to focus the viewer’s gaze on Nike. It is a precarious walk. The barrier’s top is around four feet wide and we can see the drop to either side. Cahun wears a black, seemingly eyeless, blindfold/mask. Her head is tilted back slightly as is her left arm as if she is being pulled forward by the cat though the feline is stationary. We can see that she has passed through shrubbery and over the inverted painted letters ‘PRIVATE PROPERTY’. Behind her, the vegetation seems to threaten to encompass her left side. There’s a curved space in the shrubbery from which she seems to have emerged. The shadow of her legs visually echoes a twinned strand of seaweed on the beach at her right. In one of the shots taken at this time she is smiling with insouciance and calm abandonment. This spot – on the edge of many different realities: the border between death, safety and danger, the past and future, their personal property and the beach - was a favourite locale for Cahun and Moore. There’s a doubleexposed photograph from the year before of Cahun in masculine-styled jacket, and check jumper, her head tilted back archly from the viewer as she smokes a cigarette, the same cat perched between her wellington boots.4 They are posed in the midst of the flowering shrubbery against the church-wall but this time the leafage is swept off the large angular gravestones lit up at their back, and human and cat stand on the inverted ‘PRI’ of ‘PRIVATE PROPERTY’ with a tiny human skull (almost a baby’s), in front of the ‘P’. Another celebrated ‘autoportrait’ of 1947 more ominously reveals Cahun in a diaphanous gown and holding a blank mask to her face (‘Under this mask another mask’) with her hands enveloped in one black and one white glove.5 She seems an ambiguous sentinel on the verge of the dead zone and the effacement of the human. The ‘cat-walking’ photograph of 1948 will subsequently be titled ‘Le chemin des chats V’ and placed in a sequence with others taken four years later where Cahun, sometimes carrying a case, is led out of an opened house window and down a steep and narrow ledge of slate by the same cat. Together with these 1953 shots, one implication of the sequence, is that Cahun is allowing her cat to lead her out of the interior security of the home to reinstate the parameters of security and creativity, to ‘beat’ the furthest ‘bounds’ almost ritually as it were of the property and gardens she shared for so long with Marcel Moore. It is an exorcism of evil spirits. The 4 5

See the Jersey Heritage Collections Archives reference: JHT/1995/00036/g. Cahun, Disavowals, op. cit., p. 183. See also, ibid., reference: JHT/1995/00031/n.

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subject is symbolically placing her faith in being conducted by a revered animal away from the graveyard where so many of the dead from the recent war lie. She is also exorcising memories of the German occupation and related near-starvation and suicide attempts, treachery and daily threats of shooting and exposure as a Jew. Katy Kline has written: Of the self portraits that have survived from the 1940s […] only a few such as the faceless figures at the cemetery, carry any reminder of the visual and psychological punch of the earlier self-portraits. The most radical part of her work was over.6

This certainly begs the question of what we characterise as the ‘radical part’ of these artists’ work and, in a larger sense as well, I cannot agree with this verdict for, of course, the ‘faceless figure’ photographs are part of a series of at least 27 shots in the milieu of seawall and cemetery and, read aright, these late works are as powerful as any earlier stage in Cahun and Moore’s art. Tirza True Latimer correctly identifies the radicalism of these late photographs when she writes of Cahun and Moore returning to perform a ceremony, a dance of victory ‘along the fortifications that the Germans had built in their garden; this was their ‘stage’.7 In viewing these ceremonies of life, death and afterlife rituals, we remember the desire for ‘real occult knowledge’. A comparative reconsideration of these and other of their photographs with the photo-collages of Aveux, offers new insight into those currently most neglected aspects of Cahun and Moore’s work: the ways in which their explorations of gender and exogender ambiguities, hermaphroditism and social construction are also urgently informed by a vital hermetic quest, that which Latimer calls the ‘search for the absolute.’8 Indeed, it is very striking that, when so much has been written on visionary motifs, esoteric thought and hermetic traditions in the work of surrealist women artists such as Remedios Varo, Ithel Colquhoun, Valentine Penrose, Dorothea Carrington, Toyen and Dorothea Tanning, several of whom were 6

K. Kline, ‘Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman’, Mirror Images, Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation, Cambridge and London, The MIT Press, p. 76. 7 T. Latimer, ‘Acting Out, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’, in L. Downie, Don’t Kiss Me, The Art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, New York and Jersey, Aperture Foundation and Jersey Heritage Trust, 2006, p. 69. 8 See the Jersey Heritage Collections Archives reference: JHT/1995/00045/62.

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also interested in bisexuality and trans-gender themes, that these issues have been largely ignored in relation to Cahun and Moore’s work. Additionally, we might ask how it is that, when the so-called ‘shadowboxing with God’, meditation, Faustian pacts, the finding of ‘one’s catechism’, spells and magicians, ‘sublime initiation’, Sakya Mouni and Buddhist traditions are so explicitly highlighted in Aveux, these concepts have been largely lacking in discussions of their work.9 Perhaps such omission is based on the misconception that, as Gen Doy termed it: ‘sexuality and gender issues’ and ‘revolutionary politics’ and Cahun’s interest in hermaphroditism somehow obviate or contradict her commitment to an inner search, a seeking for the esoteric truth beyond illusions and labels of self. In fact, in Cahun’s case, the opposite is true.10 Foregoing for once her customary usage of paradoxical language, masks and ironic games, on reflecting on those aspects of her existence which preserved her through the worst days of her war-time imprisonment, Cahun said: […] the immediate presence, never wavering of my dearest love, without the other: the one that has no sex and no country, I would have died from hatred.11

One notices the way that she speaks of Moore first and also slips out of anti-Teutonic resentment and gender signification in this arresting statement. But what was this mysterious ‘other’? Anyone familiar with the close connections between the development of the visual arts in Europe between the wars and the associated search through different esoteric traditions would, in viewing the ‘Le Chemin des Chats’ sequence discussed above, immediately sense a link to notions of shamanism, and animals as spirit-guides. A reader similarly informed would, in viewing the first photo-collage plates of Avenu, recognise references to and parodies of ceremonial Masonic magic, Cahun’s early practice of yoga and the hermetic search for hermaphroditism. Yet such links have been often received scant attention.

9

Cahun, Disavowals, op. cit., p. 29 and pp. 68-69. G. Doy, Claude Cahun, A Sensual Politics of Photography, London and New York, I.B. Tauris and Co, 2007, p. 39. 11 M.A. Caws, Glorious Eccentrics, Modernist Women Painting and Writing, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 139. 10

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Janet A. Kaplan writes of the interests of painters Remedios Varo and Dorothea Carrington: They had both been long interested in the occult, stimulated by the Surrealist belief in ‘occultation of the Marvellous’ and by wide reading in witchcraft, alchemy, sorcery, Tarot and magic […] the transformative processes of alchemy […] women’s creative powers and their relationship to nature, even the special charged relationship between women and cats – all were favourite issues of discussion and experiment between Varo’s daily visits to Carrington.12

Though there are obvious connections here with Cahun and Moore’s visual collaborations, it is notable that most of the topics mentioned have been largely passed over by critics in the last 20 years in preference to the subjects which Jennifer Shaw’s finds ‘central to the construction’ of Aveux: ‘Gender, identity, sexuality, subjection and desire’.13

Deflections from the Esoteric Shaw’s analysis of Aveux is, without doubt, one of the finest, most sensitive, cogent and far-reaching of any which have appeared so far, particularly rich in biographical, gender relations and political detail. In terms of the topic of the present study though, the crux comes in Shaw’s consideration of the explicitly mystical and occult materials of the book. Her discussion reveals that though, for example, she is well aware of the ‘table tournante’, (table-turning) references to séances and automatic writing in Aveux, she interprets such experiments in an exclusively materialist context. She writes: The surrealists saw the revolving table not as a route to spiritual phenomena but rather as a way of accessing the unconscious.14

Passing over for a moment that use of an absolute and Freudian distinction between the unconscious and the supernatural and acknowledging that, at times André Breton chose to distance himself and Surrealism from ‘spiritual phenomena’, it is clear that this statement seeks to foreclose on notions of Cahun’s involvement with a spiritual quest. Such an interpretive 12

J.A. Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, The Art and Life of Remedios Varo, London, Virago, 1988, p. 96 and p. 130. 13 J. Shaw, Reading Claude Cahun’s Disavowals, Burlington, Ashgate, 2013, p. 30. 14 ibid., p. 188.

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fault-line obviously existed with Surrealism itself. By 1940 Ithel Colquhoun was claiming that E.L.T. Mesens sought to banish her from the group due to her interest in magic and to edit out the Surrealists’ interest in the occult. Yet Shaw’s statement is a vast simplification of the incredible diversity of responses to supernatural phenomena broached by Surrealists and found within Surrealist art. As Alex Owen has written: The surrealist quest for the ‘marvelous’ in everyday life was caught up with a concept of ‘absolute reality’ that was familiar to occultists trained in the schools of Theosophy and magic. In particular, the concept of ‘surreality’ drew on notions of a lucid expansive consciousness and reconciliation of the dreaming and waking states that were so relevant to occultism.15

It is clear that Shaw’s attempts, as revealed in the statement above, to turn away from Cahun’s explicitly-stated interests in ‘spiritual phenomena’ involve considerable strain. This strain is evident further into Shaw’s discussion. Confronted by a photomontage bristling with subversive alchemical and quasi-Masonic symbology, Shaw writes vaguely, ‘Powerful forces seem to be at work […].’16 One senses a critic rather at sea when faced by the esoteric signs of Aveux and forced to fall back on uncertainty, sporadic queries to the reader and a recourse to very basic interpretations: Struck by the imagery of mirrors, eyes (the windows of the soul?), lips (which allow the words to express the self […]).17

In contrast, Katharine Conley argues accurately and confidently that Cahun and Moore’s pictures in fact reference and resurrect those Spiritualist energies latent in Surrealism: By creating the impression that she is allowing the viewer to glimpse the normally unseen, a supplement to objective, rational reality, Cahun makes clear visual reference to the repressed ghost of spiritualism within surrealism. ‘Spiritualism returned photography to its origins in occult science’, explains John Harvey because ‘photography had grown out of the union of science and the supernatural in alchemy.’18

15

A. Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 230. 16 ibid. 17 ibid., p. 93. 18 K. Conley, Surrealist Ghostliness, Dartmouth, University of Nebraska Press, 2013, p. 52.

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Such insights allow us to grasp the wider achievement of Cahun’s art. Though on the face of it Spiritualism might seem to be anathema to twentieth-century trans-gender politics, we recall that some Spiritualists posited an androgynous universe and a bisexual God: Gender conscious membership [was] required to harmonise with an androgynous cosmos. Since as [John Murray} Spear taught, ‘the divine mind’ itself, from which all organizations flow, is both male and female. 19

Sometimes, in their characterisation of Cahun and Moore’s images as predominantly and exclusively critiques of gender politics in a materialist sense, critics seem to ignore Cahun’s own words. One of the most dominant of Cahun and Moore’s photographic motifs quoted the Aveux collages of is the suddenly assertive, ‘trained’ and matured figure, (kisscurls clipped, hair slicked back), of the ‘Do not kiss me, I’m in training’ photo-sequence.20 Tirza Latimer glosses this sequence: Training for what? Training to become a woman […] or to un-become one? Training to be a lesbian?21

Latimer goes on to cite social conditioning in the determination of gender as the primary ideological locus for this artistic exploration. Other critics have interpreted this sequence as a parody of attitudes to virginity. Yet Cahun herself, in writing of the image, turns immediately to questions of the self and ‘god’: I am in training, don’t kiss me. If ever it happens that I believe in a god outside of myself, at certain times it seems to me that he has got the upper hand: having eternity before him. With his means at their disposal any murderer, innocent, prostitute, the bottom of their class, the lowest of men, could equal him […] yes, saved from the intolerable distractions of misery, love, illnesses, and at the same time allowed to take my time, I’d feel like his equal… And maybe He wouldn’t be much of a match for me, who knows?22 19

B.E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1997, p. 135. 20 For an example, see Jersey Heritage Trust Collections Archives reference: JHT/1995/30/j 21 Latimer, ‘Acting Out’, op. cit., p. 63. 22 Cahun, Disavowals, op. cit., p. 185.

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As in the ‘shadow boxing’ with God section, the narrative drama here manifests a pep-talk with oneself in preparation with a tussle with the socalled Supreme Being. The training is a form of gymnastic and subversive Metaphysical challenge. As she writes in the ninth section of Aveux: ‘Remove God, God remains’.23 Yet this process is not viewed as a struggle which precludes or obviates issues of gender. The narrator isn’t involved in this argument as an escape from sexual politics or conflict and this is not an exploration of an unreal but rather a hidden plane of existence. The argument with the god implicit in one’s own existence emerges precisely from the rejection of societal modes of gender construction.

A Different Context There are several main elements in Cahun’s exploration of esoteric experience, the most notable being Masonic imagery, a shamanistic understanding of the cosmos (as the ‘Chemin des Chats’ might suggest), Buddhist philosophy, the Faustian Manichean struggle and the Jewish traditions of the Kabbalah and related alchemical themes, such as the recovery of the divine Androgyne. It is clear, from her early encounters with yoga and her reading in eastern thought that the young Claude Cahun was fascinated by transcendental philosophy, esoteric lore and meditation. Her uncle, Marcel Schwob, to whom she was as close as to anyone in her family, considered Aleister Crowley a close friend whilst they both lived in Paris. Yet it is doubtful that the young Claude knew of Crowley’s ideas in detail from this connection. If she became aware of his activities within various magical orders and Masonic organisations, it is probable that such collectively male-dominated groups with their strict rituals and hierarchies would repulse such a rebellious spirit. Nonetheless, Masonic and quasi-Masonic associations are clearly evoked and parodied in the great frontispiece plate to Aveux. The all-seeing eye within the pyramid was a popular motif in Freemasonry and one that was traced back by Masons to ancient Egyptian mysteries of Isis and Osiris. Here the all-seeing eye has slipped from its usual setting inside the triangular ceremonial hat or pyramid (as in the familiar shot of Crowley in his robes), and is cradled by two sets of hands, one a mirrored image of the

23

ibid., p. 183.

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other, truncated just below the wrist, and terminating in lips.24 The alchemical two headed-eagle has evolved to a two-headed, small bird with curved bill, redolent of Cahun’s association of her own arched nose with birds. The imagery can be straightforwardly interpreted from an esoteric point of view: we see the ever-coming-into-being of creative worlds: the eye perpetually gives birth through the mind-spirit to ‘DIEU’ and, through language and images, to myriad worlds. The comet’s and artist’s arms provide a nurturing and magical double-grip. Seven lights are grouped within the outline of the bird’s body (the number of the universe), flanked by twelve lights on the bird’s wings which add to form nineteen, the number of the drive towards union with the cosmos. Cahun’s friendship with ethnologist, Michel Leiris, and also her knowledge of several figures from the esoteric circles of Georgette Le Blanc and Jane Heap of ‘The Rope’ group, a circle of lesbians gathered around the mystic George Gurdjief, also affected her work. Gurdjief’s teachings basically concerned the need to awaken from the sleep of one’s everyday life and automatic reactions to come into an awareness of one’s true self and potential. Leiris wrote an article on Émile Grillot de Givry’s La Musee des Sorciers, Mages et Alchimistes (1929), a major source of information on the occult for the Surrealists. One can definitely discern the general influence of Leiris’s alchemical interests in Cahun and Moore’s work as well as the influence of Moore’s long-term friend the poet Robert Desnos, who was fascinated by alchemy, palmistry, séances and automatic drawing. The anthropological work of Leiris and Henri Michaux, and the latter’s occasional drug-use, also fostered an awareness of shamanistic practice. Cahun was an ‘avid follower’ and collector of the work of Max Ernst.25 Cahun and Moore’s apartment featured two major works by the German artist, one a large photomontage. Cahun also owned copies of Ernst’s montage novels. Ernst with his paintings of his spirit-familiar alter-ego, the bird Loplop, the shape-shifting of his paintings, his early encounters with synchronous events and dream visions proved a powerful shamanistic presence for Cahun. This can easily be recognized in her evolving artistic involvement with cats: as companions, alter egos, spirit-guides and totemic visual motifs. The narrator of Aveux consistently addresses herself 24

For this image, see The Aleister Crowley Foundation, [website], ND, http://aleistercrowleyfoundation.net/images/Aleister%20Crowley.jpg, (accessed 18 February 2016). 25 Shaw, Reading Claude Cahun, op. cit., p. 67.

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as a cat ‘I know the feline reserve of your heart too well’.26 ‘Pussy makes no more fuss than me when she lets her claws be trimmed […].27 When the narrator asks whether she can change bodies, she replies teasingly ‘No more than a cat’.28 She writes that ‘we demand dreams, claws out or velvet paws’. 29 Cahun posed for photographs of herself accompanied by cats for at least 28 years. Two striking early shots are indicative and show her, head-andshoulders with the cat ‘Kid’. In the first of 1925, the atmosphere is clairvoyant with the artist adopting a hieratic pose, her hair brushed to one side like that of ancient Egyptian dignitaries. A rhythmic pattern involving Gothic arches seems to vibrate outwards behind human and cat’s heads, emphasizing the haunting and enchanted quality of the scene. In the second, Cahun carries Kid, the cat’s legs draped around her neck in a dramatically backlit close-up; the gazes of cat and human fuse in an intense stare at the observer. It is a powerful and sensuous selfidentification with the feline, cat and woman’s energies seemingly mingled. There are other notable portraits with felines: an unnerving veiled figure with a Siamese cat and another of Cahun reclining on a toy leopard’s skin. Shaw also writes convincingly of Cahun’s fraught artistic relationship with the iconography of birds, some as ambiguous emblems of her patrimony, (her first adoptive name was ‘Courlis’ or curlew, linked to her family’s hooked nose). Buddhism also came to exert a powerful influence on Cahun’s work and life. Over two years, from 1925 to 1927, Cahun and Moore frequented the theatre of Les Amis des Arts Esotériques and acted and designed sets for this theatre featuring plays such as Sâr Péladan’s, Babylone and Oedipe et le Sphinx. Sâr Péladan had been the arch-mage of Symbolism in Paris and the theatre was owned by the Theosophical Society. It was in this dramatic milieu that Cahun had herself photographed as a burnished and crosslegged Buddha. The fourth section of Aveux is dedicated and addressed to ‘Aurige’, the celestial charioteer who carries and nurses the starry goat as he drives across the heavens: a cipher for self-confident masculine-styled orientation and nurturing for both artists involved. In terms of Buddhist belief, Cahun also has in mind the insightful charioteer for Sakya-Mouni, (the young Buddha), the royal servant who replied truthfully to all the 26

Cahun, Aveux, op. cit., p. 92. ibid., p. 136. 28 ibid., p. 144. 29 ibid., p. 158. 27

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prince’s questions about suffering. There is another photograph of Cahun in quasi-yogic posture, the celebrated image which has been called ‘Self Portrait with a Quilt’. Gen Doy writes of the figure’s ‘sexual nakedness’ existing ‘in a magical instance of combining thought and material reality’.30 Doy’s reference to magic is perhaps associated with the exposed figure’s inwardness. Everything in the image is inturned: the play of sunlight on stilled, sunlit flesh, the curved furnishings and the masked eyes. In 1929 Cahun acted as Satan in Le mystère d'Adam and this character recurs in the collages of Aveux, most particularly in an inverted form as the crest of the four-headed blazon for the fourth section - C.M.C. ‘(vanity, sex’). Some of the evocations of devils and demons in Disavowals (‘without opposites, I cannot remain standing’), are reminiscent of the Manichean emphases of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93) or as Blake termed it ‘Opposition is true friendship.’31 The Faustian pact is never far from Cahun’s mind: ‘Sell your soul? If you only had to sign it away it would be quickly done.32 Yet Satan is rejected because of the hierarchies of his system, a bureaucratic conventionality simply revealed as an inverse form of Christian strictures: ‘Simplify your administration, O Satan!’ advises the virtuous maiden […] There’s even more protocol here than in paradise! Where to find one’s Catechism?33

The narrator gives a firm reply zen-like in its simplicity and which admirably encapsulates Cahun’s attitude to the spiritual quest, the ‘other’: ‘Secret protocol: no school’.34 If shamanism, Buddhism and the Faustian struggle were important for Cahun, as Michelle Gewurtz argues, the artist’s equivocal feelings about her own Jewish identity also influenced her expressions of spiritual quest. Cahun’s uncle, Leopold Schwob, had been a rabbi in Rouen and Gewurtz draws our attention to the artist’s familiarity with the Jewish liturgy 30

Doy, Claude Cahun, op. cit., p. 39. Cahun, Disavowals, op. cit., p. 193 and Geoffrey Keynes, (ed.), William Blake, Complete Writings, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 193. 32 ibid,, p. 160. 33 ibid. 34 ibid. 31

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including ‘the Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur services,’ to ‘which even a secular Jew might have been exposed’.35 Gewurtz relates the title of Aveux non Avenus to the Kol Nidre prayer: Literally, Kol Nidre translates into French as ‘tous les veux’. The Kol Nidre prayer ends with the words in Hebrew ‘Nidrenu lo Nidre,’ translated as ‘Our vows (to God) shall not be vows.’36

This of course links up with the sense of avowals disavowed. Even in the form of the book and the intercalated abbreviated titles for each section with the key supplied in the final pages, we find a link both to the abbreviated terms of Masonic magic and the abbreviation systems of Jewish Kabbalistic wisdom as in the Notarikon. Cahun’s famous formula: ‘I am (the “I” is) the outcome of God multiplied by God divided by God’ rings with an awareness of the compound Jewish name of God the Creator: God ‘Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh-I Am that I Am’.37 A basic link between the Kabbalah and alchemy – something of an obsession with Cahun’s friends Roger-Gilbert Lecomte and Robert Desnos – is that both systems asserted that Adam and Eve’s fall led to the separation of the male and female principles and that creation awaits its fulfilment in their recombination. As Patrick Lepetit writes: One of the mystic union of the Kaddosh Barouch Hou and the Shechina, on which she [Colquhoun] based her spiritual alchemy, as did, perhaps, Breton himself, who owned a silver kabbalist chain which is housed today in the Nantes Library. It had formerly belonged to Marcel Schwob, a writer highly esteemed by Breton, and it was undoubtedly given to him by Claude Cahun, whose real name was Lucie Schwob. Breton proclaims in On Surrealism in its Living Works of ‘the necessity to rebuild the primordial Androgyne of which all traditions tell us.’ heaven and earth, mind and matter, the conjunction oppositorum, is the true purpose of the Great Work.’38

Given Cahun’s rejection of gender demarcation and her visual and literary explorations of androgyny, such spiritual traditions, including those based 35

M. Gewurz, ‘Equivocally Jewish: Claude Cahun and the Narratives of Modern Art’, 2012, http://www.brandeis.edu/hbi/publications/workingpapers/docs/gewurz.pdf, (accessed 18 February 2015). 36 ibid. 37 Cahun, Disavowals, op. cit., p. 29. 38 P. Lepetit, The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism: Origins, Magic and Secret Societies, Rochester, Inner Traditions and Bear Company, 2014, p. 240.

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on Isis the Prophetess to Her Son, Horus from the Codex Marcianus, a text which mixed Hebraic thought and Egyptian myth,.would have proved particularly fascinating. Whether or not Cahun gave Breton her uncle’s kabbalist chain, the suggestion of this ongoing search for cosmic union within mystical Jewish and related alchemical traditions had a powerful effect on the collages and text of Aveux and in many of the photographs. Yet it is to be remembered that, as part of her neo-narcissistic ideas on individuality, Cahun rejected systems created by others and systems of belief as a whole. As Blake wrote: I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's’ yet perhaps Cahun found even the words ‘system’ and ‘school’ too programmatic and substituted the word ‘protocol’, as in a ceremony to be observed.39

‘Secret protocol: no school’. Each of these esoteric traditions and strands of mystical influence served merely as metaphors for Cahun’s own quest, her explorations of the ‘other’.

Endings There’s a sense in which that, in the 1920s and 1930s, that which was to become a life-long same-sex relationship was fated to be hermetic, in one sense a reality closed against the world. Within those spaces, Cahun pursued her personal esoteric quest. At the end of Aveux, the board games and flat, intimate surfaces are swept away: we are suddenly given a photographic vista of the empty open road ahead, the way onwards and inwards. In Whitmanesque mode, Cahun’s narrator addresses her future readers: ‘Dear Strangers, keep your distance: I have only you in the world’. Cahun foresaw this prospect of ourselves, her unseen future readers, and saw beyond us – ‘the other: the one that has no sex and no country’, which philosophically and artistically drew her on. There is a little-discussed but, within this context, a vital photograph of her from 1945 where, returned home after the privations of imprisonment, she stands looking pale and emaciated, her hair styled in an archaic Greek manner like the coiffure of a Classical bust in an alcove behind her.

39

Keynes, Blake, op. cit, p. 629.

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Figure 4. Claude Cahun c. 1945 (JHT/1995/00034/n). Courtesy of Jersey Heritage Trust Collections. She tightly grips a statue of a crouching female figure who holds an eidolon or image of a small god, reminding of Isis, Osiris and Horus: the great goddess engaged in a search for her spouse, the reconstitution and gathering of shattered worlds. The artist’s face is flooded with sunlight and she appears to be praying.

Bibliography The Aleister Crowley Foundation, [website], ND, http://aleistercrowleyfoundation.net/images/Aleister%20Crowley.jpg, (accessed 18 February 2016). Cahun, C., Disavowals, trans. S. de Muth and A. Lhermitte, London, Tate Publishing, 2007. Carroll, B. E., Spiritualism in Antebellum America, Bloomington, Indiana, 1997. Caws, M.A., Glorious Eccentrics, Modernist Women Painting and Writing, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

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—. The Surrealist Look, An Erotics of Encounter, Cambridge and London, The MIT Press, 1999. Conley, K., Surrealist Ghostliness, Dartmouth, University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Doy, G., Claude Cahun, A Sensual Politics of Photography, London and New York, I.B. Tauris and Co, 2007. Gewurz, M., ‘Equivocally Jewish: Claude Cahun and the Narratives of Modern Art’, 2012, http://www.brandeis.edu/hbi/publications/workingpapers/docs/gewurz. pdf, (accessed 18 February 2015). Kaplan, J.A., Unexpected Journeys, The Art and Life of Remedios Varo, London, Virago, 1988. Keynes, G. (ed.), William Blake, Complete Writings, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1966. Kline, K, ‘Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman’, Mirror Images, Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation, Cambridge and London, The MIT Press, 1998. Latimer, T.T., ‘Acting Out, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’ in L. Downie (ed.), Don’t Kiss Me, The Art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, New York and Jersey, Aperture Foundation and Jersey Heritage Trust, 2006, pp. 56-71. Lepetit, P., The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism: Origins, Magic and Secret Societies, Rochester, Inner Traditions and Bear Company, 2014. Owen, A., The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the culture of the Modern, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004. ‘S. Pinchetti, Purple Diary, 27 July 2011’, Purple Fr., [website], ND, http://purple.fr/diary/tag/sophie+pinchetti/?page=4, (accessed 17 February 2015). Shaw, J., Reading Claude Cahun’s Disavowals, Burlington, Ashgate, 2013.

5. WHAT CAN AIL THEE, KNIGHTESS-AT-ARMS? WHEN WOMAN JOUSTS OR WOOS, BE IT IN LIFE, ART OR LITERATURE, GENDER WANTS REVIEW DR SUSAN CLAYTON

Introduction The illustrious Joan of Arc and valiant Britomart, are renowned for their knightly deeds, yet chivalry is deemed a man’s domain. The entry for knight in one referential dictionary online reads, ‘a man who served his sovereign or lord as a mounted soldier in armour.’1 Likewise female husbands, such as Brandon Teena, lead character of Boys Don’t Cry, are known for their ability to woo women, but the suitor’s part is assumed to be the apanage of men. The online dictionary Merriam Webster defines ‘wooer’ as: ‘a man who courts a woman usually with the goal of marrying her.’2 That neither expression of female masculinity is recognised, far less promoted, is not due to a shortage of examples in real life or fiction, whether the record be textual, pictorial or celluloid. The distortion in official gender representations is encapsulated in one of John Keats’s poems, which opens by asking, ‘What can ail thee knight-at-arms?’3 But why is the question, ‘what can ail thee knightess-at-arms?’ a non-starter?

1

Oxford Dictionaries , [website], ND, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/knight, (accessed 17 March 2015). 2 Merriam-Webster, [website], ND, http://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/wooer, (accessed 17 March 2015). 3 ‘John Keats, La Belle Dame sans Merci. A Ballad, 1819’, Bartleby.com, [website], ND, http://www.bartleby.com/126/55.html, (accessed 18 February 2016).

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The word knightess, like poetess, is convenient. It complies with the standard practice of feminising terms by adding a suffix, although one may regret the demoting tone of the addition, ‘ess’. Nevertheless, knightess contains the oxymoronic quality of combined terms, such as, female masculinity or female husband, a term for which we will give a working definition in our second part, when we also consider the linguistic ramifications of an oxymoron. Firstly, however, we will start with the topic of female chivalry, then in our third part, focus on the issue of power and gender.

If the helmet fits, wear it! The richly suggestive imagery in Keats’s poem, La Belle Dame sans Merci doubtless explains its interpretation by painters, including Arthur Hughes (1863), Walter Crane (1865), and John William Waterhouse (1893). That Keats’s knightly rider, was a man, was a foregone choice; Hughes’ painting conveys standard knightliness when the horseman sets the ‘faery’s child’ on his ‘pacing steed’. Even today the term knightess is rarely found in dictionaries; indeed one internet site asked if I meant ‘nighties,’4 the sleepwear, another if I meant ‘knightless’: No definitions found for ‘knightess’ , perhaps you mean: ‘Knightless’.5

This response implies that a world without knights is more plausible than one with chivalrous women. However knightesses have existed for centuries, consistently upsetting the gender cart. One of the most generative examples of female chivalry in literature is Britomart in Edmund Spenser’s sixteenth century poem, The Faerie Queene.6 Daughter of a knight she became one herself, and proved as gallant as her male peers. Here is how, talking to a fellow knight, she explains her love of chivalry. It comes from a late nineteenth century prose rendition of Spenser’s epic, by Mary Macleod, 1897:

4

Dictionary.com, [website], ND, http://dictionary.reference.com/misspelling?term=knightess&s=t, (accessed 17th March 2015). 5 refDictionary.com, [website], ND. http://www.refdictionary.com/dict.php?name=Knightess (accessed 1 June 2014). 6 E. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, London, William Ponsonby, 1590.

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5. What can ail thee, knightess-at-arms? Fair sir, […] I would have you know that from the hour when I left my nurse’s arms, I have been trained up in warlike ways, to toss spear and shield, and to meet and overthrow warrior knights. I loathe to lead the lazy life of pleasure that most ladies do, fingering fine needle and fancy thread; I would rather die at the point of the foeman’s spear. All my delight is set on deeds of arms, to hunt out perils and adventures wherever they may be met by sea or land, not for riches nor for reward, but only for glory and honour.7

The quotation is notable as a clear affirmation of one woman’s espousal of chivalry. It is of further interest because it comes from an illustrated, prose rendition of Spenser’s poem, thus indicating a wish to address a wider readership. The illustrations in Macleod’s reworking were by A.G. Walker. A later edition, of the volume can be accessed online.8 Renewed interest during the late 19th century for the chivalrous knightess coincided with campaigning by the women’s movement, especially for suffrage. Suffrage marches were accompanied by banners and took on the air of a spectacle, not unlike medieval tournaments.9 Also the movement produced journals, placards and other art works such as the poster, Bugler Girl, designed by Caroline Watts.10 If we compare the poster with an illustration of Britomart in Macleod’s adaptation, when Britomart removes her helmet and onlookers discover her sex,11 we notice that both women are wielding or holding high objects associated with combat: metal helmet and bugle. They are also carrying or wearing other symbols of battle: suit of armour, a sword or standard. The ways they are holding their bodies, with their arms in the air, signify corporeal assertiveness. Also they are doing these things for the benefit of onlookers; theirs are public gestures, and as such defy the standard codes of deportment for women according to which they should occupy the private sphere of the home. 7

M. MacLeod, Stories from the Faerie Queene, London, Gardner, Darton & Co, 1897, pp. 181-2. 8 ‘Stories from the Faerie Queene’ [website], ND, https://archive.org/details/storiesfromfaeri00spen, (accessed 17 March 2015). 9 L. Tuckner, The Spectacle of Women, Images of the Suffrage Campaign 1907-14, London, Chatto and Windus, 1987. 10 It was designed for the Artists’ Suffrage League to advertise an NUWSS (National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies) procession in June 1908. To see the image online, go to: ‘Suffrage Stories/Women Artists: Caroline Watts and the Bugler Girl’, Woman and Her Sphere, [website], ND. http://womanandhersphere.com/2014/12/03/suffrage-storieswomen-artistscaroline-watts-and-the-bugler-girl/ , (accessed 18 February 2016). 11 For an image of Britomart by A.G. Walker, see MacLeod, op. cit., p. 198.

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There were several models of female chivalry available at this time; Bodicea was one, but the main one was Joan of Arc, as Lisa Tickner notes: Joan of Arc symbolised the women’s holy crusade […] she was borrowed from the French and made the central emblem of feminist rebellion against the state.12

The WSPU chose a patron saint from history not literature. But the dividing line between ‘faery land’ and the reality of history is problematical for it is permeable, further the two realms are mutually supportive. Besides it is female chivalry as a cognitive construct that is significant, and which is kept outside mainstream recognition. If one compares the illustration of Joan of Arc in a WSPU cover page by Hilda Dallas held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London,13 and Britomart, in Mary Macleod’s prose rendition,14 both knightesses are set in a dominant position, seen from below, as in a low-angle shot. Both are dressed in a full suit of plate armour, wield a sword in one hand and a shield or standard in the other, and are moving towards their opponent. We should not forget that these turn-of-the-century images were aimed at a wide readership; Macleod’s volume was in modern English, and The Suffragette was sold freely. Both late 19th and early 20th century illustrations depict knightesses from previous centuries; as such, they cross the boundary of time, as well as the (timeless) one established between genders. Both knightesses, Britomart and Joan of Arc, have inspired painters. Examples include Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Joan of Arc Kissing the Sword of Liberation (1864), and Peter Paul Rubens’s Joan of Arc at Prayer (1620). For Britomart, there is Walter Crane’s familiar painting Britomart, (1900), in which the contemplative knightess, in armour, rests near Albion’s shore.15

12

Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women, Images of the Suffrage Campaign 19071914 London, Chatto and Windus, 1987, pp. 209-10. 13 The Suffragette was the journal of the WSPU, (Womens’ Social and Political Union). The artist was Hilda Dallas. 14 Macleod, op. cit., p. 254. 15 ‘W. Crane, Britomart, 1900’, Wikigallery, [website], ND, http://www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_179395/Walter-Crane/Britomart-1900, (accessed 17 March 2015). The origianl is at, La Bibliothèque des Arts Decoratifs de Paris.

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Figure 5. Illustration for The Suffragette by Hilda Dallas, reproduced by kind permission of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Crane also illustrated a re-edition of The Fairie Queene, in 1894/5, which contains drawings of Britomart.16 As we have already mentioned, Crane likewise illustrated La Belle Dame sans Merci, which indicates his openness to visualising knights and knightesses in literature. However we 16

For instance the full-page illustration by Crane which preceeds Book IV, Canto VI. See T. Wise (ed.), Spenser’s Faerie Queene, A Poem in Six Books, London, George Allen, 1895, p. 913.

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would add that his knightess, Britomart, portrayed above, resembles more closely la Belle Dame than the knight, with regard to battle readiness, and bodily stance. Crane’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1865) is in the public domain.17 In Fernand Khnopff’s portrait Britomart (1892), her armour is noticeable, indicative of strength, but her pose conveys wistfulness.18 Like Crane, Khnopff portrays her in armour without a helmet, as if she is inviting the scrutiny of a hairdresser rather than facing a military inspection. Her armour is of central importance, as Judith Anderson explains, it ‘forms and masks, expresses and veils, protects and contains her.’19 In Britomart and Amoret (1897), Mary Raphael portrays the knightess rescuing Lady Amoret.20 In the painting, which is in the public domain, the artist portrays Britomart as champion of the oppressed. Mary Raphael’s painting suggests desire between the two women, offering a transition to our next expression of female masculinity, female husbands, and their skill at courting women.

Of Female Husbands, and Suitors Who Pass Henry Fielding coined the term female husband in 1746, in The Female Husband, a narrative published anonymously in which Fielding recorded a real life individual, Mary, alias George Hamilton.21 The work can be

17 The painting can be viewed in ‘W. Crane, La Belle Dame sans Merci, 1865’, Wikipedia, [website], ND, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Crane, (accessed 17 March 2015). 18 Fernand Knopff’s Britomart (1892) is viewable on the site of the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Fine Arts Museum, see: ‘Britomart by Fernand Knopff, 1892’, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, [website], ND, http://www.fine-arts-museum.be/fr/la-collection/fernand-khnopff-britomart-thefaerie-queen?artist=khnopff-fernand-2, (accessed 17 March 2015). 19 J. Anderson, ‘Britomart’s Armor in Spenser’s Faerie Queene: Reopening Cultural Matters of Gender and Figuration’, English Literary Renaissance, vol. 39, 2009, p. 74. 20 ‘Britomart and Amoret by Mary F. Raphael, 1897’, Wikigallery, [website], ND, http://www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_143635/Mary-F-Raphael/Britomart-andAmoret, (accessed 17 March 2015). 21 It was Sheridan Baker in his article of 1959 who confirmed authorship. S. Baker, ‘Henry Fielding’s the Female Husband : Fact and Fiction’, PMLA, Vol. 74, No 3, pp. 213-224.

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accessed online.22 The term continues to be used, however its usage in some current writings differs.23 Our following working definition echoes Fielding’s use. Thus a female husband is an anatomical female who lives publicly as a man, which involves: a. taking a man’s name, for instance Mary Hamilton of Fielding’s narrative, became George Hamilton. b. wearing men’s clothes and adopting the gestures etc. to back their sartorial choice, not least (and this is the third point) c. getting a job usually done by men, for instance, James Allen, was a sawyer. Manju in the Sri Lankan film Flying with One Wing is a car mechanic.24 David Lindsay was a writer, publishing between 18218.25 d. by setting up home with another anatomical female as husband and wife. James Allen married Abigail at St Giles, Camberwell, London, in 1807; a couple could live as common-law spouses. The fact that female husbands have chosen to live their lives as men prompts us to use the pronoun ‘he’ for them.

22 H. Fielding, The Female Husband or, the Surprising History of Mrs Mary, alias Mr. George Hamilton, who was Convicted of having Married a young Womman of Wells and Lived with her as her Husband. Taken from her own Mouth since her Confinement, London, M. Cooper, 1746. See University of Adelaide, [website], ND, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fielding/henry/female-husband/, (accessed 17 March 2015). 23 The theorist Judith Halberstam in Female Masculinity (1998) uses the term differently: ‘I use it to describe women who played husband to married women who were either abandoned or neglected by their male husbands.’ J. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, Durham, Duke University Press, 1998, p. 67. 24 Flying with One Wing, dir. Asoka Handagama, Sri Lanka, Be-Positive Media Group/Sanhinda Films/Heliotrope Films, 2002, [videocassette]. Manju’s job confirms Pierre Bourdieu’s remark in La domination masculine that one ‘confère à l’homme le monopole du maniement des objets techniques et des machines’ (‘confers on man a monopoly on handling of technical objects and machines'), P. Bourdieu, La domination masculine, Paris, Le Seuil, 1998, p. 25. The more a job is the preserve of men, the more female husbands must think it consolidates a masculine identity. 25 See B.T. Bennett, Mary Diana Dods, A Gentleman and a Scholar, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

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Figure 6. Character of Manju in Flying With One Wing dir. Asoka Handagama (2002). Stills by kind permission of Heliotrope Films, France. Gallantry is one feature of wooing which is regularly mentioned in accounts about female husbands; their gallantry towards women is steadily listed as a quality. In the case of James Allen, whose life was the subject of an anonymous narrative, as was George Hamilton’s, although the author has not yet been identified, we are told: Another trait in James’s character was the aversion which he frequently expressed of seeing females carry loads; he would, [...] express himself in angry terms upon the unnatural imposition, and frequently take the burden upon himself.26

James comes through this quotation as a model of gallantry towards women. It was part of his act of passing and, something he felt strongly about. Being gallant is also a trait associated with Brandon Teena. The biographer of this 20th century American female husband, Aphrodite Jones, records how one girlfriend, Gina, esteemed his gallantry:

26 Anon, An Authentic Narrative of the Extraordinary Career of James Allen, the Female Husband, London, I.S. Thomas, 1829, p. 28.

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5. What can ail thee, knightess-at-arms? All through their relationship, Brandon was the perfect gentleman, always good to her, always taking her out to eat, opening up car doors, never letting her pay for anything. Gina found herself falling more in love every day […].27

Figure 7. Abigail Mary Allen : James Allen, 1829, by Thomas Jones. ©National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG D40306. Reproduced by kind permission of the National Portrait Gallery.28 For the female husband, gallantry is part of his identification with men. For the partner, as the following quotation from the novel Trumpet by Jackie Kay confirms, it enters the arousal of desire during courting. The quotation comes soon after the couple have met, at a blood donors’ centre. Joss Moody treats Millie MacFarlane to a drink at a bar, before taking her home:

27

A. Jones, All She Wanted, 1996, New York, Pocket Books, p. 100 National Portrait Gallery, ‘Abigail Mary Allen and James Allen, by Thomas Howell Jones, 1829 or after’, [website], ND, http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw202590/Abigail-Mary-AllenJames-Allen#subjects, (accessed 17 March 2015). 28

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He walks me to my flat in Rose Street […]. A little kiss on my cheek. I get in and throw myself on my bed, punch my pillow. Then I stroke the side of my cheek Joss Moody kissed and say, ‘courting’ to myself, ‘courting, courting, courting’ until it sounds like a beautiful piece of music.29

Millie MacFarlane’s savouring of her wooer’s attentiveness turns into music pulsed by desire. The scene echoes the atmosphere in Mary Raphael’s painting, Britomart and Amoret, which one could set alongside a still from Boys Don’t Cry available on Fox Searchlight’s site.30 The female husband is portrayed as a protective force, a guardian angel, watching over and holding sway. For the person being courted, the female husband offers fairy tale protection. A dream to hope for? Dreams are vital for psychic survival, and amongst the works we have mentioned The Fairy Queen, is the one that activates the capacity to dream most strongly. Virginia Woolf valued Spenser’s poem because ‘the mind is being perpetually enlarged by the power of suggestion’31 - to which Woolf attributed its timeless fascination. Woolf also said Spenser’s epic frees one, ‘So we feel free not shut in; but freed’32and her claim is confirmed by the fact that it freed the imaginations of Khnopff, Crane and Mary Raphael, also Woolf herself with her novel Orlando,33 in which her protagonist freely crossed gender lines and timelines. The freedom Woolf explored in her writings prompted Gilles Deleuze in A Thousand Plateaus, to say: […] Virginia Woolf – who made all of her life and work a passage, a becoming, all kinds of becomings between ages, sexes, elements and kingdoms.34

As Deleuze explains ‘becomings’, or the process of becoming ‘an other’, opens onto multiplicity, and each of these becomings has its own

29

Jackie, Kay, Trumpet, 1998, Picador, p. 14 ‘Boys Don’t Cry, 1999, dir, Kimberly Peirce, USA, Fox Searchlight, [DVD]. See Fox Searchlight, [website], ND, http://www.foxsearchlight.com/post/2710/itunesmovie-of-the-week-boys-dont-cry-starring-hilary-swank-1999/ , (accessed 17th March 2015). 31 V. Woolf, ‘The Faery Queen’ in Collected Essays, vol. 1, London, The Hogarth Press, 1968, p. 15. 32 ibid., p. 18. 33 V. Woolf, Orlando, London, The Hogarth Press, 1928. 34 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, trans B. Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London and New York, Continuum, 2004, p. 278. 30

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individuation or haecceity; also Deleuze states, the process involves desire in itself. But freedom to think afresh can be triggered by smaller word units than an epic poem or novel, for instance an oxymoron, such as lady knight or female husband. When Fielding coined female husband he voiced mockery for a female who aspired to the privileged status of husband.35 Yet an oxymoron is a free-spirited linguistic construct. Geoffrey Leech in, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry defines it as a ‘semantic oddity; a ‘yoking’ together of two expressions which are semantically incompatible, so that in combination they can have no conceivable literal reference to reality’, and quite by coincidence Leech gives as an example, ‘my male grandmother’.36 ‘Reality’ and ‘ incompatible’ are key words in Leech’s definition; and prompt us to ask first, what light do knightesses and female husbands throw on the ‘reality’ of gender, and secondly how incompatible is the alleged incompatibility of combining the sex of one half of humanity and the gender performance of the other, given that it has been successfully lived by so many people? The oxymoron female husband introduces the ‘unreal ‘, in other words ‘fantasy’, and we would argue by quoting Judith Butler, in Undoing Gender : Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise, it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home. 37

Whether we prefer the term, ‘fantasy’, ‘freedom’, or ‘becoming an other’, female husbands and knightesses embody it. Thus an oxymoron enables us to rethink standard constructs and by extension those which regulate society, not least power and hierarchy.

35

As Terry Castle in her article, commenting on the mock heroic style chosen by Fielding to describe Hamilton, points out ‘ She is quite literally a mock hero, and Fielding characteristically tries to put her back in her place through the use of the mock heroic. Yet the satire is never easy, never straightforward. The very power the fantastical shape-shifting Hamilton exerts over Fielding’s imagination suggests a more complex emblematic force.’ pp. 603-4, T. Castle, ‘Matters Not Fit to Be Mentioned : Fielding’s The Female Husband’, English Literary History, vol. 49, no. 3 pp. 602-22, 1982. 36 G.N. Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, London, Longman, 1969, p. 132. 37 J. Butler, Undoing Gender, New York and London, Routledge, p. 29.

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Guarding Power to Rule or Crafting Power to Pool The virtual absence of female chivalry or gallantry in dictionary definitions for these human expressions amounts to a refusal to recognise women in these roles owing to the codes of power in society. Indeed, our question, ‘What can ail thee knightess-at-arms?’ is a non-starter because of power; put simply, the power of heteronormativity to differentiate between genders and grant superiority to one, or in Deleuze’s words: […] the majority in the universe assumes as pre-given the right and power of man. In this sense women, children, but also animals, plants, and molecules, are minoritarian.38

For people of minoritarian status who challenge the hierarchy, retaliation awaits them. It has taken various forms for female husbands; the most striking is the rape and murder of Brandon Teena in 1993. Judith Halberstam’s analysis, In a Queer Time and Place, of the homophobic murder of Brandon Teena reveals the generality of such violence: ‘Brandon represents other rural lives undone by fear and loathing.’39 Another female husband who has paid a high price is Manju, the Sri Lankan example, whose life is recorded in Flying with One Wing. He was the victim of medical betrayal; the following still comes from a relevant scene:

38

G. Deleuze, and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Continuum, London, New York, ed. 2004, p. 321. 39 J. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York, New York University Press, 2005, p. 25.

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Figure 8. Flying With One Wing, dir. Asoka Handagama (2002). Stills by kind permission of Heliotrope Films, France. We should note that the betrayer wears the trappings of colonial power and medical authority in 21st century Sri Lanka. Manju’s response to the doctor’s betrayal prompts a crowd scene marked by violence, which brings to mind the crowd scene at the public whipping of George Hamilton in 1746. In the case of George Hamilton, the original female husband, he was publicly whipped in several market towns as part of his sentence, which also included six months’ imprisonment for being a cheat. A well-known cartoon of the whipping appeared in an 1813 edition of Fielding’s pamphlet. It is attributed to George Cruickshank. Mockery in the cartoon confirms Terry Castle’s analysis of Fielding’s deliberate choice of the mock-heroic style for his narrative. If one looks closely at the image one can see that the public house is called, The Cock.40 The cartoon and etching of the Allen couple also usefully shows how images of female husbands were visually documented before the cinema. Heteronormativity maintains the gender status quo by means of ‘popular prejudice’ – to use the term of Ellen Clayton writing in 1879. In her book 40

This edition of Fielding’s pamphlet is to be found at Bristol City Library. To see the image, follow the link: ‘Mary Hamilton’, Pillory History’, [website], ND, http://pilloryhistory.com/MaryHamilton.jpg, (accessed 18 February 2016).

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Female Warriors, Memorials of Female Valour and Heroism, from the Mythological Ages to the Present Era she addressed the debate we are pursuing.41 The duration of the debate confirms the tenacity of ‘popular prejudice’ to bar women from social recognition of chivalry and gallantry and so uphold power established by gender hierarchy. But is it not rather vested interest, which manipulates ‘popular prejudice’? On the question of transgenderism literature has offered gender becomings and has supplied cognitive freedoms that readers can relish and which heteronormativity has tried, through censorship, to muzzle. Woolf was very conscious of censorship, and her transgender work Orlando was crafted accordingly. We can recall that the same year Orlando was published, 1928, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was banned.42 Censorship has been one way of upholding gendered representations of gallantry and courting, and dictionaries have been subject to (self) censorship. Yet power is not exercised by heteronormativity alone. Female masculinity, which challenges the status quo, requires guts but procures multi-faceted satisfaction, including a feeling of power. Judith Butler in Gender Trouble says, talking about drag, that when the performance is at odds with anatomical sex it procures pleasure by the ‘giddiness of the performance.’43 The will to challenge distils as power. Butler’s reference to giddiness echoes Deleuze’s notion of the process of ‘becoming an other’ procuring desire. We would suggest that integral to the ‘giddiness’ enjoyed by the female husband is the power exercised by him over his partner. Indeed the protective dimension of gallantry, which combines with seduction, expresses a wish to have a hold over the receiver of this gallantry. This is noticeable in two visual documents we mentioned earlier, the painting of Britomart and Amoret, and the still from Boys Don’t Cry, in which Brandon Teena looks protectively at his girlfriend. As Melinda Spencer points out:

41 E. Clayton, Female Warriors: Memorials of Female Valour and Heroism, From the Mythological Ages to the Present Era, London, Tinsley Bros. 1879. 42 R. Hall, The Well of Loneliness, London, Jonathan Cape, 1928. 43 J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York and London, Routledge, 1990, p. 175.

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5. What can ail thee, knightess-at-arms? Because Britomart rescues and continues to protect Amoret, she has leverage within the relationship.44

Woolf captures this feeling of power combined with eroticism in Orlando, when her protagonist, whilst a woman, but passing as a man, came across a prostitute and […] swept her hat off to her in the manner of a gallant paying his addresses to a lady of fashion in a public place.45

If female husbands or knightesses operate a breach in gender hierarchy only to reconstruct it along similar lines one can regret it, and instead propose gallantry of a more democratic or egalitarian strain. “Becomings gallant / chivalrous” by women should be less hierarchical than that engineered by men. Unless egalitarian chivalry is an oxymoron! Strength pooled is more generous surely than power to rule!

Conclusions Although ‘popular prejudice’ has been in the service of heteronormativity to limit privilege and power to one gender, so barring women from chivalry and courting, knightesses and female husbands have existed for centuries. The challenge that they represent has resulted in their being ignored, (an eloquent example of which is by not being included in routine dictionary entries) or subject to retaliation. The alternative that female gallantry represents should involve a replacement of heteronormative gallantry by a more democratic one. Female husbands and knightesses represent alternatives to straightjacketed expressions of gender. By doing so they have offered inspiration for artistic creativity, whether written or visual, which, within the limits of censorship, have broadcast the diversity inherent in these expressions. Such artistic creativity fosters freedom of mind, movement and spirit for the benefit of readers or viewers, as Virginia Woolf has noted in connection with Spenser’s The Fairie Queene. It offers the possibility of envisaging otherness, and a multitude of ‘becomings’ (to use Deleuze’s terminology). 44

M. Spencer, ‘Britomart and Amoret: Reading Escape in Spenser’s Mysticism’, in T.H. Howard-Hill (ed.), Renaissance Papers 1999, New York, Camden House, 1999, p. 36. 45 Woolf, Orlando, op. cit., p. 207.

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In a brighter world, minds would open wide enough for reality and artistic creations to valorise women who woo and are knightly. Then our question ‘What can ail knightess-at-arms?’ could become, ‘Who doth hail thee knightess-at-arms, clad alike and beckoning?’

Bibliography ‘Abigail Mary Allen and James Allen, by Thomas Howell Jones, 1829 or after’, National Portrait Gallery, [website], ND, http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw202590/AbigailMary-Allen-James-Allen#subjects, (accessed 17 March 2015). Anderson, J., ‘Britomart’s Armor in Spenser’s Faerie Queene: Reopening Cultural matters of Gender and Figuration’, English Literary Renaissance, vol 39, issue 1, 2009, pp. 74-96. Anon, An Authentic Narrative of the Extraordinary Career of James Allen, the Female Husband, London, I.S. Thomas, 1829. Baker, S., ‘Henry Fielding’s the Female Husband : Fact and Fiction’, PMLA, vol. 74, no. 3, 1959, pp. 213-224. Bennett, B.T., Mary Diana Dods, A Gentleman and a Scholar, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Bourdieu, P., La domination masculine, Paris, Le Seuil, 1998. Boys Don’t Cry, dir. Kimberly Peirce, USA, Fox Searchlight, 1999, [videocassette]. ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, Fox Searchlight [website], ND http://www.foxsearchlight.com/post/2710/itunes-movie-of-the-week-boysdont-cry-starring-hilary-swank-1999/, (accessed 17th March 2015). ‘Britomart and Amoret, by Mary F. Raphael, 1897’, Wikigallery, [website], ND, http://www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_143635/Mary-FRaphael/Britomart-and-Amoret, (accessed 17 March 2015). Butler, J., Undoing Gender, New York and London, Routledge, 2004. Castle, T., ‘Matters Not Fit to Be Mentioned : Fielding’s The Female Husband’, English Literary History, vol. 49, no. 3, 1982, pp. 602-22. Clayton, E., Female Warriors: Memorials of Female Valour and Heroism, From the Mythological Ages to the Present Era, London, Tinsley Bros. 1879. ‘Crane, W., Britomart, 1900’, Wikigallery, [website], ND, http://www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_179395/WalterCrane/Britomart-1900 (accessed 17 March 2015). ‘Crane, W., La Belle Dame sans Merci, 1865’, Wikipedia, [website], ND, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Crane, (accessed 17 March 2015).

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Deleuze, G. and F. Guittari, trans. B. Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London and New York, Continuum, 2004. Dictionary.com, [website], http://dictionary.reference.com/misspelling?term=knightess&s=t, (accessed 17th March 2015). Fielding, H., The Female Husband or, the Surprising History of Mrs Mary, alias Mr. George Hamilton, who was Convicted of having Married a young Womman of Wells and Lived with her as her Husband. Taken from her own Mouth since her Confinement, London, M. Cooper, 1746. Fine Arts Museum, ‘Britomart by Fernand Knopff, 1892, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique’, [website], ND, http://www.fine-artsmuseum.be/fr/la-collection/fernand-khnopff-britomart-the-faeriequeen?artist=khnopff-fernand-2, (accessed 17 March 2015). Flying with One Wing, dir. Asoka Handagama, Sri Lanka, Be-Positive Media Group / Sanhinda Films / Heliotrope Films, 2002, [videocassette]. Gautier, T., Mademoiselle de Maupin, France, Editions Famot, 1980. Halberstam, J., Female Masculinity, Durham, Duke University Press, 1998. —. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York, New York University Press, 2005. Heliotrope, ‘Flying with One Wing, dir. Asoka Handagama. Sri Lanka, France, 2002’, [website], ND, http://www.heliotropefilms.com/fr/films-de-fiction/flying-with-one-wing , (accessed 17 March 2015). ‘Hilda Dallas, The Suffragette, c. 1914’, Victoria and Albert Museum, [website], http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O685356/the-suffragette-1dweekly-poster-dallas-hilda/, (accessed 17 March 2015). ‘John Keats, La Belle Dame sans Merci. A Ballad, 1819’, Bartleby.com, [website], ND, http://www.bartleby.com/126/55.html, (accessed 18 February 2016). Jones, A., All She Wanted, New York, Pocket Books, 1996. Kay, J., Trumpet, London, Picador, 1998. Leech, G. N., A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, London, Longman, 1969. MacLeod, M., Stories from the Faerie Queene, London, Gardner, Darton & Co, 1897 —. Stories from the Faerie Queene, New York, Frederick Stokes, 1905 https://archive.org/details/storiesfromfaeri00spen, (accessed 17 March 2015)

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Merriam-Webster, [website], http://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/wooer, (accessed 17 March 2015). Oxford Dictionaries.com, [website], ND http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/knight, (accessed 17 March 2015). Spencer, M., ‘Britomart and Amoret: Reading Escape in Spenser’s Mysticism’, in Howard-Hill, T.H., Renaissance Papers 1999, New York, Camden House, 1999. Spenser, E. The Faerie Queene, London, William Ponsonby, 1590. ‘Suffrage Stories/Women Artists: Caroline Watts and the Bugler Girl’, Woman and Her Sphere, [website], ND. http://womanandhersphere.com/2014/12/03/suffrage-storieswomen-artistscaroline-watts-and-the-bugler-girl/, (accessed 18 February 2016). Tuckner, L., The Spectacle of Women, Images of the Suffrage Campaign 1907-14, London, Chatto and Windus, 1987. University of Adelaide, [website], ND, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fielding/henry/female-husband/, (accessed 17 March 2015). Wise, T. (ed.), Spenser’s Faerie Queene, A Poem in Six Books, London, George Allen, 1895. Woolf, V., ‘The Faery Queen’ in Collected Essays, vol. 1, London, The Hogarth Press, 1968. —. Orlando, London, The Hogarth Press, 1928.

6. THE RAINBOW TRIBE: SETS AND SPECTACLES, A PERFORMANCE PROPOSAL JADE MONTSERRAT

Watching does not substitute for but enables doing.1

This text is framed as a proposal. It can be read as a proposal for solo performance, enacted by me, and also a call out, for wider participation. It can stand as a proposal for a shifting theatre set on a global stage, or as a proposal for textual expansion, taking the rainbow as a universal symbol of hope, acceptance and freedom and combining these elements to create what I like to call ‘affectionate movement’. The proposal format emphasises two themes that define my practice; those of value and those of worth. The very nature of creative exposure, making ourselves open and positioning our vulnerability publicly, puts an emphasis on our sense of value and worth. Creative subjects are marginialised within the UK curriculum.2 There are cuts to public funding of the arts. Cultural capital, however, is unequivocal. Experimentation that derives from The Rainbow Tribe project probes exchange values and ethical worth. The Rainbow Tribe project researches civil and human rights set amidst a

1

R. Martin, ‘Mobilizing Dance Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative’ in G. Siegmund and S. Hölscher (eds.), Dance, Politics and Co-Immunity: Current Perspectives on Politics and Communities in the Arts, vol. 1, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013, p. 222. 2 M. Brown, ‘Arts and Culture Being “Systematically Removed From UK Education System”’, Guardian, 17 February 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/feb/17/arts-and-culturesystematically-removed-from-uk-education-system, (accessed 18 February 2016).

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backdrop of manufactured or mass identity masked under broad, hierarchical surveillance systems. When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production.3

Proposal: Introduction In order to become not just a political subject, via the suffrage with political rights, but a Subject, the at least partial author of oneself, through the creation of both a personage and an aesthetic practice that can affirm and enunciate each woman’s singularity, women needed a means to articulate a history of the body – the body as a space of phantasy, of pleasure, of anguish, the locus of loss, of memory and objectless desire.4 Write your self. Your body must be heard.5

The Rainbow Tribe is a set, a scene, located in a bordered space. The Rainbow Tribe frees from the enclosure, impervious to damage. The Rainbow Tribe is an appropriated title, originally the name bestowed by Josephine Baker on her assemblage of children, her showcase familycum-social experiment, who were adopted between 1954 and 1965 from the four corners of the world: Korea, Japan, Finland, Columbia, France, Venenzuela and the Ivory Coast. ‘There were ten boys and two girls’. Josephine reasoned, ‘It’s so much more important for men to get along than women.’6

3

M. Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, 2nd edition, Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2001, p. 174. 4 L. Haney, Naked at The Feast: A Biography of Josephine Baker, London, Robson Books, 1995, p. 81. 5 J. Beuys and H. Boll, ‘Manifesto on the Foundation of a “Free School for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research” (1973)’ in C. Kuoni, (ed.), Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America, New York, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993, p. 150.

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The Rainbow Tribe offers a re-imagining of a real life fiction projected on and from the career and life of Josephine Baker, born St. Louis in 1906. This re-imagining mirrors Josephine Baker’s talent for portraying her life as a fairytale. Baker’s enigmatic presentation also included misleading accounts of her patrilineage and religious affiliation. These emotional and spiritual struggles, with which I empathise, are interesting to think about in comparison with current media trends where our lives appear to mirror marketing affectations. The Rainbow Tribe, Chorus Line responds to public and private interfaces, to dual realities, and relies on movement. The movements are revealed through individual readings and annotations of this text: interpretation, consultation, improvisation, negotiation and collective realisation. A film of each rehearsal that publicly interprets this text will be made as documentary evidence for The Rainbow Tribe's archive and will be used as a supplementary document to this text in preparation for future performances of The Rainbow Tribe Chorus Line. Each performance is not an isolated spectacle but acts in communion over time, contributing to the ‘evolution of imperial history.’7

Position: Shadowing Josephine Shadowing Josephine is a surefooted but lightly choreographed work set to Cab Calloway’s popular Cotton Club track Pickin’ up the Cabbage. Shadowing Josephine recognises the indebtedness owed to Josephine Baker, the first widely celebrated, independent black celebrity who emerged from colonial and segregation contexts. Shadowing Josephine is positioned within the context of The Art Party Conference, where it premiered. My performance of Shadowing Josephine thoroughly encapsulates my initial steps: it is tentative, nervous, naïve, bashful and celebratory. Josephine’s humour, articulated through her sinuous body; lithe and comely one minute, flailing legs and arms set akimbo the next, serves to remind us of our fallibility and egotism. It would be wonderful to work more towards emulating and celebrating that enchanting position, the core of Josephine Baker’s repertoire. 6

P. Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s, Thames and Hudson, London, 2000, p. 179. 7 A.A. Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface, New York, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 199, note 21.

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The Art Party Conference, held at Scarborough Spa on the 23rd November 2013, was an event that hoped to influence policy makers to listen and think again.8 The Art Party Conference was not aligned to any political party but an opportunity to celebrate art and artists and act as a forum for debating the future of the arts in today’s climate of spending cuts and changes to the education system. Despite artist Bob and Roberta Smith’s efforts, whose artwork The Art Party is, arts education remains a contested subject. Today the arts' cultural significance and economic contribution is undermined. The creativity of the democratic is increasingly discouraged by the progress of bureaucracy, coupled with the aggressive proliferation of an international mass culture. Political creativity is being reduced to the mere delegation of decision and power. The imposition of an international cultural and economic dictatorship by the constantly expanding combines leads to a loss of articulation, learning and the quality of verbal expression.9

The choreography of Shadowing Josephine came about after I sought directional assistance from Barbara Benson Smith MBE, my dance teacher from around the age of three or four years old. The Benson Stage Academy in Scarborough is the centre for the work Miss Barbara undertakes within the local community as well as for the NSPCC. One of Miss Barbara’s protégées, Caron also helped work on the choreography. Shadowing Josephine measures physicality as a visual language. How do we read bodies and how is this body to be read? Performing the body, initiated through Shadowing Josephine is a language, a tool to articulate a series of ideas: how outrage and prejudices can be performed; perceptions of the savage and barbaric heathens; tribal nuances and thinking about the Paris of the 1920s as a site of inequality: the spate of negrophilia there; how a change of circumstances for women was reinforced by the war; cultural diversity and tolerance; exoticism and anti-colonial, therefore, transgressive behaviours. Today it is unlikely that a nude dancer would be a feminist idol, but in Paris in the 1920s her name meant freedom. French women were in revolt. During the war many of them had taken men’s jobs in industry or had

8

‘The Art Party Conference’, Crescent Arts, [website], ND, http://www.crescentarts.co.uk/project/the-art-party-conference-2013/, (accessed 18 February 2016). 9 Beuys and Boll, op. cit.

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6. The Rainbow Tribe: Sets and Spectacles, A Performance Proposal managed offices or farms. They had grown accustomed to a measure of freedom and wanted to keep it. Yet, because they were still denied the right to vote, the right to enter the professions or politics, to open a bank account or to buy contraception, real freedom was still out of reach. So, pitched against staggering odds, la femme française fell back on her sexuality, using it as her prime weapon in her battle for liberté and égalite, to say nothing of her fraternité.10

Bean, Director of ]performance s p a c e[ invited me to perform Shadowing Josephine in the space at Enclave, Deptford, as a durational work at one of their SOS events.11 At the time, my intention was that I would perform it as a 3-minute routine. Noting the relationship between space and content, Bean described the space at Enclave as similar to a shop window and suggested it would benefit from the associated marketplace context. For this reason Bean also suggested extending the performance through repeating the routine to the point of exhaustion. What was initially offered as a single slot at one of ]performance s p a c e [ SOS events became a paid residency over the course of two months, between October and December 2014. Blacks and whites shared the same dance-floor, but little else. Images of blacks and whites together in that era show them dancing, dancing and only dancing.12

Interrogations & Interrelations: Iterations of the Rainbow Tribe was held between 10 am on 24th October 2014 and 10am on 27th October 2014. Shadowing Josephine was performed at a scheduled time each day. The night time offered the opportunity to expand thinking about the performance and the context in which I was performing it. This was the first time I began to perform as totem: painting onto my skin with out-ofdate make up; covering my body with graphite, dancing as a pencil. I performed Shadowing Josephine with such urgency and exactitude as to unintentionally but violently carve into my body from debris on the floor and bruise and tear my flesh as a result of the concrete flooring. This first Occupation invited the audience to participate in the process through active exchange. I put out a request via social media for items to sustain us. The aim was that together we might develop the work through a shared dialogue of documentation, verbal and visual exchange. 10

Haney, loc. cit., p. 81. ]ps[, [website], ND, http://www.performancespace.org/, (accessed 18 February 2016). 12 Archer-Straw, loc. cit., p. 179. 11

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Set: Josephine Baker was a mistress of transformation; she was impulsive and decisive, innocent and naïve. With delight, courage and conviction, Josephine Baker had the determination to shoulder longevity, and was equipped with an unapologetic quest for equality on her own terms. She proudly marched with the French emblems of liberty, equality and fraternity positioning herself squarely, although at times marked down by her gender as, at the very least, supporting cast to the Civil Rights movement and a vital component within the machinations of the French Resistance. How are we to read the moment of Josephine Baker’s emergence as an internationally acclaimed musical star in 1925 within the context of the peculiarly painful convergence of the colonialist and a masculine eroticizing gaze at the spectacularised black female body?13

How are the boundaries being blurred between the exhibited female body and the spectator within a simulated culture and is there a distinguishable common aim? Hold still, we’re going to do your portrait, so that you can begin looking like it right away.14

Are societal and cultural mores perpetuating or determining racial and gender stereotyping? Cast: In one another we will never be lacking.15

I have a personal interest in Josephine Baker as a dislocated self-styled woman longing to make sense of and subvert the constructs under which she was born. Josephine Baker created a new way of operating in space. Time notwithstanding, her obstacles remain our obstacles. In beginning to understand the context of her triumphs, the reader and I, become supporting cast in The Rainbow Tribe. 13 G. Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archives, London and New York, Routledge, 2007, p. 129. 14 H. Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. K. Cohen and P. Cohen, Signs, vol. 1, no. 4. (Summer 1976), p. 892. 15 ibid., p. 893.

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The Rainbow Tribe challenges perceptions of mass identity exemplified by a celebrity culture nurtured by a capitalistic system ingrained, in part, by the bombardment of imagery choreographed by paternalistic economies. Gender and race need not be sensationalised anymore, but our bodies must be celebrated and honoured. The Rainbow Tribe was born out of a visit to New York in 2006. There I visited The Studio Museum, Harlem and bought a collection of essays called ‘Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance’ by Richard J. Powell and David A. Bailey.16 At around this time, I happened to watch The Josephine Baker Story directed by Brian Gibson (1991). I was enthralled at a very basic level by Josephine Baker’s spirit as a freedom fighter, her humility and her fairytale aspirations. I tattooed the back of my neck with a rainbow a couple of years later. This acts to remind me of her powerful story. This permanent rainbow on my skin is also emblematic of a barcode, a brand.

Position: Communion Abjection traces the silhouette of society on the unsteady edges of the self; it simultaneously imperils social order with the force of delirium and disintegration.17

Communion is performed, by me, as an excerpt, as is Shadowing Josephine. Both of these performances shoulder and ritualise colonialist value systems. Communion requires a central platform, covered with cloth, on which I can lie. A person, dressed in a white, hooded, disposable, decorator’s boiler suit, irons my hair, which goes from a full afro to flat (ish): the wiry texture, drier, atonal, crisp, evidence that it has withstood pressure. I ritualistically brush my hair out at the beginning of the performance. I have performed it both clothed and unclothed; the latter having significant impact in its depiction of vulnerability. The performance resonates with the sacrificial: it comments as a rite of passage in the respect of straightening hair. It is performed as a vignette. 16

R.J. Powell and D.A. Bailey, Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, London, South Bank Centre, 1997. 17 A. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, London and New York, Routledge, 1995, p. 71.

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The only slight movements visible are the ironing and the rise and fall of my breath. Communion, at its core, speaks of imposed vanity; the ritual of ‘preening’ and ‘fixing’ hair. Looking from a much broader framework, however, the performance questions silent gestures: of organised religion; the ironing out or smoothing over of cultural difference and activities performed privately for the benefit of visibly conforming to a misplaced Western construct. Experience. The scene, one is invited to conclude, is a space of freedom from convention and a space one can take a distance from in order to put oneself outside the realm of rules and determinations rather than overwhelmed, swept over, incapacitated or drowned.18

The two durational performances at ]performance s p a c e [ (Interrogations & Interrelations: Iterations of the Rainbow Tribe and Sets and Spectacles) saw spectacle interrupted by live scheduled performances. The first Occupation of the space revealed the discordant and emotional upheaval that comes from inviting audience into the space of performance. Expectation was tacitly alert in both parties especially after I had exhausted myself through the demands of finishing a two hour-long performance of Shadowing Josephine. When I came to de-robe and wash myself among the audience, there was an immediate desire for reflective exchange by the audience but my replies were enfeebled. The second Occupation, a month or so later, was of a longer duration and during the run-up I was sensitive to this previous disturbance. ]performance s p a c e [ and I installed a curtain and mirror (the mirror was taken out of the mock Baroque gilded frame and hung opposite on the wall behind me) creating a container that served to separate viewer from the live art making cubicle. The viewer could look through the framed hole in the curtain, from a sort of antechamber space, to see themselves reflected in the mirror placed behind me and subsequently be instrumental to and complicit in the scene.

18

Z. Bauman, ‘Scene and Obscene: Another Hotly Contested Opposition’, Third Text 51, Summer 2000, p. 6.

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6. The Rainbow Tribe: Sets and Spectacles, A Performance Proposal Justice grows out of recognition of ourselves and each other.19

Figure 9. Documentary photograph taken by Alethea Raban at ]performance s p a c e[, London, during Sets and Spectacles, performed by Jade Montserrat, 2014. Reproduced by kind permission of Alethea Raban and Jade Montserrat. Between Iterations of the Rainbow Tribe and Sets and Spectacles, I also began the Conway Cohort residency, mentored by Dr Luke Dixon and Jane Turner at Conway Hall. The idea to choreograph the concept of communion and exchange reflects, through dialogue and movement, ideas relating to the overall project in terms of freedom, justice, ethics and civil rights. The as yet still unresolved Rainbow Tribe, Chorus Line saw its serendipitous inception at Conway Hall, home to The Ethical Society and The Ethical Society’s collection, which is the largest and most 19 The White House President Barack Obama, ‘Remarks by the President in Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney – 26 June 2015’, (website), ND, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/06/26/remarkspresident-eulogy-honorable-reverend-clementa-pinckney, (accessed 18 February 2016).

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comprehensive Humanist Research resource of its kind in the United Kingdom. This residency allowed me to interpret, in collaboration with professional dancers, images stemming from The Rainbow Tribe research. I took a selection of these images out of context and offered them to pairs of dancers to ‘workshop’. In response we collectively created a series of movements that shaped the performance. In the first instance we performed to the music Missa Luba: Sanctus performed by Les Troubadours du Roi Baudoin. This performance revealed a bewildering, disquieting and disturbing exchange that appeared at times both dislocated and humorous. Materials. The Rainbow Tribe is a series of positions that are unaccountable and subject to change. Always already a cultural sign, the body sets limits to the imaginary meanings that it occasions, but is never free of an imaginary construction. The fantasized body can never be understood in relation to the body as real; it can only be understood in relation to another culturally instituted fantasy, one which claims the place of the ‘literal’ and the ‘real.’20

During the first occupation at ]performance s p a c e [ and ripe for interpretation by The Rainbow Tribe Chorus Line, I began a body of watercolours. These watercolours question the gaze as an autonomous gesture with which I too am complicit. They are an attempt to anticipate my agency as spectacle and investigate the tension between power, freedom and control. As with dance, a medium that strengthens The Rainbow Tribe, watercolour is built on the promise of fluid experimentation; both are multi-layered, each layer acting to create a more powerful and emotive impression. Returning to the continued research into the life and career of Josephine Baker the practice based residencies at ]performance s p a c e [ and Conway Hall allowed me to question how she, and subsequently I as her shadow, enable/d control of body and persona. In retrospect the movements I made during performances at ]performance s p a c e [ were hesitant copies of a dance, the replicated movements of memory. This understanding is notionally magnified by the very public presentation of the performances. 20

J. Butler, Gender Trouble, New York and London, Routledge, 1990, p. 71.

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The second Occupation had a presence online, staged through Ustream, which was more acute and actively organised than the first. The Ustream films present evidence, demanding further investigation of the gaze and control of presentation. Do social media platforms popularise the polarisation between empowerment and objectification of women and how do these platforms support, celebrate or denigrate? The Ustream films instigate further inquiry into Josephine Baker’s position as a celebrity, a commodity for public consumption, and particularly for the male eroticised gaze: In the painter’s studio, under the compelling gaze of the masculine artist whose erotic scrutiny of the living woman he asked to unrobe before his hungry eyes has been the object of feminist interrogation, Josephine Baker experienced, by her own account, a coming into her own sexuality through the gaze of this other, this white man, this European artist.21

Budget. Ensuring that people can have livable lives is a political matter.22

The Rainbow Tribe is inexhaustible and liable to colourful ferocity: its pacifist ethics discredit any superficial, inorganic, hierarchical stasis. It is important to imagine a world in which binary conceptions of gender no longer govern modes of segregation or association, and one in which violence is eliminated from state practices as well as from our intimate lives, in hetrosexual and same-sex relationships alike. And, of course, it is important to imagine a world without war.23

The Rainbow Tribe belies recognised currencies and is working alongside a cultural economy that champions a near future where identities are brazen, naked and understood as a glorious gift, and where equality shares the same pedestal as tolerance and acceptance. Ours is an increasingly embattled society; a society in which violence, accusations of violent intentions and expectations of violent acts turn into major vehicles of individual and group self-assertion - from the top to the

21

Pollock, op. cit., p. 128. Speaking of the artist Paul Colin. R. Burt, ‘The Bio-Politics of Modernist Dance and Suffragette Protest’, in Siegmund and Hölscher, op. cit., p. 253. 23 A.Y. Davis, The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues, San Francisco, City Lights Books, 2012, p. 133. 22

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bottom of the social system, whether at the global, local or domestic level.24

Forecast. Audiences, who found themselves at either ]performance s p a c e [ during the Occupation or at Conway Hall for one of the public sharing events, were exclusively from art, performance or dance backgrounds. Outside of these spaces, in virtual reality, audience interpretation is veiled and unknown. The live art-making recorded by my phone and transmitted through Ustream was conscious of these anonymous eyes but not anticipatory. Valuing the ways in which we are linked together without being one, that we share certain sensibilities of moving together without needing to model or imitate someone opens up conceptions of sovereignty self-production that just might serve as a momentary realisation of the future in the present.25

My body, our bodies, throughout our lifetimes require negotiations and renegotiations in space and will constantly act as catalysts for exploration: […] the metaphor of the textualized body has been used to situate the body as a page or material surface, possibly even a book of interfolded leaves […] ready to receive, bear, and transmit meanings, messages of signs, much like a system of writing.26

Perhaps Josephine Baker unexpectedly found the colonialist fantasies less damaging, more easily turned back on themselves, more amenable to being used as a springboard for her finding of her own verb; a verb in which she could speak her own singularity and experience that gowth that comes from trying different things and having the space and freedom to decide who to become through work, through art, through love, through politics in which being black was found beautiful, interesting, in ways that did not compromise her fundamental humanity as a person. The Rainbow Tribe shuns spectacle as a vehicle for visibility or voice, favouring the transparent reciprocity of affectionate movement. The 24

Bauman, op. cit., p. 11. Martin, op. cit., p. 225. 26 E.A. Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Australia, Allen and Unwin, 1994, p. 117. 25

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economic and social structure we operate within provides the platform for future performance, destined as a constant negotiation between past and present histories. This document relies on ethical understandings and shares the responsibility of an open and fluid structure, which is balanced and arrested before violent, homogenous, repetition. The barriers encountered en route are flexible and may be used as useful opportunities from which to grow and develop. The Rainbow Tribe performance proposal utilises these accidental moments to elevate, to see, and be seen by the surroundings.

Bibliography Archer-Straw, P., Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s, Thames and Hudson, London, 2000. Bauman, Z., ‘Scene and Obscene: Another Hotly Contested Opposition’, Third Text 51, Summer 2000, pp. 5-15. Beuys, J., and H. Boll, ‘Manifesto on the Foundation of a “Free School for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research” (1973)’ in C. Kuoni, (ed.), Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America, New York, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993. Brown, M., ‘Arts and Culture Being “Systematically Removed From UK Education System”’, Guardian, 17 February 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/feb/17/arts-and-culturesystematically-removed-from-uk-education-system, (accessed 18 February 2016). Burt, R., ‘The Bio-Politics of Modernist Dance and Suffragette Protest’, in Siegmund, G., and S. Hölscher (eds.), Dance, Politics and CoImmunity: Current Perspectives on Politics and Communities in the Arts, vol. 1, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013, pp. 247-258. Butler, J., Gender Trouble, New York and London, Routledge, 1990. Cheng, A.A., Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface, New York, Oxford University Press, 2011. Cixous, H., ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. K. Cohen and P. Cohen, Signs, vol. 1, no. 4. (Summer 1976), pp. 875-893. Davis, A.Y., The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues, San Francisco, City Lights Books, 2012. Haney, L., Naked at The Feast: A Biography of Josephine Baker, London, Robson Books, 1995. Martin, R., ‘Mobilizing Dance Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative’ in G. Siegmund and S. Hölscher (eds.), Dance, Politics and Co-

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Immunity: Current Perspectives on Politics and Communities in the Arts, vol. 1, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013, pp. 209-225. McClintock, A., Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, London and New York, Routledge, 1995. Pollock, G., Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archives, London and New York, Routledge, 2007. Poster, M. (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, 2nd edition, Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2001. Powell, R.J., and D.A. Bailey, Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, London, South Bank Centre, 1997. ‘The Art Party Conference’, Crescent Arts, [website], ND, http://www.crescentarts.co.uk/project/the-art-party-conference-2013/, (accessed 18 February 2016). The White House President Barack Obama, ‘Remarks by the President in Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney - 26 June 2015’, (website), ND, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/ 2015/06/26/remarks-president-eulogy-honorable-reverend-clementapinckney, (accessed 18 February 2016).

7. TRANS*TASTIC MORPHOLOGIES: LIFE-MODELLING THEATRE AND THE LADY OF SHALOTT DR NINA KANE

The act of creation or giving form to chaos, implies having power of choice. Choice is a positive limitation that ultimately gives birth to form, and we cannot find our own path in life without freedom to choose. Viewed in this light, art studios are significant because they are privileged places for decision-making and shelters in which hope is born.1

This chapter discusses gallery education studio activities where the central feminist impetus is to empower participants to consider and make choices in relation to questions of gender, embodiment and agency in arts-making. The work discussed here centres on my practice of ‘life-modelling theatre’ – a practice that investigates life-drawing conventions through drama, and in which I use my anatomically-female body as a site of feminist and queer intervention in both the reading and production of art images.2 The process interrogates and challenges oppressions of the body through model-led life-drawing, and uses gallery collections, exhibitions and spaces as a starting point. Workshops embed an intersectional consciousness, and draw attention to what Patricia Hill Collins describes as ‘the Matrix of Domination’; focusing on where and how this occurs within arts production

1

A.A. Albano, ‘Sementinha: School Under the Mango Tree’ in T. Eça and R. Mason (eds.), International Dialogues about Visual Culture, Education and Art, Bristol, UK and Chicago, USA, Intellect, 2008, pp. 161-169. 2 I have developed this practice since 2002. See under ‘Repertoire’ and ‘Community and Education’ in Cast-Off Drama, [web blog], ND, https://www.castoffdrama.blogspot.com, (accessed 18 February 2016).

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processes, and in galleries and art collections.3 In my work at Leeds Art Gallery, UK, the myth of the Lady of Shalott has played an important role in these explorations.4 The Lady of Shalott is a poem by the British poet Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892).5 For much of the C19th and C20th, it was a central text taught in schools throughout Britain and Ireland; its key protagonists, the Lady and Sir Lancelot, Knight of the Round Table, forming the subject of innumerable paintings, novels, photographic artworks and scholarly treatises. First written in 1832, then reworked and republished ten years’ later, it tells a fantastical tale based on a miscellany of European texts pertaining to the Arthurian legends, principally the story of Lancelot and Elaine, the Maid of Astolat.6 The 1842 version of the poem has become the definitive version referenced. The Lady of Shalott is also the title of two separate artworks by painter John William Waterhouse (1849-1917) produced in 1888 (Tate Britain) and 1894 (Leeds Museums and Galleries), and is the central subject of a third entitled I am Half-Sick of Shadows (Art Gallery of Ontario) made in 1915. Waterhouse’s 1894 painting The Lady of Shalott is one of the oldest works in the Leeds Art Gallery collections, having been presented by the artist himself shortly after completion.7 When I started my work there in 2002, it was displayed on the back wall of the Arnold and Marjorie Ziff Gallery.

3

P. Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, Boston, Unwin Hyman, 1990, pp. 221-238. 4 Leeds City Council, ‘Leeds Art Gallery’, [website], 2013, http://www.leeds.gov.uk/museumsandgalleries/Pages/Leeds-Art-Gallery.aspx, (accessed 18 February 2016). I offer a warm thanks to Leeds Art Gallery’s Learning & Access Officer Amanda Phillips for her continued and invaluable support of this work. 5 A. Tennyson, ‘The Lady of Shalott’, in The Complete Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, London, MacMillan and Co., 1909, pp. 28-30. The text reproduced here is the 1842 version. 6 For an excellent overview of the history and evolution of the myth, see K. Dillon, “Who is this? And what is here?” The Evolution of Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott and Her Presence in the Artistic Imagination, Independent Study, 2002, http://vault.hanover.edu/~battles/arthur/shalott.htm, (accessed 18 February 2016). 7 John William Waterhouse, Artist File, Archives, Leeds Art Gallery.

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Figure 10. ‘Keeper at the Gate’ from Foil and Feathers, Cast-Off Drama, 2008. With thanks to Leeds Art Gallery. By a strange quirk, or perhaps design, of perspective it was framed perfectly by both the internal doorways marking the entrance to that space and by the external glass doors opening on to the street. This curious and spider-like curatorial placing both welcomed and challenged the visitor at first encounter. On entry, the Lady fixed one in her gaze from the furthest point of the interior, traversing the full distance of the lower ground floor, and asserting a quiet but insistent imperative for the visitor to approach. On walking towards her, her figure grew steadily in size. The play of

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perspective essentially framed the visitor within the architecture of the space, urging him or her along a trajectory of invisible sightlines. Once standing face-to-face with her you had already become part of the frame; part of her ‘narrative’ or domain. It felt as though she were the gate-keeper to the space. No-one entering or exiting the building could escape her gaze; she demanded attention, journeying, recognition and return. The strength of this curatorial placing underscored the painting’s importance to the history of the establishment. Inhabiting place, space and time, the Lady embodied a chronology – and more intriguingly, in the power of her positioning, a potential ‘crone-ology’ – marking the gallery as a place where female-centred and feminist work both belonged and was welcome.8 I recognised the Shalott as a crone-text and one that I needed to engage with.9

On Life-Modelling Theatre and Female Morphology10 Early explorations in life-modelling theatre centred around the delivery of a community education course for the Leeds College of Art (The Art of the Life-Model), and study days and performances created by Cast-Off Drama in partnership with Leeds Art Gallery Education.11 These projects explored

8

‘Crone-ology: Radical Feminist chronology; an oral or written expression of Crone-logically understood connections between and among events normally erased in patriarchal chronologies/histories.’ M. Daly, in cahoots with J. Caputi, Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language, London, The Women’s Press, 1988, p. 116. 9 I will abbreviate the title Shalott for ease of reference. Where italicised it will relate to a definable text, for example, a poem or artwork; where not italicised it will indicate the wider Shalott mythology or general cultural reference. 10 For an excellent analysis of Luce Irigaray’s ideas on ‘morphology’ in relation to art production see H. Robinson, Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women, London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2006. 11 The Art of the Life-Model ran as a partnership between the Leeds College of Art and Leeds Art Gallery Education from 2002-2008. I offer huge thanks to Garry Barker and Marianne Sprigham (Adult & Community Education, Leeds College of Art), Amanda Phillips and Corinne Miller (Leeds Art Gallery) for their support in developing the course at this time. See N. Kane, ‘Embodying the Other: Pedagogic and Performative Strategies Used in The Art of the Life-Model 2002-2007’, Research Series Commission, Leeds College of Art, 2007. Copies of this are held at Leeds College of Art libraries and at Leeds Art Gallery Education. Also, Academia. Edu, Nina Kane, [website], ND,

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the figure, histories and working practices of the female life-model, and drew strength and inspiration from an inheritance of feminist, performance and body art in preceding decades that: […] selected the body, one’s own body, as an artistic material [… making] flesh, skin, one’s own senses the tools of communication, the substitution of the body itself for written pages and lectures […]. Thus existence becomes a form of expression […] that is inscribed in the body, through the cruel and necessary signs that transform it into a manifesto in which the obligatory and catatonic docility to which the body has been abandoned is opposed by the evidence of a body exhibited to society, witting and scandalous, against a body that is captive and resigned to muteness.12

I called an aspect of the working practice ‘stepping into the picture’.13 This involved reconstructing the pose from a selected figurative work for lifedrawing, having investigated it through drama and art-historical discussion with workshop participants first.14 The process raised questions about the conditions of the artwork’s production, its representational economies, and where the loci of its powers and oppressions lay.15 It essentially tapped the artwork’s ‘aura’ through a combination of scholarly research, intuitive probing and performative play.16 In presenting my anatomically female body as a means by which figurative images in the collections could be https://www.academia.edu/4809092/Embodying_the_Other_Pedagogic_and_Perfo rmative_Strategies_Used_in_The_Art_of_the_Life-Model_Course_2002-2007, (accessed 18 February 2016). 12 F.A. Miglietti, Extreme Bodies: The Use and Abuse of the Body in Art, Milan, Skira Editore S.p.A, 2003, p. 20. 13 Kane, ‘Embodying the Other’, op. cit., pp. 30-32. 14 Many of the insights and gender observations in this account emerged from the input of community participants, and I thank everyone who has attended my gallery workshops and performances from 2002 onwards and contributed so generously to the discussions. 15 Key theoretical texts informing the approach and available for reference in workshops were M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, Oxford, London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1974; G. Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories, London and New York, Routledge, 1999; and A. Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors, trans. A. Jackson, London and New York, Routledge, 1992. 16 Marxist Literary Criticism, ‘Walter Benjamin (1936): The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, [website], ND, https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm, (accessed 18 February 2016).

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Figure 11. The Lady of Shalott, 1894 (oil on canvas), John William Waterhouse (1849-1917), Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery) UK/Bridgeman Images, LMG100082.

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Figure 12. Workshop on The Lady of Shalott, Nina Kane (modeltutor), The Art of the Life-Model, Education Studio, Leeds Art Gallery, 2002. With thanks to Leeds Art Gallery Education, the Leeds College of Art and community education participants.

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deconstructed and remade, I consciously employed a feminist strategic essentialism that made a tool of my nakedness. Whilst accenting the biological body as a central point of reference, I was mindful of a wider female ‘morphology’ implied by it in Irigarayan terms, that named: […] the site of a discursive and dynamic relationship between a subject’s empirical living in the body and in the Symbolic; a relationship that does not go in one direction, but where the subject understands the body is significant in determining an appropriate syntax in the Symbolic; and where in turn the subject understands – or reads – the body through that syntax.17

At one level the nakedness worked to undress the pictorial image and the (frequently inhibiting and sexist) narrative of its composition through recognising and revealing its processes of construction and artifice. At another level, it served to reinforce a female agency and feminine subjectivity to the life-drawing process through my speaking, gesticulating, creative contribution to the exchange. I wrote on this practice in 2007: By ‘embodying’ the position of the model, I created a critical distance for myself negotiated by theatre. Using my body as a laboratory allowed me to register the immediate effects of the interventions through emotion, instinct and physical response, and articulate these, through dialogue with the students.18

Employing this method with the Tennyson/Waterhouse texts proved particularly fruitful in generating gender-based discussion; so much so that the 1894 Shalott became a central artwork in Cast-Off Drama’s developing ‘life-model canon’.19 The plethora of feminist and queer readings emerging from these workshops resulted in part from the mutability that sits at the heart of life-modelling and life-drawing processes – something that was given sharp accent and made manifest through performance and through my embodiment of the conventionally discrete roles of life-model and tutor/facilitator. It also resulted from a mutability and a resistance to singular interpretation at the heart of the Shalott texts themselves.

17

Robinson, op. cit., p. 98. Kane, ‘Embodying the Other’, op. cit., p. 23. 19 Cast-Off Drama, ‘Community and Education’, op. cit.; Pollock, Differencing the Canon, op. cit. 18

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Towards a Trans* Morphology of Body Art The implications of this critical distancing and strategic use of my female anatomy for feminist intervention and ‘witting and scandalous’ exhibition, gained greater import as I developed the work with the body and increasingly recognised (and acknowledged) myself to be Trans* male in my gender identity. As someone who has chosen not to undergo any medical intervention or transition physically, my gender conundrum is how best to exist and identify as male – essentially to ‘live as a man’ – with an anatomy that remains to all visible outward intents and purposes, female? A further conundrum for me is how best to translate the inherent paradoxes and puzzles of my bodily ontology into theatre/performance work in ways that expand the work’s dramaturgical and ‘placental’ parameters, and progress its methodologies?20 Essentially, I am concerned with how best to continue to discover a performance language: […] which accompanies that bodily experience, clothing it in ways that do not erase the body but speak the body [?]21

Feminist understandings built from Irigaray’s ideas on morphology and ‘cultural breath’ have proved useful to this process, as has the recognition that my Trans* identity gives me an opportunity to explore what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick names as: […] the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning, when the constituent elements of anyone’s sexuality [my note: and gender identity] aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.22

From this I have begun to build what I am naming as a Trans* morphology of body art. Dwelling-time in the ‘privileged’ space of the art

20

These conundrums are being explored in my current and forthcoming Cast-Off Drama work. See updates to ‘PACE project 13: Skin’ and ‘PACE project 14: Dwelling. Place.’, Cast-Off Drama, op. cit. 21 L. Irigaray, ‘Body Against Body: In Relation to the Mother’ in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. G.C. Gill, Columbia, University of Columbia Press, 1993, p. 19. See also, L. Irigaray, ‘On the Maternal Order’ in Je, Tu, Nous, New York and London, Routledge Classics, 2007, pp. 31-38. 22 E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies, Duke University Press, Durham, USA, 1993, pp. 5-9. For more on ‘cultural breath’ see ‘The Way of Breath’ in L. Irigaray, Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, reprint, trans. S. Pluháþek, New Delhi, India, 2005, pp. 73-91.

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studio, and an openness to the chaos, ‘monsters’ and unknown shapes that will emerge from there, are essential to this process: Why has the art studio become so important for […] educators? To answer this, I will return to the […] image of Pandora’s Box. […] I associate her box with the art studio, a place in which imagination works chaotically and often and ideas and materials wait to take shape. Giving shape to the unknown is one of the chief functions of art. Uncontrolled imagination is frightening and, by analogy, this may explain why Pandora’s Box was locked – to contain the monsters within. But it is hope, lying dormant at the bottom of the box that enables imagination to create the new order that rewards curiosity.23

I will continue to share my explorations and discoveries with arts educators, community artists, members of the public, theorists, feminists and queers; and carry the figure of the Lady of Shalott with me as a ‘touchstone text’ for this journey. I propose that the Astolat/Shalott myth is a useful prism through which feminist and queer questions of the body can be raised, and expressions of transgender experience explored. For this I draw on my experience as a Trans*-identifying life-modelling performer who for 16 years has made workshop programmes and live art performances inspired by Tennyson’s poem and by site-specific engagement with Waterhouse’s 1894 oil painting The Lady of Shalott at Leeds Art Gallery.24 Through these activities I have passed performatively from one side of the gender binary (female) and identification with the Lady of the poem, to the other side (male) and identification with the Knight. This rhizomatic journey through gallery-based practice has encompassed signifiers and ‘gestic’ moments pertaining to female masculinity, transvestism, dragging, natural breath, cultural breath, female subjectivity, feminist, female and trans* morphologies, strategic essentialism, anatomical inscription and FtM Transgender ‘becoming’.25

Part 2: Texts – A Trajectory: The Astolat/Shalott Myth The Astolat/Shalott myth has a complex and fascinating genesis. It forms part of the wider Lancelot mythology, which scholars suggest was originally 23

Albano, loc. cit. Cast-Off Drama, op. cit. 25 For more on feminist uses of Bertolt Brecht’s theory of Gestus, see E. Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, London and New York, Routledge, 1997, p. 53. 24

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of female authorship, emerging from the court of Marie de Champagne where the cult of the romantic knight as a lover who is truer to a Lady than one’s husband, was popular.26 Marie was the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine. There is insufficient space in this chapter to explore how the cult of the courtly lover worked as a form of ‘gift-space/object’ between Eleanor and Marie and between women in their courts, but I note it here as a phenomenon of interest to Astolat/Shalott/Lancelot enquiry.27 Lancelot first appears in the Arthurian pantheon in the work of the C12th French writer Chrétien de Troyes. Marie was de Troyes’ patron, and scholars suggest that they dialogued intensively on scripting Arthurian Romances.28 The story of Elaine, Maid of Astolat (also called Elaine le Blank/le Blanc) appears later in the C13th French work Mort Artu (Death of Arthur). This formed part of the Vulgate Cycle; a collection of three works recounting Lancelot’s quest for the Grail. It also draws inspiration from the C13th Italian tale of La Donna Di Scalotta (The Lady of Scalotta).29 However, Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott and his later poem Lancelot and Elaine, drew directly from Sir Thomas Malory’s C15th retelling of the Lancelot stories in book 18 of Le Morte D’Arthur (1485).30 Malory’s interpretation 26

There was a parallel development in Germany of a Lancelot story, but the C19th Shalott texts are conventionally associated with French, English and Italian sources. 27 See Robinson, op. cit., pp. 83-88 for a useful analysis of Irigaray’s philosophy of the gift-space/object as pertains to the passing of art objects between women. Also of note to a discussion of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Marie de Champagne is the contemporaneous emergence of the ‘earliest known French poetess’ Marie de France, whose identity has been ascribed variously to a woman of these queens’ courts and also to Eleanor and Marie themselves. A. Ewert (ed.), Marie de France: Lais, Oxford, Basil Blackwood & Mott Ltd, 1960. 28 C. de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, trans. D.D.R. Owen, London and Vermont, Everyman, 1987; T. Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur, USA, W.W. Norton, 2004; T.S. Fenster (ed.), Arthurian Women, New York and London, Routledge, 2000. 29 L. Thorpe, The ‘Lancelot’ in the Arthurian Prose Vulgate, Illinois, Dept of English, Wheaton College, Illinois, 1980; D. Pearsall, Arthurian Romance: A Short Introduction, Malden, USA, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2003; A. Tennyson, ‘Idylls of the King: Lancelot and Elaine’ in R. Barber (ed.), The Arthurian Legends: An Illustrated Anthology, The Boydell Press, Suffolk, UK and Rochester, USA, 1979, pp. 169-184 and D. Brewer, ‘The Presentation of the Character of Lancelot: Chrétien to Malory’ in L.J. Walters (ed.), Lancelot and Guinevere: A Casebook, New York and London, Garland Publishing Inc., 1996. 30 Walters, ibid; A.D. Alexander, ‘The Three Elaines’ in Women of the Morte D’Arthur, London, Methuen, 1927; J. Gribble, The Lady of Shalott in the Victorian Novel, London and Basingstoke, Macmillan Press Ltd., 1983; C. Brewer and B.

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‘consists primarily of adventures that show Lancelot’s prowess’. He presents a more belligerent and irrational figure than previously illustrated; a character given as much to hot-headedness and to picking fights as to noble ardour, valour and passion for Queen Guinevere.31 Waterhouse took his inspiration from Tennyson.32 Encountering the Lady of Shalott in the C21st, therefore, we find ourselves in the presence of an 800-year old European cultural figure; a figure whose origins are centred both in a courtly ‘maternal-feminine’ and an Arthurian tradition of knight/maid romance; and one with essential elements of mutability, resistance and ‘shifting’ at its core.33

‘Shalott’ and its transmission, corps-à-corps avec la mère Le corps-à-corps avec la mère has no simple translation in English. The expression corps-à-corps […] usually denotes armed combat between two warriors – hand-to-hand fighting. However, it is the word corps (body) that is crucial to Irigaray, who is looking to some new relationship between mother and child that accepts the body of both parties and moves towards a new imaginary and a new symbolic.34

My earliest encounter with Tennyson’s Shalott (1842) came through my maternal grandmother who recalls learning to chant it aloud ‘by rote’ in unison with her classmates at a small Irish school in Charlestown, County Mayo; a school she would walk a mile to and from each day, frequently reciting poems to help the journey pass. Now aged 97, she remembers the rhythms and the cadences of the lines learnt, chanted and carried ‘by heart’ all those years ago, and told me recently that it is still her favourite poem. I myself know much of the 1842 poem ‘off by heart’, and snatches of it frequently surface in my mind unbidden when out walking. The poem somehow exists within me as it does within my grandmother. Artist Windeatt (eds.), Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Medieval English Literature: the Influence of Derek Brewer, Suffolk, UK and Rochester, USA, Boydell and Brewer, 2013. 31 E.D. Kennedy, ‘Malory’s “Noble Talk of Sir Launcelot du Lac”, the Vulgate Launcelot and the post-Vulgate Roman du Graal’ in T. Suzuki and T. Mukai (eds.), Arthurian and Other Studies Presented to Shunichi Noguchi, Cambridge, UK, D.S. Brewer, 1993, p. 120. 32 Waterhouse file, loc. cit. 33 L. Irigaray, ‘The Invisible of the Flesh’ in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. C. Burke and G.C. Gill, London, The Athlone Press, 1993, pp. 151 -184. 34 G.C. Gill’s translator’s note, Irigaray, ‘Body Against Body’, loc. cit., p. 9.

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Margaret Harrison, whose painting The Last Gaze (2013) took direct inspiration from Waterhouse’s 1894 work, similarly recalls a familiarity and fascination with Tennyson’s poem generated through the matrilineal voice.35 In conversation with Kim Munson, she testifies to an accumulative and regenerative dynamic around it: It’s a very popular poem and I think it’s still taught […]. As a child I was very familiar with it as my mother read it out loud. It still fascinates people, and it’s discussed over, and over, and over again.36

The presence of the maternal-feminine in the genesis and transmission of the Lancelot/Astolat/Shalott myth could account, in part, for the popularity of the Elaine/Shalott figure with female-identified painters and photographers at a time when First Wave Feminism was seeking to establish its Crone-ologies.37 Artists Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Eleanor Siddal, Sophie Anderson, Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, Emma Sandys, Lucy Maddox Brown, Marie Spartali (Stillman), Margaret MacDonald, Julia Margaret Cameron and Annie Swynnerton all produced works inspired by the Maid of Astolat.38 Such oral and painterly modes of female-to-female or female-to-child transmission constitute a philosophical corps-à-corps around the progression of the Shalott figure, accenting sites frequently

35 Margaret Harrison won the Northern Art Prize in 2013 with a submission comprising works inspired by the Lady of Shalott legend, American Marvel comics and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace camp as subject matter. BBC, BBC News, ‘Margaret Harrison Wins Northern Art Prize’, 24 May 2013, [website], ND, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22647661, (accessed 24 May 2013). 36 K. Munson, On Reflection: The Art of Margaret Harrison, Pacifica, California, Neurotic Raven 2015, p. 36. The poem is still recommended as a National Curriculum text for Literary Heritage English studies (Key Stages 2 and 3, years 714), though receives less emphasis in art teaching than it did formerly in British schools. It is referenced humorously in Fascinating Aida’s OFSTED song, Youtube, Fascinating Aida: very funny OFSTED song for teachers, [website], ND, https://youtu.be/d13gX-1HJg4, (accessed 11 December 2016). 37 Part of this included attempts to renew ‘the bonds of female ancestries’. L. Irigaray, Thinking the Difference for a Peaceful Revolution, trans. K. Montin, London, Athlone Press, 1994, p. 109. 38 W.S. Sparrow (ed.), Women Painters of the World from the Time of Caterina Vigri -1413-1463 - to Rosa Bonheur and the Present Day, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1905.

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(though not exclusively) equated with the maternal-feminine from the home to the schoolroom to the art studio and beyond.39 The close and tactile passing of ‘Shalott’ through female breath and mouth to ear, through female eye and hand to canvas or camera creates a ‘mucosity’ in which anatomically female or female/woman-identified performers can find space to play, speak, breathe, battle and make new languages. My morphologically-female production of naked performances and nude art images has drawn strength from such mucosity.40 In working principally from the C19th Shalott phenomenon, I participate in a cultural continuum noted for its proliferation of images, but also for its elusive and mutable elements. For whilst being subject to an almost-constant recycling, reinvestment and reinvention in the visual arts field for much of the last 200 years, the Lady, as noted by art historian Elizabeth Prettejohn, remains ‘radically indeterminate.’41

The 1832 Poem She persists, however, as a female figure who speaks, writes and performs her own name and who makes choices about her fate. Arguably, she has stronger agency in the 1832 version of The Lady of Shalott.42 Tennyson ends the journey of this earlier poem with the Lady’s voice, thus displacing the (nominally male) narrator by (what I suggest is) the ‘speech-act’-through-text of a female figure whose words ‘puzzled […]

39

One that has a relationship to forming bonds and finding ‘words’. Irigaray, ‘Body Against Body’, loc. cit. p. 19. This mode of transmission indicates both placental economy and a potential affirmation/restitution of ‘female genealogy’ through ‘a feminist ethics of generosity’ in the retelling of the Shalott story. Placental economy ‘thinks autonomy according to a deconstructive logic of difference and a feminist ethics of generosity.’ D. Bergoffen, ‘Irigaray’s Couples, in M.C. Cimitile and E. Miller (eds.), Returning to Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy, Politics and the Question of Unity, New York, State University of New York Press, 2007, p. 157. 40 For more on ‘mucous’ see M. Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, London and New York, Routledge, 1991, p. 163. 41 E. Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, revised paperback reissue. London, Tate Publishing, 2010, p. 231. 42 M. Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition, Routledge, New York and London, 2004, pp. 61-65.‘The Lady of Shalott (1832) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson’, The Poetry Foundation, [website], ND, www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174626, (accessed 13 June 2014).

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the wellfed wits at Camelot.’43 Her words mark, in her choice of death and her coming to Camelot, the breaking of the curse under which she has lived, and an affirmation of self through writing: ‘The web was woven curiously, The charm is broken utterly. Draw near and fear not, - this is I, The Lady of Shalott.’44

Thus, Tennyson posits, it is her words (voice) more than her image (corpse) that poses a ‘puzzle’, and in it there is an invitation, a challenge, a riddling, even, from the poet that indicates that the reader/hearer could look deeper at the Lady’s words, and draw nearer to her, to figure out their import. What did Tennyson mean by this conundrum? Alas, generations of readers have not had much chance to consider it for familiarity with and reference to the original poem has been eclipsed by a more enduring adherence to the 1842 version as ‘definitive’ by publishers, scholars and teachers. Whilst the Lady of the 1832 text insists we need not be frightened and asserts that we know her – ‘fear not, this is I, the Lady of Shalott’ prompting recognition; a clear direction to ‘re-call’ or ‘re-member’ her rather than an introduction – the Lady of the 1842 text is made strange and silent.45 Her voice is eclipsed by that of Lancelot’s; who defines her face as ‘lovely’, blesses her and speaks aloud her name. He defers his (and our) attraction towards ‘reading’ her to a higher transcendent authority – that of his Christian God – and in doing so denies the possibility of her return to the earthly realm: But Lancelot mused a little space; He said, ‘She has a lovely face; God in his mercy lend her grace, The Lady of Shalott.’46 43

H.F. Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism, Cambridge, Massachusettes and London, Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 100. 44 Tennyson, ‘Shalott’, (1832). 45 Daly/Caputi, op. cit., pp. 92-93, ‘Re-membering. 1: Re-calling the Original intuition of integrity; healing the dismembered Self – the Goddess within women; Re-calling the Primordial connections/conversations among women, animals, and Other Elemental beings. 2: Realizing the power to See and to Spell out connections among apparently disparate phenomena: Spinning, Creating.’ 46 Tennyson, Complete Works, op. cit., p. 29.

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Whilst there is solace, acceptance, gentleness and honesty in Lancelot’s musing, it is also a rather frustrating and dull conclusion, closing down the more intriguing possibilities, mysteries and questions posed by the earlier text. I suggest that its reworking, and the sanctified ending, reflects the grief experienced by Tennyson with the loss of his close friend Arthur Hallam.47 Hallam’s death precipitated a ten-year period of mourning and a hermeneutic withdrawal from public life for Tennyson, marked nevertheless by a feverish, solitary, industry, and a profusion of new writing. He emerged from his grief a melancholy patrician and establishment ‘heavyweight’, and the reworked Shalott bears the hallmarks of this metamorphosis. Essentially, the 1842 version traps the Lady in death; the curse has caught and killed her. There is no return. With it go other softer features that were mocked by critics of the 1832 work48– descriptions of flowers, for example, ‘yellow-leaved waterlily’, ‘green-sheathed daffodilly’; also musical and mystical references to the Lady singing like an ‘angel’ or hearing bells, not to mention the Medievalesque and Marian imagery of the island being embowered by a rose-fence trailing roses.49 Also deleted from the 1842 version are the opulent textile references to the Lady’s garments and furnishings; images of velvet and pearls through which Tennyson conjures a luminescent, moon-like whiteness in beautiful and harmonious counterpoint to Lancelot’s sun-like brilliance. The removal of these features darkens and hardens the later poem. It is a pessimistic, rational, somewhat inexplicable reworking which kills the female/feminised figure and its demand for recognition stone dead. The eclipsing of the selfauthoring female voice in the final lines of the 1842 version is particularly frustrating for the feminist reader; and yet the decision by Tennyson to

47 Tucker, op. cit., chapters 2 and 3. See also C. Ricks, Tennyson, 2nd edition, Berkley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1989 [1972]. For the question of whether or not there was a homosexual dimension to their relationship, see J. Kolb, ‘Hallam, Tennyson, Homosexuality and the Critics’, Philological Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 3, Summer 2000, also J. Garrett Jones, Alfred and Arthur: An Historic Friendship, Maidenhead, Authors Online, 2001. There is insufficient research time and space to investigate this line of enquiry here therefore I do not offer an opinion either way on the question of homosexuality; rather confine my point here to the fact that the men were very close; Hallam’s loss was deeply mourned by Tennyson and had a significant impact on his work and life. 48 ibid., Tucker. 49 For a fascinating discussion of such imagery and its ritual associations, see S.M. Robertson, Rosegarden and Labyrinth: A Study in Art Education, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1963.

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rework his ppoem in this way w opens up questions aboout the shiftin ng history of the text, aand the inhereent mutability at its heart annd origins.

Figure 13. Who is this? and what is here? afteer Tennyson by Phil Sayers, 20003. Photoggraph from a single double-exposed 5x4 transparenccy. With thaanks to Phil Sayers S for hiis kind perm mission to reproduce tthis image.

Elaine of Astolat A and d Gender C Crossings The obscurrity and elussiveness of the female ffigure in Teennyson’s Shalott/Astoolat constructiions, are in keeping k with the general pattern p of Arthurian teexts relating too Lancelot. Th hese, as Derekk Brewer discu usses, are full of ‘puzzzles and paraddoxes’, some of o which relatte to the mysteery of his origins and name, his eaarly presentation as ‘the Faair Unknown’, and the fact that he w was raised byy a fairy foster-mother.50 Deerek Pearsall, similarly, when discusssing de Troyyes’ texts, no otes an elusivveness surroun nding the Lancelot stoory, and suggeests that this obliges o the reaader to pursue the story as if it were itself a quest::

50

Brewer in W Walters, op. cit., pp. 3-7.

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Everything is enigmatic and unexplained – or at least not explained in any way that is clear until much later by which time the explanation has been overtaken by other events. Meaning is always elusively beyond reach; the reader’s quest mirrors the knight’s.51

Tennyson progresses the enigma of Lancelot and his ‘fairy-like’ ephemerality, in the excessive detail of the description of his armour, which supplants any definitive description of a face, body or human skin. The one bodily feature mentioned and visible to the Lady is Lancelot’s flowing mane of ‘coal-black curls’. Beyond that, the knight is apparently faceless and bodiless. This free-floating and flowing signifier liberates the reader, and those of us who are performers and artists, to imagine other possibilities; to imagine a body or face for the knight of our own choosing, and by extension to liberate the figure from its temporal and cultural setting thus participating in a long tradition of displacement and reinvention. Margaret Harrison’s painting The Last Gaze (2013) reflects the deconstructive and regenerative possibilities of the Shalott text. Her various artworks on the myth bring questions of identity, gender and desire to the fore; political and emotional questions that send the everyday reader, maker, lover, lady, knight and philosopher on a ‘route out’ of whatever is ‘fixed’ in their existence through the quest for meaning beyond the place and time they are in.52 She notes the singular detail of Lancelot’s hair and explains her decision to substitute an image of Elvis to signify him: Elvis had coal black curls. Sir Lancelot could well have looked like that. Who knows? Elvis was so significant. In the 50s and 60s, where you had […] a whole number of American artists, black and white, working class kids in Britain, mainly the boys, related to them because it was optimistic and was an indicator that they had a route out of a fixed identity.53

Where Harrison gives a pop art mask to Lancelot, using post-modern bricolage to indicate and express his transformative and libidinal masculine energies, artist Phil Sayers embraces the phantom-like, fluid and feminised space of the knight’s missing face. Echoing Tennyson’s ‘knights and dames’, Sayers’ 2003 photographic work ‘Who is this? And what is here?’ presents the viewer with an image of his own ghostly figure masquerading as the Lady in her barge. His barely perceptible features disappear in a haze of bright exposure and are set in sharp contrast to the 51

Pearsall, op. cit., p. 29. Munson, op. cit., pp. 35-37. 53 ibid. 52

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dark tones of the boat and the shadowy, funereal wreaths of drying herbs. The stark theatricality recalls the constructed and artificial aesthetic of C19th photographic studio tableaux. The fluidity of his body is set, similarly, in contrast to the heavy physicality of the other objects in the photograph. These contrasts invite a questioning of the body’s materiality, and within this, as his own transvestite and performative presence indicates, a questioning and destabilising of the gendered body. The opulent luminescence of the white drapery and the silver transparency of the medium somehow ‘re-call’ the lost pearls of the 1832 poem. Both artists, in their treatment of the Shalott theme, invite reflection on queer crossings, the roots of which can be found in the figure of Elaine le Blank/le Blanc, Maid of Astolat. Where Pearsall clearly indicates Lancelot in his perception of the reader’s identification as a questing knight, the Elaine of Astolat story challenges the assumption that this position of the seeker will unequivocally be that of a male.54 A central feature of the Elaine story involves her taking Lancelot’s shield, and in the company of her brother, riding out from the castle to seek him when she dreams he is dying. The association of Elaine in a gender-crossing heritage is embedded within the tale in that in keeping and regularly cleaning Lancelot’s shield while he is away, she effectively takes on the role of an attendant to the Knight; a role conventionally preserved for young men and boys. Arguably, as a woman that crosses out from her castle and into the realm of the knight-seeker, and one who takes up an occupation conventionally reserved for boys, Elaine displays some typical attributes of ‘female masculinity’.55 Tennyson seemed particularly drawn to this aspect of her role and accents it within his poem: ‘Do me this grace, my child, to have my shield In keeping till I come.’ ‘A grace to me,’ She answer’d, ‘twice today. I am your squire!’56

And later: ‘No, no,’ she cried, ‘I care not to be wife, 54

My analysis of Elaine of Astolat here could usefully be extended in relation to Dr Susan Clayton’s fascinating work on ‘the knightess’. See Dr Clayton’s discussion in chapter 5 of this collection. 55 J. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1998, 56 Tennyson, ‘Lancelot and Elaine’, op. cit., p. 173.

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But to be with you still, to see your face. To serve you, and to follow you thro’ the world.’57

Of the women Lancelot encounters, Elaine differs in her offer to him. While clearly represented as displaying some form of sexual attraction for him, (albeit frequently framed as adolescent, her youth and virginity emphasised and encoded in her association with the ‘lily’), Elaine eschews the idea that she wants to be his wife. Furthermore, although he wore her colours at the tournament, she eschews the idea that she wants to take Guinevere’s place as his courtly (and actual) lover, the woman on his shield who is to be fought for and ‘won’. Elaine, instead, wants to carry his shield, travel, protect and fight with him. The shield, carrying as it does, the marks and scars of Lancelot’s battles, which Elaine has ‘read’ with her eyes and fingers, stands as a symbol for Lancelot’s body. What has been honed through her polishing of its surfaces and ‘reading’ of its stories is a desire to join the adventure; to be close to him bodily, to fight those skirmishes with him and win. She wishes to accompany him, ‘man to man’, to protect him, gallantly, to serve him loyally. Elaine’s love is homoerotic, centred on a continuum of female masculinity that could arguably, if investigated further perhaps reveal more layers of Trans* male identifiers and FtM homosexual desires for Lancelot; or alternatively, and equally possibly, reveal desires and identifiers on a cisgender female, agender or lesbian spectrum.58 Astute, perceptive, empathetic, Elaine ‘sees’ Lancelot clearly from the moment he speaks to her, and she loves him for his battles, quests, scars and devotion. Unlike the faceless Lancelot of Shalott poem, the Lancelot of the Elaine poem is described by Tennyson in intimate and tactile detail: […] the lily maid Elaine Won by the mellow voice before she looked Lifted her eyes, and read his lineaments. The great and guilty love he bare the Queen, In battle with the love he bare his lord, Had mark’d his face, and marr’d it ’ere his time.59

57

ibid., p. 179. As Halberstam notes, ‘[…] what we recognise as female masculinity is actually a multiplicity of masculinities, indeed a proliferation of masculinities, and the more we identify the various forms of female masculinity, the more they multiply.’ Halberstam, op. cit., p. 46. 59 Tennyson, ‘Lancelot and Elaine’, op. cit., p. 172. 58

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When Lancelot rejects her desire to travel with him, and (crucial to the plot), dishonours her courtliness by refusing to engage in a farewell by word or gesture or receive hers, she chooses suicide. The suicide is honourable and measured. She tells her father and brother what she is going to do and dictates a letter to them to scribe for her. She charts the course of her final journey to Camelot and stages her death, carrying the letter for Lancelot that will explain clearly to him why she has taken the action she has. At all stages, even to the last, she remains both auteur and author of her death.60

‘Crack’d’ Mirrors, Whispers and Contagion The Shalott figure as a female muse continued well into the C20th, and as Tennyson’s popularity as a poet waned and the reading of his work became somewhat outmoded and associated with nostalgia, the story and heroine of his Lady of Shalott remained popular and arguably took on its own life. This is illustrated in Agatha Christie’s 1962 detective novel The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side.61 The novel features Christie’s most enduring protagonist, that wily bastion of female masculinity Miss Marple, doing what she does best – shrewdly sleuthing out people’s deepest secrets, politely poking her nose in firmly where not wanted, irritating male police inspectors by doing the job for them and concluding her quest with the articulation of some pithy nugget of matriarchal wisdom or discovery gained through the adventure. In the case of The Mirror Crack’d, this involves bestowing forgiveness on the dead murderess who has committed suicide by directly quoting Lancelot’s final blessing on the Lady in the final lines of the novel, whilst also maintaining a rather harsh line on women who lack introspection or who seek to hide unpalatable truths under artifice. In Christie’s novel this moral presents itself through a story of maternal desire, rejection, failure, infection and loss leading to violent and untimely deaths. Maternal desire and aspiration (arguably being presented here in a form that corresponds with what Irigaray would call ‘mimicry’) is encoded 60 See M. Higgonnet, ‘Speaking Silences, Women’s Suicide’ in S.R. Suleiman, The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, USA, Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 68-83. 61 “People laugh at Tennyson nowadays, but the Lady of Shalott always thrilled me when I was young and still does.” A. Christie, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, Fourth Impression, Collins Fontana Books, London and Glasgow, 1967, p. 52. See also: “People don’t read much Tennyson nowadays.”, ibid, p. 64.

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in the familiar patriarchal motif of the painted Madonna and Child on the stairs of a wealthy actress’s home.62 The failure to live this aspiration is played out in the tragic tale of a woman (Marina Gregg) who thinks she cannot have children so adopts a little girl, rejects her when she becomes pregnant, catches German measles from an infected woman’s embrace, gives birth to a disabled child who is then hidden away in an institution for life, their existence denied, and who ultimately murders other women and finally kills herself. Marina Gregg is aligned firmly with Tennyson’s (and arguably Waterhouse’s) Shalott throughout, right down to her lying in ‘the great white shell of the bed – her eyes closed, her hands folded’ in a manner that recalls to Miss Marple the Lady in the barge at the end of Tennyson’s poem. The novel marks a queer turn in the Shalott trajectory. Through female recalling and retelling, centred in the character of key witness Mrs Dolly Bantry, the patriarchal logos is destabilised to a point that verges on parody (‘curse’ becomes ‘doom’) and is replaced by an agreed and understood ‘frozen’ female gaze: ‘She had a kind of frozen look’ said Mrs Bantry struggling with words, ‘as though she had seen something that – oh how hard it is to describe things. Do you remember the Lady of Shalott? The mirror crack’d from side to side: ‘The doom has come upon me’, cried the Lady of Shalott. Well that’s what she looked like.’63

And later: ‘She was just staring with what I call this Lady of Shalott look, as though she’d seen something awful. Something frightening, something that she could hardly believe she saw and couldn’t bear to see.’ ‘“The curse has come upon me?”’ suggested Dermot Craddock, helpfully. ‘Yes, just that. That’s why I called it the Lady of Shalott look.’64

62

‘There is, in an initial phase, perhaps only one “path”, the one historically assigned to the feminine: that of mimicry. One must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it.’ L. Irigaray, ‘The Power of Discourse’ in This Sex Which is Not One, trans. C. Porter with C. Burke, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 76. 63 Christie, loc. cit., p. 52. 64 ibid., pp. 65-66.

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Through the repetition of the story, first to Marple and then to Craddock, Dolly Bantry moves from describing how Marina Gregg ‘looked’ to how she was actually ‘looking’. It is a movement from an object to a subject position inflected with and energised through association with the Lady of Shalott and her gaze; a gaze that is ultimately Medusa-like – frozen and destructive to all who look directly at her. There is huge fear in Marina Gregg’s stare; there is agency and intention and there is violence, and it is a violence that turns first on other female subjects and then ultimately on herself. The moment of looking (subject and object) described by Bantry in the novel fuses respectively direct and implicit reference to Tennyson’s 1842 poem and to Waterhouse’s 1894 oil painting.65 I would suggest that Christie was familiar with both though whether she saw the Leeds painting in situ is a matter of speculation and perhaps unknowable.66 The Waterhouse picture surfaces, however, in direct reference to the novel through the publisher’s choice of front cover image. In this Collins Fontana paperback copy from 1967, we see a striking reworking of the 1894 painting, executed in combined soft dry mediums – perhaps chalk pastel, conté and pencil – bisected in a sharp fracture across the centre with a harder, photographic, drawing of a staring eye peering from the darkness; the darkness of a cave or perhaps a closet. The original challenging gaze of Waterhouse’s work is given further accent by a performative and postmodern rupture of the canvas (recalling Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale, 1960) whose sharp jagged edges suggest that the second eye is looking back at you not only from or behind the canvas but also from behind a broken mirror. What we see is a disruptive and challenging pictorial representation of a figure caught behind the ‘reverse’ of the mirror – the place of ‘reserve’; an embodied, feminised, place of resistance.67

65

Christie chooses the same piece of verse for her inspiration as Waterhouse chose for his. See Tennyson, Complete Works, op. cit., pp. 24-25; also, Waterhouse file, Leeds, loc. cit. 66 The only reference to any time spent in Yorkshire is Christie’s ten-day ‘disappearance’ at a time of personal crisis where she was found to be staying under a pseudonym in a Harrogate hotel. 67 L. Irigaray, ‘“Woman”’s Jouissance’ in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G.C. Gill, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 353-365.

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Figure 14. Front Cover image (author photograph). Reproduced by kind permission of Harper Collins. The place of the ‘reserve’ is a point at which the collapse of vision can happen as the reflection disappears into darkness. The broken mirror in its own way fragments vision leaving the gazing subject with an image of disintegration. Fragmentation in the cultural economy of phallocentric logic is commonly associated with collapse and disintegration and by extension with pestilence and plague. This is something artist Lucia Noguiera explored in her 1994 installation Black – a work made in response to a diagnosis of terminal illness in which she spread myriad pieces of broken chandelier pieces across the gallery floor evoking the smashing of a large light or mirror.68 The pieces lay for weeks gathering 68 See photographs, N. Kane, ‘“I am half-sick of shadows”: Finding Queer Agency Through Life-Model Theatre in Body Art Projects and Gallery Spaces’, Agender:

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dust, forbidding/inhibiting touch; a crystalline chaos that implied a prior completeness, connection or function that could now never be regained or repaired. It merely existed, broken, the echoes of its crash fading as the dust settled. An inevitability. Waiting for the artist to clear the floor and allow a new inhabiting of space and time to begin. This artwork resonates with what Renate Lorenz describes as characteristic of a queer artistic practice: [… They] are precisely in the position to break off interpellations producing a temporal and spatial distance – a deferral and a gap – between an experience and any possible effect on the processes of subjectification.69

The breaking of the mirror marks a disruption in the temporal and spatial continuum of the Lady’s existence and displaces her – and us – allowing us to consider the ways in which the mirror may trap us in endless inversion, industry and relentless gazing. In Christie’s novel, the break in Marina Gregg’s continuum expands time and sends her spinning backwards and between the cracks. She acknowledges the dissonance between the image of motherhood she gazes on and the ‘reserve’ of her own life with its opaqueness, its closed rooms, its hidden children, its female others, and its potential contagions. She is terrified by what she sees, and moves herself into a place where the voice and the image of the woman standing before cannot touch her. The withdrawal of the self from the pollution of the other woman’s face and voice has a relationship to homophobia and a fear of the lesbian subject. I would suggest that the occupant of the ‘reserve’ in Christie’s novel, and the ‘uncanny’ figure in fact staring through the cracked glass on the reverse of the canvas/mirror in the cover image, is its unacknowledged and unrecognised lesbian subject. Aligned (linguistically) with the ‘imbecile, or queer, or something’ (emphasis mine) baby who is cited early on in the novel as the cause of Marina’s breakdown, the lesbian subject in the novel exists somewhat in silence.70 She is ‘the curse’ that the A Conference on Female and Transgendered Masculinities, Leeds Art Gallery, UK, 17 June 2014. See Academia.edu, Nina Kane, [website], ND, https://www.academia.edu/, (accessed 15 November 2017). 69 R. Lorenz, Queer Art: A Freak Theory, Bielefeld, transcript Verlag, 2012, p. 18. 70 “[…] she’d always longed to have a child – she’s even half-adopted a few strays – anyway this was the real thing. Very much built up. Motherhood with a capital M. And then, I believe, it was an imbecile or queer or something – and it was after that, that she had this breakdown and started to take drugs and all that, and threw up her parts.” Christie, op. cit., p. 22.

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straight subject hears a ‘whisper’ about but cannot fully hear or see. As Nicky Hallett writes: Homosexuality is ‘never heard of’, while heterosexuality is treated as a said. Language is of concealment, attributed by the ‘threatened’ to the ‘threatener’, and it operates within a constructed aural/oral and visual discourse. […] The audience is led to conceptualise homosexuals as secretive because the legislative discourse suggests that lesbianism is an unheard ‘whisper’ which its promoters wish to amplify […] Eyes and ears are thus the most vulnerable orifices. Given this primacy, protecting them from sexual corruption is therefore of great cultural importance. […] The thing and the thing obscured become synonymous: the veil […] By this process it is inferred that the lesbian is somehow a dissembler, who has sought to disguise her dangerous physicality.71

The source of its contagion nominally rests within the figure of Heather Badcock, the carrier of the German Measles virus that passed to Marina Gregg whilst pregnant. In this analysis, the heavily made-up face of the eager, young, adoring Heather, with its mask of health, concealing infectious disease, becomes ever more weighted with associations of a lesbianism, which not only threatens to touch Marina’s body, but also that of her unborn child. The retreat into a non-hearing, non-seeing space becomes one of protection not just against disease but against perceived, unmentionable, unknowable, unspoken sexual advance. Marina hopes to stop the contagion, but it gets to her anyway and in killing Heather, she sets a murderous course leading to her own demise. Marple condemns Badcock in withering terms towards the end of the novel and essentially blames her for her own fate, somewhat exonerating the murderess in the process: ‘She thought she’d been resourceful and brave and shown a lot of spirit in getting up from her bed, covering her face with make-up, and going along to meet the actress on whom she had such a crush [emphasis mine] and obtaining her autograph. It’s a thing she has boasted of all through her life. Heather Badcock meant no harm. She never did harm but there is no doubt that people like Heather Badcock […] are capable of doing a lot of harm because they lack […] any real consideration for the way their actions may affect other people […]. So she died, you see, for a simple reason out of her own past. You must imagine what that moment meant to Marina Gregg. […] I think she had nursed all those years a kind of hatred for the 71 N. Hallett, Lesbian Lives: Identity and Auto/Biography in the Twentieth Century, London and Sterling, Pluto Press, 1999, pp. 105-106.

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7. Trans*tastic Morphologies unknown person who had been the cause of her tragedy. And here she suddenly meets that person face-to-face. And a person who is gay [emphasis mine], jolly and pleased with herself. It was too much for her.

The key words inferring something of lesbian attribution to Heather Badcock here are ‘crush’ and ‘gay’ and with this reading The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side could be read in relation to what Doan and Garrity identify as ‘Sapphic Modernity’, or even as part of a more select canon of lesbian ‘dick’ novels.72 Heather Badcock (emphasis mine) represents a recognisable ‘type’ parodied somewhat knowingly as an ‘injoke’ by lesbian writers such as Nancy Spain – for example, the character of Charity Puke in Poison for Teacher (1949). However much a queer reader may try, however, it is hard to find any joy in Badcock as there is such negativity encoded within her construction, and save for her grieving, gentle husband, few have a good word to say about her. She exists fleetingly in the novel – child-like, as she gushes and rushes – and is framed negatively (disproportionately so) as a self-absorbed, dissembling and pestilential foil to the murdering and self-murdering Shalott figure of Marina. The novel presents a world that is cold – hollow and anaesthetised. Christie encodes the contagion of murderous relations in a gendered frame and through the voice of Miss Marple relays to us a misogynistic world where female-to-female exchange is policed by heteronormative censure and where the potential for feminine-maternal growth is made toxic. She also depicts a world where the potential growth of female ancestry and mother-child relations through inter-uterine bonding of mother and child (Marina and her unborn baby) and through a respect for difference and a placental economy of generosity (Marina and her adoptive daughter) is destroyed and institutionalised through the dominance of normative patriarchal economies: ‘[…] you see, German measles is extremely infectious. People catch it very easily. And there’s one thing about it which you’ve got to remember. If a woman contracts it in the first four months of --------’ Miss Marple spoke the next word with a slight Victorian modesty ‘---of ----- er --pregnancy, it may have a terribly serious effect. It may cause an unborn child to be born blind or to be born mentally affected.’ 72

See Charlotte Mallinson’s fascinating analysis of modernist uses of the words ‘gay’ and ‘queer’ in relation to lesbianism in chapter 2 of this collection. See L. Doan and J. Garrity (eds.), Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and National Culture, USA, Palgrave MacMillan, 2006.

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And herein lies the tragedy of relations. In a world where women cannot talk openly of pregnancy, and where veiled words and painted faces order discourse and deny the realities of the female body and its regenerative economies, there will inevitably be a retreat into what Irigaray names as a ‘maintenance mimesis’. Marina cannot tell Heather she is pregnant due to the ‘modesty’ of expectations and Heather therefore cannot understand the implications of her dissemblance and make a choice to move back and protect Marina from infection. Instead, the women present a painted façade to one another. Both are acting. Neither take responsibility for their body. Each conceals, dissembles and presents a shining face, palatable to patriarchy, to one another. They become caught in a doubling mirror that refracts, reduces and entraps them both. The contagious connection of lips, skin and breath between them, and the ultimate breaking of the mirror through this, is the only thing that can stop the cycle. In its unflinching focus on female subjects stuck in a ‘maintenance mimesis’, The Mirror Crack’d essentially queers the Shalott trajectory, with ‘gorelesque’ inflections of a contagious and penetrative maternalfeminine at once lesbian and (with its emphasis on the painted face) theatrical, and potentially trans*vestite. It undoes a shining virginity, innocence, nobility and brings in the heart, womb, cunt and guts of the myth – unleashing a messy, abject, sexual, breathy, cunning, obsessive, narcissistic, delusional, star-struck, suicidal and contagious femininity. As the contagion spreads it reveals a world of abandoned daughters, failed mothers, unthinking sisters, vague neighbours, bored housewives, jealous actresses and reproving maiden aunts all caught up in murderous and vengeful tension. Whilst ostensibly upholding the archaic niceties of a ‘Victorian’ gentility where elderly women hesitate, ridiculously, to say the word ‘pregnancy’ in polite company, the world Christie depicts is more inline with the post-war high drama of the kitchen sink or soap opera than anything else, and it is in this – and in its metaphor of contagion – that we can perhaps find the novel’s feminist potency and rejuvenating capacities. Christie’s treatment of the myth in The Mirror Crack’d constitutes a necessary infection of the Shalott figure.73 It is an infection that can be passed body to body (corps à corps) and is ‘vampyric’ – insatiable and compulsive in its bloodletting (as arguably all good murder fiction is) – 73

‘But isn’t such a model of queer art paradoxical, since on the one hand it affects or infects, that is, it also approaches unbidden, and on the other hand, it allows a distance to be created? Or is this paradox of distance and proximity precisely one of the characteristics of queer art?’ Lorenz, op. cit., p. 20.

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and in this way, essentially queer.74 Where recognition is not possible, contagion provides a voice. As Lorenz notes: Contagion thus takes the place of recognition, which is a central element of normalization, by making norms and regulations acceptable for subjects. Contagion, instead of recognition then also allows for speaking when one is not authorized to speak, for instance when one is not taken as someone who would have something to say about concepts of gender or as someone who even has a voice in society at all. Queer-artistic practice in this way also speaks without authorization, even when it speaks publicly and to others.75

The progression of the Shalott myth to this place in the 1960s heralds a sea-change in approaches to the female figure in culture to which different readings of gender can be applied, and through which other voices can be heard.

Part 3: Trans*tastic Morphologies She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces thro’ the room. She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume. She look’d down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack’d from side to side; ‘The curse is come upon me’, cried The Lady of Shalott.76

Morphology 1 Shuttle: My idea was to perform self-consciously a queer gender rather than simply talk about it, thus embodying and enacting the concept simultaneously 74 ‘Queer theory and practice are vampyric in that they consist in a perverse form of blood-letting, of the abject transgression of boundaries between the proper and improper.’ S. Case, quoted in A. Sullivan, Virtually Normal, An Argument About Homosexuality, London, Picador, 1996, also in N. Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 2003, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, p. 52. 75 Lorenz, op. cit., p. 21. 76 Tennyson, Selected Poems, loc. cit.

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under discussion. I wanted the formal structure of the work to express a transgender aesthetic by replicating our abrupt, often jarring transition between genders.77

Morphology 2 River: The 1842 version of Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott is a work of nineteen stanzas, containing regular, repeating and accumulating rhythms and rhyming patterns. Each stanza comprises nine lines with the rhythm and rhyme turning at the fifth line constituting a break or a breath in the flow, marked by a full-stop. With the exception of stanza 10, where Lancelot makes his entrance and breaks the pattern, all the fifth lines of the break end in the word ‘Camelot’. With the exception of stanza 13, at the point at which the Lady turns, all final lines in the stanzas end in the word ‘Shalott’. Thus, is the poem mapped and held between the two sites, moving from ‘Camelot’ to ‘Shalott’ in an inverse trajectory to that taken by the Lady in the course of the poem – her journey being from Shalott to Camelot – but one that traces the conventional course of the Knight, whose journey in the earlier Arthurian texts moves from Camelot to Astolat. In this way, inversion and gendering is embedded from the outset through topographical location and trajectory within Tennyson’s structural frame. We move ‘widdershins’ with the Lady as we journey with her through the poem.78

77

S. Stryker, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix’: Performing Transgender Rage’ in S. Stryker and S. Whittle (eds.), The Transgender Studies Reader, New York, Routledge, 2006, pp. 245-256. 78 ‘Widdershins (Withershins) adv [ (derived fr. MGH widdersinnen to go back, go against, fr. wider back, against + sinnen to travel, go . . . akin to OHG sind journey, road): “in a left-handed or contrary direction: CONTRARILY, COUNTERCLOCKWISE – used esp. of ritual circumambulation” – Webster’s; also “in a direction opposite to the usual; the wrong way” – O.E.D.] : in a direction that counters the processions or clockocracy/cockocracy; in a manner that grinds the doomsday clocks to a halt, that turns back the clocks of father time: Contrariwise: the Wrong Way. See doomsday clock (w-w 3).’ Daly and Caputi, op. cit., p. 179.

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Morphology 3 Tirra-Lirra or Lizzie Siddal’s Hairy Loom: “The poem, like some perfect plant, connotes a flower, and suddenly under the artist’s hands it bursts forth into its necessary blossom, fragrant with a mental odour at once subtle and refined.”79

Figure 15. The Lady of Shalott, 1853 (ink on paper) (b/w photo), Siddal, Elizabeth Eleanor (Lizzie) (1834-62) /Private Collection / Photo © The Maas Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images In one lovely moment, a woman on her lunch break passing through, whipped out a crochet needle from her handbag and spent half an hour crocheting a beautiful, soft, winding of mint-green wool to a pillar as an anchor for others’ threads. The sudden appearance of the crochet needle from the handbag delighted other people present, precipitating much laughter and some chatter; her woven work being much admired, stroked and gently touched for some time after.80 Footnote 685 from my PHD Thesis

79 G.S. Layard, Tennyson and his Pre-Raphaelite Illustrators: A Book About a Book, London, Elliot Stock, 1894, pp. 30-31. 80 N. Kane, ‘“F-F-Felt it”: Breathing Feminist, Queer and Clown Thinking into the Practice and Study of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and Blasted’. PhD Thesis, University of Huddersfield, 2013, p. 310. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/19287/

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Figure 16. Untitled, Claude Cahun. Courtesy of Jersey Heritage Collections - JHT/2003/00001/8

Morphology 4 Web: Re-calling* 1: persistent/insistent Calling of the Wild; recurring invitation to Realms of Deep Memory. 2: Active Unforgetting of participation in Being; Re-membering and giving voice to Original powers, intuitions, memories. Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language Conjured by Mary Daly in cahoots with Jane Caputi The Women’s Press, London, 1988, p. 92.

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Figure 17. Weaving Webs in the Gallery Space. The Elements Project, Cast-Off Drama. In response to Margaret Harrison’s Northern Art Prize submission, 2013. With thanks to Leeds Art Gallery and Margaret Harrison.81 On Weaving Webs, Greenham Common and Kissing Between Women The following is an extract from my PhD thesis. It was written as a reflection on web-weaving with workshop participants and gallery visitors at Leeds Art Gallery, in response to Margaret Harrison’s works Reflect and The Last Gaze. In 1989, artist Margaret Harrison visited the Peace Camp at Greenham Common and made a number of reconstructions of the perimeter fence for exhibition in gallery spaces in New York. The series was entitled Common Land/Greenham and formed part of Harrison’s ongoing investigation of gender and female creativity. In 2013, she revisited this work and her experiences of Greenham in relation to an exploration of John William 81

N. Kane, ‘Evaluation of The Elements Project: Audience Development at Leeds Art Gallery – Report to the Arts Council of England’, West Yorkshire, June 2013. A full copy of the report is held by Leeds Art Gallery Education and an abridged copy can be accessed, Academia. Edu, Nina Kane, op. cit.

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Waterhouse’s work The Lady of Shalott. The works – collectively titled Reflect – form part of the 2013 Northern Art Prize selection, and at the time of writing are being exhibited in Leeds Art Gallery, UK. One of the pieces is a reconstruction and reworking of her earlier 1989 section of the Greenham Common perimeter fence. By wonderful – clown-time – fortuity I was asked to make work from this, and took the opportunity to use workshop and performance with community groups and gallery visitors to explore memories and creative practices of Greenham. There is insufficient space to detail all the findings here, but what was notable was the testimony to amnesia and the shock of remembering Greenham by visitors over the age of 40, followed by an outpouring of memories and associations when presented with an opportunity to engage and spend time with artwork related to it. As part of my work I invited visitors to informally weave a web in the gallery space, and this served to bring memories and emotions strongly to the fore. One woman, aged 40, visiting with her two daughters, described the process of encountering the web-building as ‘uncanny’. She related that she had been taken to Greenham by her mother at the age her daughters now were and the first thing they did when they arrived was weave a web over some bushes. As her daughters jumped into circling the wool around stools and pillars, she recounted a familiar 1980s childhood tale of parental conflict over feminism, the growth of her mother’s agency in challenging the father in her support of Greenham, and the effect this subsequently had on the dynamics of gender within the family. As she talked she watched her daughters and kept repeating the words ‘it’s uncanny’, whilst showing me the goose-bumps on her arms (that by that point, I too was catching)! The reference to the uncanny – unheimlich – has a relationship to the reemergence of that which is known and close to home, and this is significant in the phenomenon of re-membering that I believe is beginning to happen in relation to the Greenham story and its gender politics.82 Webbuilding in anarchic, disruptive ways represents a reclamation for women of spaces conventionally reserved for the transactions of patriarchy – commodification, utilitarianism and sexual exchange. Freud stated that women’s only contribution to the development of civilisation was weaving – an activity that developed from women’s need to invest in fabrics and cloths to cover the ‘shame’ of their lacking genitals. Irigaray explains and refutes Freud’s ideas thus: ‘Weaving is however, more or less, an “imitation” of the “model” Nature gives in the pubic hair. Woman can, it seems, (only) imitate nature. Duplicate what nature offers and produces. In a kind of technical 82 S. Freud, The Uncanny, reprint, London, New York, Victoria, Ontario, New Delhi, Auckland, Rosebank, Penguin, 2003.

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assistance and substitution. But this is paradoxical. Since Nature is all. But this ‘all’ cannot appear as no thing, as no sex organ, for example. Therefore woman weaves in order to veil herself, mask the faults of Nature, and restore her in her wholeness. By wrapping her up. In a wrapping that Marx has told us preserves the “value” from a just evaluation. And allows the “exchange” of goods “without knowledge” of their effective value. By abstracting “products”, by making them universal and interchangeable without recognising their differences. In a wrapping that Freud tells us serves to hide the difference of the sexes from the horrified gaze of the little boy and the man.’83 In transferring the art of weaving from clothes-making to anarchic, chaotic, messy and idiosyncratic collective web-building over trees, bushes, across paths and roads transporting nuclear weapons the women at Greenham overturned the conventional associations of weaving and the feminine and used it as a weapon that revealed the phallus at its most destructive. By making webs with looping holes, strange tangled shapes, amorphous lumps caught up with signifiers of the personal and whatever was close to hand – quirky, whimsical or political – they effectively ‘undid’ the wrappings of patriarchy, through monstrous rambling and woolly effusion. Through weaving webs, not clothes, in such acts of collective divestment (and divertissement) they put the tangle of threads away from their bodies and into the public and political space. In stalling, trapping and bamboozling the military officials, angry ratepayers and local ‘plod’ into confrontation with woven space, they made themselves symbolically naked, showing their ‘lack’ without shame like bawdy sheela-na-gigs. Essentially through the act rather than the product of weaving they sought to ‘weave again the strands of true existence’ and remove whatever lies of force and violence have got caught ‘unravel them and weave again where holes were torn, until with truth and love and gentleness the web is whole and strong.’ […] Experience of web-building is that it gains and expands in its own time. Individuals lose themselves in the rhythms and flux of winding, unwinding, journeying in and out of each other’s threads, cutting, tying, knotting, choosing a different ball, a different colour or texture, tying the end to whatever is close to hand and starting again. People use the floor and increasingly become emboldened occupying the horizontal, remembering in many ways the freedom of childhood to roll, crawl on their belly, wriggle, lie on their backs, get caught and uncaught. It essentially takes people into a ritual of no time, and ever-moving rhythm – all the while the structure of threads builds and resonates as bodies brush 83 Irigaray, ‘The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry’ in Speculum, op. cit., p. 115.

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against it, step over it, move their way delicately through it with careful fingertips and tiptoe. In the web-building on the Elements Project, the impulse to weave more and more of the gallery space, using horizontal and vertical planes, became an ever-circling, expansive activity, with the core group of participants happy to play in the space indefinitely, and gallery visitors taking time to join in. The web, in the process and rhythms of its building, and in the emergence of a material gift-space/object collectively wrought, is essentially a manifestation of a kiss and at Greenham this kiss of the webbuilding was essentially that of a kissing between women: ‘Our all cannot be projected or mastered. Our whole body is moved. No surface holds. No figure, line or point remains. No ground subsists. But no abyss either. Depth, for us, is not a chasm. Without a solid crust, there is no precipice. Our depth is the thickness of our body, our all touching itself. Where top and bottom, inside and out, in front and behind, above and below are not separated, remote, out of touch. Our all intermingled. Without breaks or gaps [...] we are at home on the flatlands. We have so much space to share. Our horizon will never stop expanding; we are always open. Stretching out, never ceasing to unfold ourselves, we have so many voices to invent in order to express all of us everywhere, even in our gaps, that all the time there is will not be enough. We can never complete the circuit, explore our periphery; we have so many dimensions.’84

Morphology 5 Loom: Trans*: derives from the Latin word meaning ‘across’. Its asterisk here references contemporary transgender politics that indicate anyone involved in crossings, transitions and movements of the body or the gender binary, eg. transgender, non-binary gender, intersex, gender nonconforming, transsexual, transvestite, genderqueer, genderfluid, agender, genderfuck, third gender, two-spirit and bigender people.85 - tastic: Indicates the English word ‘fantastic’. Fantastic: 1. Informal. Extraordinarily good or attractive. 2. Of an extraordinary size or degree. 3. Imaginative or fanciful; remote from 84

Irigaray, ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’, in This Sex, op. cit., pp. 214-215. ‘What does the asterisk in Trans* stand for?’, Metrosexual, [website], ND., http://itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2012/05/what-does-the-asterisk-in-transstand-for/, (accessed 16 February 2016). 85

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reality. Late Middle English (in the sense ‘unreal’): from the Old French fantastique, via Medieval Latin from Greek phantastikos, from phantezein ‘make visible’, phantazesthai ‘have visions, imagine’ from phantos ‘visible’ related to phainein ‘to show’.86

Morphology 6 Plume: There is […] in many Dostoevsky stories a moment when a character caught in high drama catches sight of their face in the mirror. It’s what I call “accident time”. It isn’t a sudden elucidation, but the questions change: and not merely concerning the face but also the hands – it’s a moment of gesture. It’s not a matter of solution, but of understanding: the geography changes and you are in a different place because the same place is now different. 87 Letter, Edward Bond to Sarah Kane, 1997.

The moment at which the mirror cracks is a moment of ‘accident time’. The Lady, perhaps for the first time ever, ‘sees’ herself. The illuminating flash of light from Lancelot’s armour-clad gallop holds cultural reference to other moments of blinding clarity and disruption – St Paul’s conversion on the road to Damscus, Pip tearing down the curtains as Estelle settles into Miss Havisham’s agoraphobic chair, the flash of the nuclear explosion from the bomb dropped on Hiroshima – such moments represent transcendent change. There is no ‘going back’ – only a leap to a different state of consciousness or being. Curatorial Shift: The Awakening - after an idea by Jason Edwards in his essay: Queer and Now: On Etty’s ‘Autobiography’ (1849) and ‘Male Nude with Arms Up-Stretched’ (c.1830).88

86

Oxford Dictionaries, [website], ND, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/fantastic, (accessed 18 February 2016). 87 I. Stuart (ed.), Edward Bond Letters 5, London and New York, Routledge, 2002, p. 167. 88 J. Edwards, ‘Queer and Now: On Etty’s ‘Autobiography’ (1849) and ‘Male Nude with Arms Up-Stretched’ (c.1830)’ in S. Burnage, M. Hallett and L. Turner (eds.), William Etty: Art & Controversy, London, Phillip Wilson Publishers, 2011.

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Figures 18 and 19. The Awakening, 1891 (oil on canvas), Solomon, Solomon Joseph (1860-1927). Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery) U.K. / Bridgeman Images LMG2956958. a. Landscape. b. Portrait.

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Morphology 7 Mirror: Group drama activities – to explore the space inside and behind the mirror: x Balance the space between you as a group. Walk forward around the room in any direction. Try to cover as much of the room as you can while walking forward. Go to where the space needs you most. x In pairs, hold a bamboo cane between you with the tip of your index fingers. Move around the room and explore the space without letting the bamboo drop. Step over the cane and under it. Link up with others and exchange canes or link to make a group of 4, 6, 8 … as you wish. Keep holding the canes between you at all times, using only the index fingers. x In pairs A and B. A offer your hand to B. B take A’s hand, close your eyes and let A guide you around the room. A take B on a journey. Then swap. x Choose a percussive instrument. In pairs A and B. A choose an instrument and play it to B. B close your eyes. A use the sound of your instrument to guide B on a journey round the room. B follow the sound of the instrument. Stop when it stops. Move when you hear it. Keep moving towards the sound. Then swap.89 x Choose a mirror from a pile of assorted sizes. Hold it in front of you and see yourself reflected. Look at the space behind you in the mirror and observe the room, people and objects visible. Begin to move into that space walking slowly backwards and keep going. Go on a journey through the space using the mirror’s reflection as a guide. x Work in groups of 3. Decide who is A, B and C. The model-tutor has arranged a circle of stools in the middle of the room with a space to model in between. On the stools are balls of coloured wool. Outside the circle of stools at the edges of the room there are mirrors of varying sizes with drawing materials placed in front of them. You are going to work together to build a web with others in the room. C, place yourself in front of a mirror. You are to watch the activity in the room through the mirror’s reflection and draw 89

I first came across this activity in a workshop with Horse and Bamboo Theatre, UK. Thanks to them for this. ‘Horse and Bamboo Theatre’, [website], 2016, http://www.horseandbamboo.org/, (accessed 7 December 2016).

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whatever you see. B, hold the ball of wool and stand by the stools, ready to let it out a little at a time. A, you are to take the end of the wool and weave it in and out of the circle of stools to create a web across the model’s posing space. Every so often, the three of you must swap positions so A becomes C and draws from the mirror, B become A and weaves the web and C become B and holds the wool for A. Rotate between these positions as often as you wish ensuring everyone has a chance to participate in all aspects of the activity. When the group as a whole decide that the web is finished, the model will step into the middle of it and take up the posing space for you to make drawings of her.90 This activity can be adapted for longer workshops, e.g. once the web is made, participants can spend time embellishing the web with symbols and small beads/made objects, or explore posing/being within the web themselves. Shuttle or Aspens Quiver: ‘Poetry is like shot silk with many glancing colours. Each reader must find his own interpretation according to his ability, and according to his sympathy with the poet.’ Tennyson, to his son Arthur Hallam.91

Reflections, Leeds Art Gallery, 2002-2013: In following the lines of text and the threads of the painting, in the process of immersing themselves in the vibrancy of colours and images from both poem and picture, and in working from their own bodies and from mine to uncover and intuit processes of construction and lived experience contained within the central figure, many workshop participants returned again and again to questions of gender-crossing, sexuality and transvestism. The clothing worn by Waterhouse’s 1894 Shalott figure drew much note – in particular, the off-white see-through fabric bound tightly round the legs in the drama of escaping threads; bindings that many noted were more like ribbons and cords than tapestry threads. These bindings, participants generally opined, were strategically placed to accent the nude flesh beneath the material, and also evoked bondage associations pointing to 90 91

See figure 12 for an illustration of this activity. Ricks, op. cit.

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sado-masochistic and fetish-based activity. The repeated opinion was that ‘it didn’t look like a real dress for the time’ and the theatricality of it was noted and discussed in relation to the assertive stance and ‘gaze out’ of the model. A repeated association rising to the surface when the dress was discussed was that of a dancer – ‘an exotic C19th dancer’ – and before long the figure of Salomé emerged as a figure intuited by participants as having some connection to the Waterhouse painting. Associations with the actress Sarah Bernhardt were likewise made, particularly in relation to the stance and gaze of the model. These musings from participants indicated a reception to the Waterhouse work which placed it by implication in subjects of interest to queer theory and arts-making. […] even amid the violent social circumstances of the late 19th and early to mid 20th – such as colonial history, homophobia and Taylorism –Salomé provided the opportunity to live and fantasize about sexuality and gender outside gender binarism and heteronormativity, and without resorting to new, fixed identity formations.92

The model remains an enigma. Waterhouse kept no record of her or his name and sketches reveal a probability that the figure was a composite – created from more than one model with an element of fantasy thrown in. Thread or Aspens Quiver: Musing in front of the Waterhouse picture, participants would get lost in following the painted threads. One set – a curious swirl of bright blue circling across the front of the canvas always drew comment and questions. People generally found it dis-cord-ant. They asked whether it was meant to be like that: ‘it looks like someone’s taken a blue biro to it’, ‘has it been graffiti’d?’. Fearing delinquency and destruction, and sensing a deconstructive potential in it that interrupted immersion in and easy entry to the interior of the picture, many worried about why Waterhouse had painted it that way. People concluded it must symbolise the ‘whirlpool’ she drowned in as the boat went downstream. I became interested in this idea of the whirlpool as 92

Lorenz, op. cit., p. 94.

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it was a word that occurred repeatedly and was always said with some satisfaction… ‘it must be the whirlpool that she drowns in’. And yet, there is no whirlpool mentioned in the text – her barge simply floats downstream and she freezes to death. There is no drowning. And yet, participants were certain this was it. In truth, standing in front of the Waterhouse work thinking through Tennyson’s suggestion that poetry is like shot-silk, many were content to ignore the ‘given circumstances’ of the poem and the picture and instead get lost in the tangle of Waterhouse’s swirling blue threads, in ‘magic if’s’, abysses and watery immersions.93 I too got caught in this in my modelling fantasies, though in truth the colours I felt I was surrounding myself with through scraps of bright material never quite looked as bright in the modelling space or on the drawers’ artworks as they did in my head. The act of life-modelling, essentially dramaturgical, lives in the magpie realm of scraps, fragments, cast-offs, suggestions, substitutions, hunches, intuition, imagination, random, shiny, intriguing bits of

colourful,

flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict. In 2005, I began to introduce the Falmouth sketch and another similar into workshops showing the model with long red hair. The fantasy of the 1894 painting’s surface-level narrative completely collapsed. Gender was the first ‘discovery’ marked in the wake of recognising Waterhouse’s composite approach – ‘It’s a man!’ became the general opinion. ‘It’s a man in a long red wig!’ ‘That explains the masculine features, the square jaw, the fake-looking breasts’ 93 K. Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, trans. J. Benedetti, London and New York, Routledge, 2008, pp. 48-59.

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Loom: “I want to argue that the dancer is neither male nor female, but, rather transvestic […] transvestism as a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture. That is the taboo against which Occidental eyes are veiled.”94

Morphology 8 Thread or Tennyson’s Trans*vestite Text: The reconstruction of figurative poses to contest gender conventions and ascriptions is a familiar feature of feminist and queer performance and photographic work, and has been usefully theorised by Lorenz as ‘“transtemporal drag”: […] an embodied intervention in time and temporality.’95 It is one of the methods employed by Phil Sayers and his longterm collaborator Rikke Lundgreen. Sheila MacGregor notes of their process: By literally putting themselves into the picture and masquerading as its protagonists, they create moments of disjuncture, which disrupt our response to paintings or sculptures we know (or think we know) well […], sometimes bringing out the absurdities of the original in a manner that verges on parody and sometimes entering into the spirit of the action with every appearance of empathy.96

In the case of Sayers, an aspect of the ‘disjuncture’ and ‘masquerade’ created is effected by his presentation of a transvestite identity in his reconstruction of female characters; a presentation which is constant and consistent in his artwork and which: […] necessarily draws attention to gender representation as a state of perpetual negotiation or flux, fixed only by the momentary artifice of appearance.97

94

M. Garber, Veiled Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety, New York and Abingdon, Routledge, 1997, p. 342. Edited thus, and cited in Lorenz, op. cit., p. 97. 95 Lorenz, ibid., p. 94. 96 S. McGregor, ‘Cross-Purposes: Looking Again at Victorian Collections’ in P. Sayers and R. Lundgreen, Changing Places, Bury, Bury Art Gallery Museum and Archives, 2007, pp. 12-14. 97 Phil Sayers, [website], ND, http://www.philsayers.co.uk/, (accessed 8 February 2016). There is insufficient space here to look at Lundgreen’s work in depth.

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Figure 20. Shalott (after J.W. Waterhouse) by Phil Sayers, 2008. (combination of 5x4 transparency and digital photographs). With thanks to Phil Sayers for his kind permission to reproduce this photo. Sayers’ reconstruction of female figures from gallery works is feminist; and primarily concerned with a female morphology and with the historical experience of women as represented in and through art. He says of the Changing Places exhibition, which included a reconstruction of Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott:

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7. Trans*tastic Morphologies […] these works predominantly relate to representations of women from the 18th- early 20th Century. Some challenge these icons of high culture by revealing and questioning their underlying misogyny and prurience, others simply celebrate womanhood.98

Whilst maintaining masculine pronouns, Sayers lives and works as a woman, and refers primarily to himself in interviews as ‘a transvestite’. His inscription of a transvestite self into the artwork points to a wider queer politics which notes the continuum of discrimination against Trans* people from history to the present day, and which also serves through its exhibition, to provoke and reveal layers of hetero- and cis -normativity and bigotry encoded within gallery spaces and some of their visitors. His reconstruction of Waterhouse’s Circe received trans*abusive and ignorant comments in the visitors’ book when exhibited at the Lady Lever Gallery, Liverpool in 2007. When he mounted the exhibition at Leeds in 2008, he reframed the work and etched the Liverpool visitors’ comments into the frame: Waterhouse’s Circe is a typical C19th depiction of a predatory femme fatale. Gender politics may have shifted since then, but there is still fear & suspicion of transsexuals, transvestites or those inbetween. The goddess Circe could transform men into pigs, but Sayers’ Circe has the power to transform some gallery visitors into ignorant swine as shown by their negative comments […] ‘Wonderful apart from the awful transvestite pornography.’‘Shame about the perverse transsexual photography. Horrid.’ ‘HOW SAD! The photographs of the transvestite detract from a wonderful exhibition.’ etc, etc.99

Dorothy Rowe writes of Sayers’ reworking of the insults that he ‘leave(s) viewers in little doubt as to their intended porcine associations’. She notes however that in his work: […] interpretative meanings and possible outcomes are neither stable nor predetermined: ignorance can just as easily become enlightenment (and vice-versa). Negative critiques of transgendered politics […] are confronted head-on and reinscribed into a renewed ground for the viewer’s engagement in which the frame becomes a metonymic passe-partout unlocking the doors to the deliberate potential of viewing uncertainties.100

98

‘Changing Places’, Phil Sayers, ibid. ‘Waterhouse’, Phil Sayers, ibid. 100 D. Rowe, ‘Of Mimesis, Magic and Metamorphosis’ in P. Sayers and R. Lundgreen, Changing Places with Leeds, UK, InSite Arts Ltd., 2008, pp. 24-25. 99

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Such deliberate destabilisation of viewing certainties and the potential opened up by the shift in perspective is at the heart of most feminist and queer art. The ‘repeat-return’ frequently occurs with this method of reconstructing and subverting historical images, as a mode of both reinscription and of facilitating encounters between bodies in the past and in the present. As Lorenz notes: Transtemporal drag could thus be viewed as a method by which it is possible to ‘go back into the event, to take one’s place in it as in a becoming.’ It […] facilitate[s] an encounter between contemporary bodies and the historical body with all its connections, which can do justice to the ‘otherness’ of the historical images while still making them available for future becomings.101

Through his entering and re-entering of the Circe image, firstly in a reconstruction of Waterhouse’s original, and secondly in his reworking of the frame of his original picture to reflect back some contemporary attitudes to Trans* experience and identity to the gallery visitor, Sayers affirms the queer optimism that seeks opportunity for new metamorphoses and ‘becomings’ in the face of repression and ignorance. Sayers’ inhabiting of female figures in the Changing Places exhibition opened up a Trans* morphology latent in many Pre-Raphaelite works. It enabled me to explore a more direct Trans* masculine subject position through the Lady of Shalott. This work marked a move from my explorations of morphology through female subjectivity (progressed by my use of the naked body) to a liberating exploration of the body as an object; marked initially by a playing with abstraction through materials – primarily foil or cardboard – and later through active and intentional transvestism (trans* male vestism) and ‘dragging’ more common to explorations of female masculinity.102 In recent years, I have extended this to include genderqueer and Trans*-welcoming nude working within male/female

101

Lorenz, op. cit., p. 109. There is insufficient space here to discuss the Unquiet Susan project (see ‘Repertoire’, Cast-Off Drama, op. cit.), and my exploration of Malory’s Lancelot and Shakespeare’s Mercutio through Tony Bevan’s Tender Possessions and The Meeting; but I note it of relevance to this chapter and will write on this further in a future publication. I extend warm thanks to Tony Bevan for his kindness in giving permission for this image featuring his work to be reproduced here. Whitechapel Art Gallery, Tony Bevan: The Meeting, London, 1993. 102

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binaried life-model workshops allowing for deeper discussion of the relative importance and non-importance of anatomy in determining gender.103

Figure 21. Water, the ‘Modelworks’ project. Cast-Off Drama, 2010.104

Morphology 8 Singing: Air corresponds closely to a possible female imaginary; it is both mobile and immobile, permanent and flowing, with multiple temporal punctuations possible […].105

103 104

See ‘PACE 12 – Saturday Moots/Sunday Club’, ibid. See ‘PACE 7 – Modelworks’ Cast-Off Drama, op. cit.

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Figure 22. Becoming the Knight – a singing exploration of Shakespeare’s Mercutio. Unquiet Susan Cast-Off Drama (2014). Working from Tender Possessions by Tony Bevan (1986). With thanks to Tony Bevan and Leeds Art Gallery.106

105 106

Whitford, loc. cit. See ‘Repertoire’, Cast-Off Drama, op. cit.

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Lorenz, R., Queer Art: A Freak Theory, Bielefeld, transcript Verlag, 2012. McGregor, S., ‘Cross-Purposes: Looking Again at Victorian Collections’ in P. Sayers and R. Lundgreen, Changing Places, Bury, Bury Art Gallery Museum and Archives, 2007. Malory, T., Le Morte D’Arthur, USA, W.W. Norton, 2004. Marxist Literary Criticism, ‘Walter Benjamin (1936): The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, [website], ND, https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benja min.htm, (accessed 18 February 2016). Miglietti, F.A., Extreme Bodies: The Use and Abuse of the Body in Art, Milan, Skira Editore S.p.A, 2003. Munson, K., On Reflection: The Art of Margaret Harrison, Pacifica, California, Neurotic Raven 2015. Pearsall, D., Arthurian Romance: A Short Introduction, Malden, Oxford, Melbourne and Berlin, Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Pollock, G., Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories, London and New York, Routledge, 1999. Prettejohn, E., The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, revised paperback reissue. London, Tate Publishing, 2010. Ricks, C., Tennyson, 2nd edition, Berkley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1989 [1972]. Robertson, S.M., Rosegarden and Labyrinth: A Study in Art Education, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1963. Robinson, H., Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women, London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2006. Rowe, D., ‘Of Mimesis, Magic and Metamorphosis’ in P. Sayers and R. Lundgreen, Changing Places with Leeds, UK, InSite Arts Ltd., 2008. Sparrow, W.S. (ed.), Women Painters of the World from the Time of Caterina Vigri -1413-1463 - to Rosa Bonheur and the Present Day, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1905. Stanislavski, K., An Actor’s Work, trans. J. Benedetti, London and New York, Routledge, 2008, pp. 48-59. Stryker, S., ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix’: Performing Transgender Rage’ in S. Stryker and S. Whittle (eds.), The Transgender Studies Reader, New York, Routledge, 2006, pp. 245-256. Stuart, I. (ed.), Edward Bond Letters 5, London and New York, Routledge, 2002. Sullivan, A., Virtually Normal, An Argument About Homosexuality, London, Picador, 1996.

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Sullivan, N., A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 2003, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. Tennyson, A., ‘The Lady of Shalott’, in The Complete Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, London, MacMillan and Co., 1909. —. ‘Idylls of the King: Lancelot and Elaine’ in R. Barber (ed.), The Arthurian Legends: An Illustrated Anthology, The Boydell Press, Suffolk, UK and Rochester, USA, 1979. ‘The Lady of Shalott (1832) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson’, The Poetry Foundation, [website], ND, www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174626, (accessed 13 June 2014). Thorpe, L., The ‘Lancelot’ in the Arthurian Prose Vulgate, Illinois, Dept of English, Wheaton College, Illinois, 1980. Tucker, H.F., Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism, Cambridge, Massachusettes and London, Harvard University Press, 1988. Walters, L.J. (ed.), Lancelot and Guinevere: a casebook, New York, Garland Publishing, 1996. Waterhouse, John William, Artist File, Archives, Leeds Art Gallery. Whitechapel Art Gallery, Tony Bevan: The Meeting, London, 1993. Whitford, M., Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, London and New York, Routledge, 1991. Youtube, Fascinating Aida: very funny OFSTED song for teachers, [website], ND, https://youtu.be/d13gX-1HJg4, (accessed 11 December 2016).

8. DRAG KING PRACTICES AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST CIS-NORMATIVITY: SOME INSIGHTS FROM THE ITALIAN SCENARIO DR OLIVIA FIORILLI AND DR MICHELA BALDO

Drag King as a Set of Practices ‘Drag kinging’ emerged in the United States in 1980s as a set of practices enacted by people – generally, but not necessarily, assigned ‘female’ at birth – who intentionally performed masculinit(ies) on the stage, in workshops, or in other contexts and settings. Drawing on the now canonical definition provided by Del LaGrace Volcano, we could provisionally define a Drag King as a person who – regardless of their gender – ‘consciously makes a performance out of masculinity’.1 Most scholars agree on the fact that male impersonators, cross-dressers and a plethora of figures that Halberstam lists under the umbrella term of female masculinities, are all part of the genealogy of the Drag King phenomenon (see for instance Greco).2 On the other hand ‘Drag King’ only emerged as a discrete category at the end of the 1980s in the United States and United Kingdom where the term started to be used to refer to a phenomenon that spread (predominantly) in queer/dyke bars where drag kings would participate in King-Contests or exhibit in performances where parody, camp, eroticism and gender-fucking strategies were all used or mixed, as detailed by Halberstam and LaGrace Volcano (1999), Troka, Lebesco and 1

D. LaGrace Volcano, and J.J. Halberstam, The Drag King Book, London and New York, Serpent’s Tail, 1999, p. 16. 2 J. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, Durham, Duke University Press, 1998. 2014a. L. Greco, ‘Un soi pluriel: la présentation de soi dans les ateliers Drag King. Enjeux interactionnels, catégoriels et politiques’, in N. Chetcuti and L. Greco (eds.), La face cachée du genre, 2014, pp. 63-83. 2014b. L Greco, ‘Tout que vous avez tujour voulu savoir sur les drag kings sans ... Gender fucking masculinités/féminités, et tout le reste? (version drag king)’, in Miroir/Miroiresrevue des corps contemporaines, vol. 2, 2014, pp. 27-39.

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Noble (2002), Hasten (1999) and Bourcier (2006).3 From the 1990s onward these performances have also spread around continental Europe. Beyond the performances on stage, the phrase ‘Drag King’ was also deployed in workshops. In the genealogy of Drag King workshops we find the figure of a trans man, Johnny Science,4 a musician, activist and makeup artist, who claimed the paternity of Drag King workshops and of the word Drag King itself. In the workshops that he organised in New York at the beginning of the 1990s he did the make-up of the participants but also gave lectures on phalloplasty. Other popular workshops were the legendary ‘King for a Day’ (nowadays known as ‘Man for a Day’) ones, conducted by performance artist Diane Torr. In these workshops Torr taught – and still teaches5 – to a predominantly ‘female-assigned’ audience how to perform a credible masculinity with the help of some material prostheses such as chest binding, beard or moustaches made out of one’s own hair (or of other material), and packing filled with cotton. The workshops also teach how to perform masculinity through what could be defined as ‘immaterial prostheses’ such as bodily attitudes, postures, gestures, that is, the techniques du corps (‘body techniques’) that allow the participants to ‘pass’ as cis-gendered men and to experience new possibilities offered by their bodies. At the beginning of the 2000s, workshops started to spread also in Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, as documented by Marie Hélène Bourcier (2006), Paul B. Preciado (2008), Arnaud Alessandrin (2014) and Luca Greco (2012, 2014a, 2014b).6 3

LaGrace Volcano and Halberstam, op. cit.; D.J. Troka, K. Lebesco, and J.B. Noble, The Drag King Anthology, Binghamton, New York, Harrington Park Press, 2002; L. Hasten, ‘Gender Pretenders: A Drag King Ethnography’, PhD Thesis, Columbia University, 1999, see also L.W. Hasten Renaissance Transman, Gender Pretenders: A Drag King Ethnography, PhD Dissertation, New York City, Columbia University 1999, [website], 2015, http://www.laurenhasten.com/genderpretenders.html, (accessed 18 February 2016), and M.H. Bourcier, Queer Zones. Politiques des identités sexuelles et des savoirs, Paris, Éditions Amsterdam, 2006. 4 More information on Johnny Science can be found at this blog: ‘Johnny Science (1955 – 2007): Musician, Activist, Make-Up Artist’, A Gender Variance Who’s Who [web blog], ND, http://zagria.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/johnny-science-1962007-musician.html#.VPyYuVbF, (accessed 18 Feb 2016), and also in D. Torr, and S. Bottoms, Sex, Drag, and Male Roles. Investigating Gender as Performance, Michigan, The University of Michigan Press, 2010. 5 See the description of Torr’s workshops, Torr and Bottoms, ibid. 6 Bourcier, op. cit., Chetcuti and Greco, op. cit., Greco, 2014a, 2014b, op. cit., B. Preciado, Testo Junkie, Paris, Grasset, 2008, and A. Alessandrin, ‘DRAG KING:

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The Drag King world is profoundly diverse and inhabited by many gendered subjectivities. It is populated by trans*7 and cis people, by people who experience or do not experience forms of transphobia or cissexism – that Julia Serano defines as the assumption that ‘transsexual genders are distinct from, and less legitimate than, cissexual genders’ – or, more broadly, the consequences of cis-normativity: that is why we prefer exploring Drag King as a ‘set of practices’ rather than as a gendered identity.8 Furthermore, talking about Drag King as a set of practices can help us making sense of the different ways in which kinging is experienced and conceived. People can experience drag kinging occasionally, maybe in a workshop or in the context of a party or a day out; other people might practise it for a sustained period of time, either on the stage or outside of it. Some people might use it in the context of queer/transfeminist political activism as a tool for ‘queering public space’ or in the context of post-porn activism as a technique to destabilise normalised gender and sexuality patterns.9 Some people might practice kinging with the purpose of exploring or working on their own subjectivities and desires, what Preciado calls the ‘post-pornografic effect’ of drag kinging, or again with the purpose of interrogating, questioning and displacing gender and the gender binary.10 Some people practice Drag King with the purpose of shedding light on the toolkit of ‘gender expression’ and on the mechanisms that regulate the way bodies are read and processed in social interactions. Some people might do Drag King with the purpose of exploring the norms and social expectations that frame and regulate the possibilities of our bodies, while others simply do it for fun. For some the retour sur un atelier mixte’, Miroir/Miroires-revue des corps contemporaines, vol. 2, 2014, pp. 39-47. 7 Trans* people – men, FtMs, FtXs and people in the masculine spectrum but also, in some cases, women and MtFs – who embraced and still embrace drag king practices, both on stage or in occasional situations such as workshops, have been and still are many – see Alessandrin, op.cit., Troka, Lebesco and Noble, op. cit., E. Shapiro, ‘Dragkinging and the Transformation of Gender Identities’, Gender and Society, vol. 21, no. 2, 2007, pp. 250-271 and C. Boeuf, M. Diamond et al., ‘Masculinités queer, trans et post-trans: les rejetons du féminisme’, Cahiers du Genre vol. 45, no. 2, 2008, pp. 85-124. 8 J. Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, Emeryville, CA, Searl Press, 2007, p. 162. 9 See R. Borghi, ‘Questo porno che non è un porno’, in S. Marchetti, J. Mascat and V. Perilli (eds.), Femministe a parole, Ediesse, Roma, 2012, pp. 219-223 and also M. Sola and E. Urko, Transfeminismos: epistemes, fricciones y flujos, Navarra, Spain, Txalaparta, 2013. 10 Preciado, op. cit., p. 161.

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experience of kinging can be a mix of the above-mentioned ‘ingredients’. Again, for some people drag kinging might constitute a substantial element of their identity or subjectivity, while for others this is not the case. Finally, some kings might claim a position in the trans* community/umbrella for the simple fact of practising drag, some might not. Therefore, rather than asking who Drag Kings are – and whether or not all Drag Kings are trans* or have a legitimate position in the ‘trans* umbrella’ – we will rather focus on what Drag King practices (can) do, and will ask the following questions: can Drag King practices become tools for anti-transphobic politics? Or, on the contrary, can Drag King practices become problematic in relation to the struggle against cisnormativity and transphobia? While the harshest ‘wars’ that have developed within the ‘masculine continuum’11 have been mainly fought on the butch/FtM borderlands, kinging has not been exempt from struggles and criticism. For instance, Bradford reports that some butch and trans* people are offended by some approaches to Drag King as ‘the idea of gender being performed or parodied seems to contradict their daily struggle’.12 Indeed trans* activists and scholars have underlined the possible side-effects of the use of drag as a way to illustrate that ‘gender is performance’, as affirmed by many with an oversimplification of the Butlerian theorisation on ‘the performativity of gender’.13 The possible implication of this simplification are exemplified by Serano14 who writes:

11

Halberstam, Female Masculinity, op. cit., p. 151. K. Bradford, ‘Grease Cowboy Fever, or the Making of Johnny T.’, Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 43, no. 3-4, 2003, p. 26. 13 Butler theorisation has also raised criticism from some scholars, namely J. Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, New York, Coumbia University Press, 1998 and V.K. Namaste, Invisible Lives. The Erasure of Transsexuals and Transgendered People, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000. See also T.M. Bettcher, ‘When Selves Have Sex: What the Phenomenology of Trans Sexuality Can Teach About Sexual Orientation’, Journal of Homosexuality vol. 61, no. 5, 2014, pp. 605-620. 14 J. Serano, ‘Performance Piece’, in K. Bornstein and S. Bergman (eds.), Gender Outlaws, Berkeley, Seal Press, 2010, pp. 87-88. It is worth clarifying that Serano is not contrary to the inclusion of drag queens and kings in the ‘trans gender umbrella’. See also J. Serano, Whipping Girl, [web blog], ND, http://juliaserano.blogspot.pt/2014/04/a-few-thoughts-on-drag-trans-womenand.html (accessed 18 February 2016). 12

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I know that many contemporary queer folks and feminists embrace mantras like ‘all gender is performance’, ‘all gender is drag’ and ‘gender is just a construct.’ They seem empowered by the way these sayings give the impression that gender is merely a fiction, a façade, a figment of our imagination, endlessly mutable and malleable. It is easy to fictionalise an issue when you’re not aware of the many ways in which you are privileged by it. Almost every day of my life I deal with people who insist on seeing my femaleness as fake […]. People who insist on third-sexing me with labels like MTF, boy-girl, he-she, she-male, ze&hir – anything but simply female. Because I’m transsexual, I am sometimes accused of impersonation or deception when I am just trying to be myself.

For Serano gender feels ‘too real’, a work of non-fiction and social gender is not propagated because of the way people ‘do or perform it’ but because of the way they are perceived and interpreted by others.15 We could legitimately reply that one of the reasons why in a structurally transphobic society trans* people are often perceived as ‘evil deceivers or make believers’ – to use Bettcher's formula16 – is precisely because cis-normativity operates through the assumption that gender is an ontological quality of bodies,17 and that cissexual genders are the ‘primary’, ‘real’ version of genders.18 In this sense affirming - in theory and practice – that ‘all gender is performance’, and that there is no necessary connection between gender and body shape, should point instead exactly to the fact that there is no such thing as a ‘true’ man and woman or a ‘true/biological/original’ male body – ‘male bodies’, just as men, come in all shapes19 as gender assignation at birth is a social operation20 - and that the masculinity of cis men is not more ‘ontological’ or ‘truer’ than the masculinity of trans men or people assigned female at birth. Indeed both the deconstruction of the categories of ‘real’, ‘authentic’ men and women, and the complication of these categories as to account for the fact that they include both cis and

15

Serano, Whipping Girl, op. cit., p. 194. T.M. Bettcher, ‘Evil Deceivers and Make Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion’, Hypatia vol. 22. no. 3, 2007, pp. 43-45. 17 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, op. cit. 18 Serano, Whipping Girl, op. cit. 19 ‘Assigned Male’, [web blog], ND, http://assignedmale.tumblr.com/post/108536931142/i-wasnt-born-a-girl-i-am-aman-and-this-is-my (accessed 29 April 2015). 20 A. Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, New York, Basic Books, 2000. 16

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trans* men and women, can be vital strategies to challenge the assumptions through which transphobia operates.21 But Serano’s words, which are voiced also by Califia22 for example, alert us to the possible risks that are embedded in this insistence on the malleability and fictionality of gender. For instance, the risk of trivialising the lives and needs of those trans* people who experience gender as perfectly stable and who don’t consider themselves as being ‘beyond the binary’23 who face – among the other things – the painful consequences deriving from mis-gendering and gender invalidation. Or, again, the risk of unintentionally making invisible those to whom a stable modification of the body is important in order to fully express their sense of embodied self and their gender.24 Now, we must consider that one of the ways in which ‘institutional transphobia’ manifests itself is the difficulty with which a good quality and public funded trans-related health care can be accessed. Unfortunately the access to gender affirming medical procedures is still nowadays dependent on the ability – both collective and individual – of those people who desire or need these procedures to have their desires and needs considered ‘real’, ‘taken seriously’ and recognised as authentic and thus worth being fulfilled. Considering this, we must definitely pay attention to the possible side effects of drag euphoria with the idea that ‘gender is (just) performance’ and take into account the positionality of those who make the claim. Furthermore, we must pay attention to another possible risk of kinging, that is: when drag is perceived and used as a mere ‘gender game’ or ‘masquerade’ – and this could happen outside of depoliticised/antitransphobic contexts – where ‘true women’ play the game of taking up a ‘male persona’, it could ultimately sustain the heteronormative and transphobic framework according to which all those who were assigned female at birth ultimately ‘are women’. This risk is well expressed by Sennett and Bay-Cheng in their discussion of drag king and transgenderism, who alert us on the risks embedded in assuming a female

21

T.M. Bettcher, ‘Trans Identities and First Person Authority’, in L. Shrage (ed.) You Have Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 98-120. 22 P. Califia, Sex Changes. The Politics of Transgenderism, Cleis Press, San Francisco, 1997. 23 Bettcher, ‘Trans Identities’, op. cit. 24 Prosser, op. cit.

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gender and fixed body beneath a Drag King performance, whereas, as we have already said, Drag Kings come in all genders.25 Given these considerations in relation to why drag kinging is not intrinsically ‘anti-transphobic’, nor intrinsically ‘subversive’, in the second part of this article we will try to outline some of the ways in which Drag King practices can, in our opinion, contribute to anti-transphobic politics and to the struggle against cis-normativity. Our considerations are based on our own experience and research in UK and Italy where we practised kinging and where we co-edited (together with Rachele Borghi) an anthology of photos, texts and essays on Drag King entitled Il Re Nudo. Per un archivio drag king in Italia (The Naked King. Towards a Drag King Archive in Italy).26 Our individual practices and self-identifications have certainly added complexity to the way in which our project was conceived. For me, Olivia (Roger) Fiorilli, my first approach to kinging dates back to 2009, when I attended a Drag show held by the Italian Drag troupe The Eyes Wild Drag in the frame of the queer/feminist festival Ladyfest Roma. In 2011 I took part for the first time as a participant in a Drag King Workshop held in the self-managed social space La Torre in Rome. From then on I kept on practising kinging occasionally as an amateur and I continued to take part in DIY/DIT (do it yourself/do it together) Drag King workshops both as participant and as facilitator. Drag King practices have not only been an important tool in my transfeminist and queer activism, but have also had a role in my life journey as a genderqueer/non-binary person. As for me, Michela Baldo, my first approach to kinging dates back to 2007 in Manchester when I started DIY Drag King with a group of friends in my nights out to parties or to the gay village. Subsequently, I became interested in the phenomenon from a more academic point of view after the encounter in 2009 with the Italian drag troupe The Eyes Wild Drag and the participation to workshops organised by them in Rome in more recent years. Although I define myself as a cis-woman, drag kinging has played a major role in my exploration of the mechanisms of gender construction, and specifically in my personal and political investigation of queer 25

J. Sennett and S. Bay-Cheng, ‘I am the Man! Performing Gender and Other Incongruities’, Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 43, no. 3-4, 2003, pp. 39-48. 26 M. Baldo, R. Borghi and O. Fiorilli (eds.), Il re nudo. Per un archivio dragking in Italia, Pisa, ETS, 2014.

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femininity against cis-normativity, and has ultimately influenced my queer transfeminist agenda.

Italian Drag Kings: Cis-Privileges and Transphobia The first (recorded) Drag King performances in Italy date back to the end of the 1990s in northern Italy, in cities like Milan and Turin.27 Turin, more specifically, witnessed the timid appearance of a Drag King scene born in the context of dyke-lgbt parties at the end of the 1990s, from which the Drag King troupe Barbìs would later emerge. However, it is at the beginning of 21st century that the phenomenon started to blossom in Italy, after a workshop held in 2005 by writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado28 and a month-long laboratory held in 2006 by Gustavo Lagnokka in Rome. These events saw the formation, in the spring/summer 2006, of a troupe made of Drag Kings and Faux Queens, The Butterfly Kings,29 which fell apart a year later, in 2007, giving birth respectively to the Eyes Wild Drag and the Kings of Rome (who disbanded in 2008). Drag King workshops played a pivotal role in the emergence and growth of the Drag King phenomenon in Italy. While the abovementioned more structured drag groups also used to organise, and still organise, workshops, given the DIY/DIT spirit of the Drag King phenomenon in Italy, workshops were also organised by people who were not experienced performers, often in the context of feminist and queer events and with the support of political spaces and organisations. In recent years Drag King workshops have been held all over the country, in cities as diverse as Bologna, Catania, Firenze, Milano, Padova, Pisa, Rho, Roma, Torino, Trento, Sassari (and many more), and the phenomenon is still very vital. While most of the Anglophone/North-American scholarship on Drag King, has focused on performance analysis,30 this paper focuses on the practice of kinging in the context of the workshop. In fact what interests us is not the effect of Drag King on its audience, but rather its effects on 27

Halberstam and LaGrace Volcano, op. cit. In April 2005 Paul B. Preciado held a workshop in Prato during the festival Outlook-tendenze lesbiche organised by Arcilesbica. 29 On the history of this group see the account given by Julius Kaiser, now active as a performer and part of the artistic duo Kyrahm and Julius Kaiser – ‘Human Installations: Kyraham + Julius Kaiser’, [website], ND, http://www.humaninstallations.com/, (18 February 2016). 30 Non Anglo-American authors such as Luca Greco however, have focused on workshops. 28

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those who practise it.31 More specifically, we are interested in those who practise kinging in the context of the workshops as in this scenario the focus is on experimentation with one’s own body and gender, and what gets overtly thematised and discussed are the effects of ‘crossing boundaries’, assuming different perspectives and standpoints and being perceived as having another position in the net of power relations designed by gender norms. As various scholars such as Preciado have noted, workshops can really be privileged spaces where the technologies of gender,32 perceived as political and cultural constructions, can undergo an intentional process of critical and revolutionary deconstruction and re-construction, and where the gendered expectations that shape the possibilities of our bodies can be questioned and interrogated experientially. Many of the Drag Kings that participated in the book aforementioned, Il re nudo, by sending their pictures and creative texts, describe the workshops, where they created ‘their own king’ together with other participants, as ‘revealing’, ‘exciting’ and ‘erotic’, as spatial and temporal settings where one’s body image is ‘fragmented’ and ‘reassembled’ in a new shape.33 The workshops, as collective contexts where bodily experimentation is solicited and encouraged, can thus provide an affirmative space where kinging turns into a transformative practice that allows to experience one’s own masculinity in a safe environment. Not surprisingly, drag kinging can be one step or one element in one’s own process of coming out as trans*, as shown by the narratives and life-paths of various kings who took part in the book or whom we met during our experience with Drag King workshops. This is the case, for instance, of Massimo Tiberio, aka Max. For Massimo Tiberio, as he explains in the brief text that he proposed for inclusion in Il re nudo, together with a photo of himself, drag kinging has been a fundamental step in his coming out as trans. Very revealingly Massimo Tiberio thanks Drag King performers Julius and Jurij,34 the organisers of the first workshop he participated in, who gave him ‘the

31

Shapiro, op. cit.; Preciado, op. cit. T. De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender. Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1987. 33 Scarmoncin in Baldo, Borghi and Fiorilli, op. cit., p. 111. 34 Julius Kaiser and Jurij Zoltan Kurgan are former members of the Drag King troupe aforementioned, The Kings of Rome, which ceased their activity in 2008. Julius Kaiser has been conducting Drag King workshops, with the name: ‘Uomini non si nasce, si diventa’ (trans: You are not born a man, you become one) since 2007. He is now actively performing together with body performance artist Kyrahm. 32

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possibility to know this world’, and to find himself through drag kinging.35 Massimo Tiberio’s text could be read as a reminder that genders need a collective effort (a collective labour, we could say following Ward) in order to blossom and flourish.36. Recognition, support and healing are vital in order to fully embody one's own gender, especially when it breaks the rules of cis-normativity. Workshops can thus represent nurturing spaces where one's masculinity is likely to be recognised and celebrated or at least safeguarded. Indeed, even for those who do not arrive to self-identify as trans*, drag kinging per se and the experience of the workshop can provide new gender scripts and body patterns. As Eve Shapiro noted in her research with the Californian drag king troupe The Disposable Boy Toys, the participation in spaces and contexts where drag kinging is practiced collectively can ‘expand the way of being gendered’ that people can ‘imagine for themselves and others’.37 The workshops are often spaces where the possibilities for gender shifts, for transitions or for the full expression of one’s own gender are nurtured. In this sense we suggest that they can give a useful contribution to antitransphobic politics precisely because they create such positive spaces. Apart from learning the techniques of kinging, during the workshops participants are often invited to interact from the position of ‘a man’ with other people, both the other participants and the people met during the ‘walk out’ that usually takes place at the end of the workshop. That is, they are invited to enjoy the experience of being read (or trying to be read) as a cis man, to pass as one, which is something new for many. This implies thematising on issues such as positionality, embodiment and privilege. With reference to embodiment, many of the texts we received for inclusion in the book dealt with the discovery of how deeply the social expectations related to ‘femaleness’ can be incorporated, even by people who are not conventionally ‘feminine’, and how strongly these expectations shape and orient the possibilities of our bodies. In Il re nudo Tati aka Paolo, for 35

Baldo, Borghi and Fiorilli, op. cit., p. 41. J. Ward, ‘Gender Labor: Transmen, Femmes, and the Collective Work of Transgression’, Sexualities vol. 13, no. 2, 2010, pp. 236-254. These reflections have been elaborated during an informal e-mail exchange between Olivia Fiorilli, Alessia Acquistapace and Irene Miglioranza, activists of the transfeminist and queer group Consultoria queer di Bologna – see ‘Consultoria Queer Bologna’, [website], ND, http://consultoriaqueerbologna.noblogs.org, (accessed 18 February 2016). 37 Shapiro, op. cit., p. 262. 36

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example, affirms that she38 thought to be freed, at least in the use of her body as a woman, but the workshop made her realise how much she limits herself and how much her body is shaped by the social conventions and expectations attached to femaleness.39 Laura Sergiampietri aka Tommaso, on the same line, recognises that the kinging has been a moment of revelation of how difficult it can be to get rid of these social expectation as they are literally engrained in her body.40 However, more than the revelation of how much normative gender assumptions actively work to limit the possibilities of our bodies, drag kinging constitutes a way of experiencing the privileges of (dominant) masculinity in the public sphere as it grants the body new positionalities.41 Many Kings in Il re nudo, especially those who referred to the experience of bringing one’s king outside the safe space of the workshop, dealt with the striking discovery of how drastically the social interaction can change once one is perceived as ‘being a cis white man’42 as happened to many of the kings who participated in the book. Having ‘more space’, being invisible to ‘predatory’ and ‘objectifying’ gazes, being perceived as stronger, are some of the experiences many of the participants in the book wrote about. Fra, aka Drag King Danny for example, states that the experience of kinging made her experiment space for the first time differently as she had never realised before how little space her body used to occupy. Here are her words:

38 While for much of this article we use the pronouns he/him/his to refer to Drag Kings, when talking about the participants in the book Il re nudo we use the pronoun that they have chosen for themselves in their texts. We also refer to their names in the same order in which they wrote them. 39 Baldo, Borghi and Fiorilli, op. cit., p. 62. 40 ibid., p. 65. 41 See B. Noble, ‘Seeing Double, Thinking Twice: The Toronto Drag Kings and (Re-) Articulations of Masculinity’, Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 43, no. 3-4, 2003, pp. 251-261; also Torr and Bottoms, op. cit. 42 It is important to point out that the peculiar experiences of space and social interaction narrated by the participants of the book were, in most cases, derived as much from being read as (cis) men as from being read as white men. This is because in Italy, as elsewhere, ‘invisibility’ - to give but one example - is clearly connected to white male privilege and is not equally enjoyed by non-white men, who experience a great deal of scrutiny and policing. For a discussion on this point see Boeuf, Diamond et. Al, op. cit. On the other hand, it is worth noting that white men are ‘invisible’ only to other white (heterosexual) men.

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8. Drag King Practices and the Struggle against Cis-normativity I never realised how often I showed insecurity in the most common moments of my life, while walking at night head down, for example [...]. The drag king workshop has allowed me to become more aware of the borders of my body and the space surrounding it. I experimented about a lot of borders and realized how much I was imbued with some stereotypical feminine characters imposed upon me by education, thinks like I had to be quiet, well-mannered and gentle and occupy the space assigned to me. Often impersonating Danny gives me a sense of security.43

The participants of the workshops who took part in the book, or whom we encountered in Drag King spaces, experiment with the fact that as Drag Kings they can occupy more space, their spatial horizon is expanded. Moreover, as Kings they realise that they are ‘entitled’ to feel in charge of that space and not to worry about invading other people's space. This is confirmed in the book by Leandr* Monachino aka Gustavo Lagnokka aka Illud Shone, who affirms that, as a Drag King they had the feeling of owning their own space without having to beg for it. In their own words: I remember the first time I went out in the street as Gustavo. I did not speak, because the only thing that could put my ‘passing’ at risk was my voice. For the first time I experienced the self-confidence and safety which, in that context, only those who pass as men can experience: a feeling of safety coming from not being seen as a possible object of sexual interest, [or] as prey.44

These considerations are in line with what is generally explained during Drag King workshops in Italy, following the suggestions by Diane Torr on corporal attitudes involving gestures and the use of the voice.45 This has much to do, obviously, not only with masculinity, but also with race, class, dis/ability, and so on. However, these are not the only privileges that we think Drag King workshops can help map and visualise experientially. Among the texts that we received, one that struck us was a text that described an experience and a feeling that had much to do with cis-gender privilege. The words below are an extract from the text by Gina aka Drag King Pedro: In the car, going to party my doubts were growing. (Drag King) Ivan […] asked me: ‘Why are you so serious?’. I could not admit that I was petrified at the idea that we could have been stopped by the police for a routine 43

Baldo, Borghi and Fiorilli, op. cit., p. 72. ibid., p. 71. 45 Torr and Bottoms, op. cit. 44

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control. In that case I would have had to give some explanations. I did not even have an explanation for myself. Maybe going out ‘in king’ was not a good idea.46

It was, indeed, a good idea we believe: after that first experience Pedro loved kinging and kept on doing it, and also started performing on stage. But what we would like to highlight here is that Pedro experienced a type of discomfort or fear which can be very common for many trans* people whose legal gender does not match their gender and that is, all to the contrary, often unknown to those who experience some forms of cis privilege. More generally, practising king in the public space, a space that is not ‘safe’, and outside ritualised contexts of ‘gender play’, can put cispeople in the position of having a practical experience of some of the issues that are at stake when one risks to be seen as a ‘deceiver or make believer’. A risk that trans people experience due to the particular form of transphobia that Bettcher names ‘basic denial of authenticity’47 whereas ‘trans people are viewed contrary to our own self identifications’.48 Bettcher continues saying: ‘we are seen as people trying to pass as ourselves off as something we are not’. Usually ‘deceiver’ is reserved for trans people who pass as non-trans in the gender of our choice - but who are subsequently ‘exposed’ as ‘really’ another gender. By contrast, trans who are out (either through necessity or through self-disclosure) can be represented as pretenders – people who don’t necessarily ‘deceive’ but ‘play’ at being something that we are not.' Of course, in this case, the issue of positionality is particularly salient, as non-trans* or cis drag kings will not face the same kind of violence that trans* people face and, most importantly, they will not have the painful experience of having one's own gender invalidated and misrecognised. And still, as the workshops are often contexts where issues of positionality and privilege are generally explored through practice, we suggest that they can also become spaces of consciousness raising for those who experience some forms of cis privilege. Given the fact that Drag King workshops are often spaces for collective discussion and confront, they can also be spaces 46

Baldo, Borghi and Fiorilli, op. cit., p. 61. See also Bettcher, ‘Evil Deceivers’ op. cit., also T.M. Bettcher, ‘When selves have sex: what the phenomenology of trans sexuality can teach about sexual orientation’, Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 61, no. 5, 2014, pp. 605-620, especially his theorisation on ‘reality enforcement’. 48 T.M. Bettcher, ‘Understanding Transphobia: Authenticity and Sexual Abuse’, in K. Scott-Dixon (ed.), Trans/Forming Feminisms: Transfeminist Voices Speak Out, Toronto, Sumach Press, 2006, p. 181. 47

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where these particular set of issues can – and should, we suggest – be discussed. In fact, the potential for working practically and maybe playfully on issues connected to power, privilege, resistance and rebellion during Drag King workshops are enormous and are worth being expanded.

Conclusions This article has shown that despite the controversy surrounding drag kinging as a diverse set of practices that are not intrinsically aligned with an anti-transphobic agenda, Drag King workshops (for all the abovementioned reasons) can in fact provide an interesting and important tool in the struggle against cis-normativity and transphobia. Indeed, as we have seen, workshops can represent on the one hand positive and affirming collective spaces where bodily and gender experimentation and critical and revolutionary deconstruction and re-construction of gender norms can take place. The workshops can even be one element in a personal process of transitioning or can be simply a way to ‘expand the way of being gendered’. Even more importantly, Drag King workshops are spaces where one's own masculinity can be nourished and celebrated. On the other hand, and this is what we pointed out mainly in this article, Drag King workshops can become devices for consciousness- raising since they provide the opportunity, for their participants, through the walk out tour, to map and eventually discuss different forms of privilege, including cis privilege. In conclusion we could say that Drag King workshops can represent a precious tool in the struggle against cis-normativity and transphobia.

Bibliography Alessandrin, A., ‘DRAG KING: retour sur un atelier mixte’, Miroir/Miroires-revue des corps contemporaines, vol. 2, 2014, pp. 3947. ‘Assigned Male’, [web blog], ND, http://assignedmale.tumblr.com/post/108536931142/i-wasnt-born-agirl-i-am-a-man-and-this-is-my, (accessed 29 April 2015). Baldo, M., R. Borghi and O. Fiorilli (eds.), Il re nudo. Per un archivio dragking in Italia, Pisa, ETS, 2014. Bettcher, T.M., ‘Understanding Transphobia: Authenticity and Sexual Abuse’, in Scott-Dixon, K. (ed.), Trans/Forming Feminisms: Transfeminist Voices Speak Out, Toronto, Sumach Press, 2006, pp. 203–210.

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—. ‘Evil Deceivers and Make Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion’, Hypatia vol. 22. no. 3, 2007, pp. 43-45. —. Trans Identities and First Person Authority, in L. Shrage (ed.), You Have Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 98-120. —. ‘When Selves Have Sex: What the Phenomenology of Trans Sexuality Can Teach About Sexual Orientation’, Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 61, no. 5, 2014, pp. 605-620. Boeuf, C., M. Diamond et al., ‘Masculinités queer, trans et post-trans : les rejetons du féminisme’, Cahiers du Genre, vol. 45, no. 2, 2008, pp. 85124. Borghi, R., ‘Questo porno che non è un porno’, in S. Marchetti, J. Mascat and V. Perilli (eds.), Femministe a parole, Ediesse, Roma, 2012, pp. 219-223. Bourcier, M.H., Queer Zones. Politiques des identités sexuelles et des savoirs, Paris, Éditions Amsterdam, 2006. Bradford, K., ‘Grease Cowboy Fever, or the making of Johnny T.’, Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 43, no. 3-4, 2003, pp. 15-30. Califia, P., Sex Changes. The Politics of Transgenderism, Cleis Press, San Francisco, 1997. Connell, R., ‘Transsexual Women and Feminist Thought: Toward New Understanding and New Politics’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 37, no. 4, 2012, pp. 857-881. ‘Consultoria Queer Bologna’, [website], ND, http://consultoriaqueerbologna.noblogs.org, (accessed 18 February 2016). De Lauretis, T., Technologies of Gender. Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1987. Fausto-Sterling A., Sexing the Body, Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, New York, Basic Books, 2000. Greco, L., ‘Un soi pluriel: la présentation de soi dans les ateliers Drag King. Enjeux interactionnels, catégoriels et politiques’, in N. Chetcuti and L. Greco (eds.), La face cachée du genre. Langage et pouvoir des normes, Paris, Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2012, pp. 63-83. —. ‘Un soi pluriel: la présentation de soi dans les ateliers Drag King. Enjeux interactionnels, catégoriels et politiques’, in Chetcuti, N. et L. Greco (eds.), La face cachée du genre, 2014a, pp. 63-83. —. ‘Tout que vous avez tujour voulu savoir sur les drag kings sans... Gender fucking masculinités/féminités, et tout le reste? (version drag king)’, Miroir/Miroires-revue des corps contemporaines, vol. 2, 2014b, pp. 27-39.

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Halberstam, J., Female Masculinity, Durham, Duke University Press, 1998. Halberstam, J. and C.J. Hale, ‘Butch/FTM Border Wars: A Note on Collaboration’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 1998, pp. 283-285. Hale J., Consuming the Living, Dis(re)membering the Dead in the Butch/Ftm Borderlands, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 311-348. Hasten, L., ‘Gender Pretenders: A Drag King Ethnography’, PhD Thesis, Columbia University, 1999, see also L.W. Hasten ‘Renaissance Transman’, Gender Pretenders: A Drag King Ethnography, PhD Dissertation, New York City, Columbia University 1999, [website], 2015, http://www.laurenhasten.com/genderpretenders.html, (accessed 18 February 2016). ‘Human Installations: Kyraham + Julius Kaiser’, [website], ND, http://www.humaninstallations.com/, (18 February 2016). ‘Johnny Science (1955 – 2007): Musician, Activist, Make-Up Artist’, A Gender Variance Who’s Who [web blog], ND, http://zagria.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/johnny-science-196-2007musician.html#.VPyYuVbF, (accessed 18 Feb 2016). LaGrace Volcano, D., and J.J. Halberstam, The Drag King Book, LondonNew York, Serpent’s Tail, 1999. Namaste, V.K., Invisible Lives. The Erasure of Transsexuals and Transgendered People, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000. Noble, B., ‘Seeing Double, Thinking Twice: The Toronto Drag Kings and (Re-) Articulations of Masculinity’, Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 43, no. 3-4, 2003, pp. 251-261. Preciado, B., Testo Junkie, Paris, Grasset, 2008. Prosser, J., Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, New York, Coumbia University Press, 1998. Sennett, J. and S. Bay-Cheng, ‘I am the Man! Performing Gender and Other Incongruities’, Journal of Homosexuality vol. 43, no. 3-4, 2003, pp. 39-48. Serano, J., Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, Emeryville, CA, Searl Press, 2007. —. ‘Performance Piece’, in K. Bornstein and S. Bergman (eds.), Gender Outlaws, Berkeley, Seal Press, 2010, pp. 85-88. —. Whipping Girl, [web blog], ND, http://juliaserano.blogspot.pt/2014/04/a-few-thoughts-on-drag-transwomen-and.html (accessed 18 February 2016).

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Shapiro, E., ‘Dragkinging and the Transformation of Gender Identities’, Gender and Society, vol. 21, no. 2, 2007, pp. 250-271. Sola, M. and E. Urko, Transfeminismos: epistemes, fricciones y flujos, Navarra, Spain, Txalaparta, 2013. Torr, D., and S. Bottoms, Sex, Drag, and Male Roles. Investigating Gender as Performance, Michigan, The University of Michigan Press, 2010. Troka, D. J., K. Lebesco, J.B. Noble, The Drag King Anthology, Binghamton, New York, Harrington Park Press, 2002. Ward, J., ‘Gender Labor: Transmen, Femmes and Collective Work of Transgression’, Sexualities, vol. 13, no. 2, 2010, pp. 236-254.

9. CLAUDE CAHUN AND THE PRACTICE(S) OF CROSS-DRESSING, DRAG AND PASSING: GENDER, EROTICISM AND THE PROCESS OF BECOMING SUBJECT EVE GIANONCELLI

Cahun has been popularised, in particular in the field of queer theory and aesthetics, becoming, for instance, an icon in English Drag King culture. This interest is linked to Cahun's performance and gender questioning in ‘self-portraiture’.1 But what do we really talk about when we evoke the category of ‘masculinity’, ‘femininity’, or ‘performance’, in relation to Claude Cahun's activity? What is at stake in such a practice? I think that we need to make a distinction between queer theory and the ways it has been used by Cahun’s scholars, mainly art historians and literati and gay and drag cultures. Judith Butler became, for instance, a reference for Cahun’s critics, in particular in the UK and the USA,2 the latter being often presented as an anticipator of the philosopher’s theses. It is however surprising that researchers have been less tempted to reflect on Cahun’s 1

Some critics have suggested that the category of ‘self-portraiture’ is problematic to the extent that Cahun never used it – her photography was mainly a private activity – produced in collaboration with her lover, the artist Suzanne Malherbe/Marcel Moore who assisted Cahun in her photographic approach and notably illustrated her autobiographical work, C. Cahun, Aveux non Avenus (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions), Paris, Editions du Carrefour, 1930, reprinted in F. Leperlier (ed.), Ecrits (Writings), Paris, Jean-Michel Place, 2002. See also, T.T. Latimer, Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 2005. 2 The article by the art historian Laurie Monahan, published in 1996 seems to be a turning point. See L. Monahan, ‘Radical Transformations: Claude Cahun and the Masquerade of Womanliness’, in C. de Zegher (ed.), Inside the Visible, Cambridge Mass, The MIT Press, 1996, pp. 124-133.

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work by using categories which have been forged by queer theory and which can be very useful. If Cahun’s work has been mainly explored by reference to Butler’s theorisation of the imitative structure of gender, or the social coherence and continuity of gender identity, the categories of ‘cross-dressing’, ‘drag’, and ‘passing’ have been problematised less in the examination of her work. This formulation suggests that my aim is not to use these categories to enlarge the queer exploration of Cahun per se; rather it seems to me that they can help us problematise a major dimension critics have tended to put into brackets: that is the plurality of Cahun’s practices of the body. By distinguishing and articulating the categories of cross-dressing, drag and passing in Cahun’s plural production, through art and writing in particular, I propose to explore her problematisation of the question of gender, eroticism and becoming subject. The question of subjectivity needs first to be clarified. Cahun's scholars have often argued that Cahun's self-exploration ends in an absence of fixity which is a way to deny any stable meaning of identity, and focused on her investigation of a multiple or decentered subject, which may lead to the conclusion that it is impossible to know who the real Cahun is behind the many masks that she wears.3 It seems to me that these conceptions of identity and subjectivity tend to limit the question to some forms while excluding others. I am particularly concerned with what Cahun does in her work and want to suggest it would be accurate to read in this work a very process of becoming subject; that is the ways in which Cahun claims to exist as subject, and what this may mean. To do so, I first propose to question Cahun’s visual and textual crossdressing. Secondly, I will explore Cahun’s practice as an actress and performer in photography in the light of the categories of cross-dressing and drag. Thirdly, I want to reflect upon the display of femininity in a parodic mode by paying more attention to Cahun’s use of masquerade as related to the double process of androgynisation and eroticisation. Last but not least, it is my intention to highlight the ways in which Cahun may

3

See for instance, K. Kline, ‘In and Out of the Picture: Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman’, in Mirror, Images: Women, Surrealism and Self Representation, Massachusetts, MIT, 1998; J. Blessing, ‘Claude Cahun: Dandy Provocatrice’, in Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture, S. Fillin-Yeh (ed.), New York, New York University Press, 2001, pp. 185-203; S. Harris, ‘Coup d’oeil’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 24 no. 1, 2001, pp. 89-111; G. Doy, Claude Cahun, A Sensual Politics of Photography, London, I.B. Tauris, 2007.

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appear as the very figure of otherness and through masculinisation, reclaim her status as a thinking and creative subject.

Visual and Textual Cross-Dressing Cahun did not write that much about her work in general and the practice(s) of cross-dressing in particular. Her writings, however, reveal that this practice originated in her childhood. For instance, in her autobiographical writings known under the title Confidences au miroir,4 Cahun writes that she used, together with her step-sister and lover Suzanne Malherbe, to dress as a man while playing with other girls who were confined to female roles: Ayant couru les champs, ‘echelés’ les barrières avec les gamines du pays – l’une portait à ravir le charmant prénom: Justine – nous leur faisions jouer les rôles de femmes dans les comédies que nous composions (que j’écrivais), que nous mettions en scène – nous réservant les rôles masculins en pantalons et vestons.5

This recollection allows us to apprehend a process of Cahun’s practice of cross-dressing: her early association to masculinity. As a child Cahun disguises herself, as many children do, but the relation between childhood and cross-dressing is particularly interesting here because it’s the adult Cahun who mentions this and it therefore acquires a particular meaning in the light of her life. This child game matters for Cahun enough to be recounted in an autobiographical narrative. The retrospection also enables Cahun to formulate, albeit implicitly, something meaningful for her adult self; her lesbianism readable in the possible attraction contained in her reference to the ‘lovely first name’ (‘charmant prénom’) of Justine. Consequently, we can argue that by proceeding retrospectively, Cahun forces us to read this apparently innocent childhood game not only as part of her life but also as a process of her becoming subject through playing with gender roles. We can also notice the use of a meaningful bracket 4

Cahun’s biographer, François Leperlier compiled and edited the majority of her rediscovered work, both published and unpublished, in Ecrits (Writings), op. cit. See also, F. Leperlier, L’écart et la metamorphose, Paris, Jean-Michel Place, 1992; F. Leperlier, L’Exotisme intérieur, Paris, Fayard, 2006. 5 ‘Having run throughout the fields, climbed the barriers with the child girls of the country – one of them had the lovely first name: Justine – we made them perform the roles of women in the plays which we composed (that I wrote), which we staged – holding back for ourselves the male roles in trousers and jackets’, C. Cahun, ‘Confidences au miroir’, in Cahun, Ecrits, ibid., p. 606.

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typical of Cahun’s writing, that she used to write into her plays, also that writing was with her as an early activity. Significantly, cross-dressing is also part of it. At 17, Cahun begins to write in the familial journal, owned by her father, Le phare de la Loire. Textuality here appears as another modality of crossdressing which is made particularly acute in the light of the topic of the chronicle; fashion. First, it is legible in Cahun’s ambiguous signature, ‘M’. If, as Cahun’s biographer Leperlier suggests, we are to read this as meaning Mathilde, (her second name, also that of her maternal grandmother who she was close to), it seems to me that we need to pay more attention to this use. The chronicle is supposed to be written by a man – which Leperlier also suggests. If this is so we can assume that the initial M. could mean Monsieur, Mister in French. In some chronicles reprinted in Cahun’s writings, the enunciative position is clearly that of a man: Moi, ça m’est éga… Mettez mes pyjamas, fumez ma pipe et faites mes articles. Mais passez-moi votre kimono. Je servirai le thé, je mangerai les gâteaux, on me fera la cour… Non. Je suis généreux: Gardez votre part, Madame, c’est la meilleure.6

It is worth noting that the gendered enunciative position appears in a theatrical inversion of gender roles which fails in the very end, since the narrator reinstalls, in an ironic way, each protagonist in the symbolic order of gender. It conveys Cahun’s attention to gender roles and her attempt to challenge them, a move which appears even in these chronicles, where fashion is a way for Cahun to free women from their confinement, represented by clothes. This concern about gender is also visible in the few occurrences concerning the narrator’s gender identification upon which we can try then to speculate. It is actually a difficult task because in many cases there is no direct reference to gender. But considering Cahun’s acute awareness of 6

‘It does not matter to me/ Put on my pyjamas, smoke my pipe and write my articles/ But pass me your kimono/ I will pour tea, I will make the cakes, I will be courted…/ No. I am generous/ Keep your piece, Madam, it is the best one’. C. Cahun, ‘Les négligés’, Le phare de la Loire, reprinted in Cahun, Ecrits, ibid., pp. 440-441.

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gender identification; her will to blur gender boundaries and to question stereotypes from very early on in her writings, and her photographs as well, we could assert that the use of the initial and the refusal to be identified as a woman is, for Cahun, a way to insert herself into a tradition of authorship which has erased and forbidden the presence of women, and to position herself as an intellectual. Textual cross-dressing is then related to an intention to confrontationally place herself into writing. Theatricality is also part of Cahun’s early sketches. It appears that it is through processes of mise en abime for instance that Cahun can display dress as a tool for liberation for women. This is testified to by the short dialogue in a text meaningfully entitled sans entraves (Unhindered) between a tailor and a female customer in which Cahun recommends the lady to wear dresses which will facilitate her freedom of movement.7 The first appearance of Cahun as performing in writing can be viewed in a prose piece entitled Concours de grimaces (Funny Face Competition) in which through fancy dress again, Cahun points up the interchangeability of self and sex and emphasises the wearing of the face in place of the mask with change of face-paint corresponding to change of identity.8 Thus Cahun’s practice of the body is first characterised by the early practice of fancy-dress and textual and visual cross-dressing (through textuality in the second case) linked to theatricality; a process that she also experiences more literally through acting.

Between Cross-Dressing and Drag: Cahun as an Actress and Performer Cahun’s interest in cross-dressing was developed further by her involvement in theatre9. In its most familiar meaning ie. wearing the items of the opposite sex, cross-dressing is a theatrical practice in itself that dates back to the Greeks, also used in modernity and as a necessary and practical response to the exclusion of women from the stage. This means that the parody and subversion of gender norms, while allowed by crossdressing, were not the aim of such a practice. But this historical account 7

‘Demand the freedom for your step’ C. Cahun ‘Sans entraves’, in Cahun, Ecrits, ibid., p. 439. 8 C. Cahun, ‘Concours de grimaces’, in ibid., p. 444. 9 Cahun’s theatrical activity has been particularly explored by Miranda WelbyEverard. See M. Welby-Everard, ‘Imaging the Actor: the Theatre of Claude Cahun’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 29, no. 1, 2006, pp. 1-24.

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may also help us to be more attentive to the possible meaning of this activity for a woman, who, moreover, is concerned with a specific questioning of gender. Cahun’s performances are actually all the more interesting because she performs different gendered roles. In 1929, Cahun performs within the Théâtre ésotérique, and then the ephemeral company Le Plateau (The Stage) directed by the poet and playwright Pierre Albert-Birot. These two experiences have to do with an avant-garde and counter-traditional aesthetic considering theatre neither as the reflection nor the imitation of the world and reality; rather as an artificiality sensitive to Apollinaire’s claim according to which ‘theatre is not life’ and Jarry’s rebellion against the role of the theatre as the reproduction of the everyday. Le Plateau pays, more specifically, attention to another idea expressed by this leading figure of the Theatre of the Absurd, that of the critical transformation of the actor into a marionette. Artificialisation is thus at the core of the performance. According to Albert-Birot, the amateur, robotic and very precise aesthetic aims to deform and exaggerate reality, making its own fake dimension visible, in order to dehumanise the actor and though this, display pure expression and humanity.10 Gender transgression through performance is epitomised by the different gender roles performed by Cahun, and fixed in photography which charge this idea with a particular meaning. Indeed, Cahun plays three roles: Elle (She, The Wife) in Barbe-Bleue (Blue Beard), Monsieur (The Man) in Banlieue (Suburbs), and Le Diable (The Devil) in Les mystères d’Adam (The Adam Mystery). These three roles correspond to three differing gender roles, feminine, masculine, and androgynous. As Miranda Welby-Everard, writing about Cahun’s theatrical activity, suggested, the female role both points up the falsity of the broader theatrical tradition and is relevant to gender issues and Cahun’s lesbianism – which have surprisingly been overlooked by scholars concerning theatrical performance – to the extent that Cahun’s role, as a frigid wife who rejects male advances, allows her to deny female sexuality while assuming the status of victim.11 This idea enables us to problematise another dimension of cross-dressing, that might better fit into the category of drag, that is the way in which it can accentuate gender roles. Many 10

Birot expressed his views on theatre in particular in a review he founded entitled SIC. Cf. Sic: 1916-1919, Paris, Jean-Michel Place, 1980. 11 Welby-Everard, op. cit., p. 16

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critics have insisted upon the ways in which Cahun seems to anticipate and embody Butler's thesis on the imitative structure of gender. In Gender Trouble, Butler problematises this idea through the experience of the drag. The drag is the one who parodies gender norms, through the conception of gender as fundamentally performative.12 Like Cahun’s contemporary psychoanalyst Joan Rivière problematised at the same period, she performs in this sense a masquerade of femininity to the extent that she plays at being a woman.13 We can argue for instance that ‘Elle’ represents a parody of the feminine with her whitened skin, her darkened eyes, her pencilled brows and her bow-shaped and sparkling lips. ‘Monsieur’ (or ‘Mister’) that Cahun plays in Banlieue seems less a parody of the man than a performance of masculinity particularly relevant with Cahun’s face and body reshaped in every detail to display masculinity: from the most obvious, black suit with jacket and tie, way of standing, slicked hair-line; to the most subtle prominent ears, short neck, work on the expression of the mouth to appear less feminine, eyebrows slightly raised giving an impression of condescending attitude. This attitude recalls the aesthetic of the dandy with shaved head Cahun also practised in photography a few years before, also displaying herself as a drag in this. But then, surely, the thinness of the eyebrows, linked to femininity indicates the failure of the masculine performance? An attention to Cahun’s eyebrows in particular sheds doubt on the credible masculine nature of Cahun’s embodiment. The very thinness of the eyebrows seems rather to suggest a more feminine that masculine connotation. By presenting both masculinity, and the failure to achieve full masculinity in tension, justifies our reading of these images in terms of drag. Last but not least, the Devil figure, embodiment of gender ambiguity is also performed by Cahun, which forces us to read it as the necessary and subtle synthesis of performance. The classical iconography of the Devil is reshaped by Cahun’s extravagant costume, and is accompanied by feminine accessories, such as head-dress, necklace, earrings, and heeled shoes. We also notice the wearing of an androgynous helmet. Here, the parody of the symbols of sexual evidence is more visible 12 J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York, Routledge, 1990. 13 J. Rivière, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 10, 1929, reprinted in V. Burgin, J. Donald, and C. Kaplan (eds.), Formations of Fantasy, London, Routledge, 1986, pp. 35-44. The fundamental argument of Rivière’s idea here is that behind femininity, behind the mask, there is no real essence. Womanliness and masquerade collide.

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as Cahun’s apparent nipples above the costume exemplify – all the more meaningful because she will re-use it again in photography as we will later see. This analysis, related to gender, complicates the idea of artificiality that I outlined as part of the avant-garde theatrical aesthetic. In other words, artificiality is then part not only of general aesthetics, but also of the particular assumptions of these different gender roles. The marionette aesthetic can also be utilised in a gender performance that reveals femininity and masculinity as cultural codes. The continuity between Cahun’s theatrical activity and her photographs makes this clear. With the help of her partner Suzanne Malherbe/Marcel Moore, Cahun made photographs of the role she performed as an actress. We can read photography as a way to fix the performance, an immortalisation through pictures which is made all the more possible because fixity is also relevant to the aesthetics of the performance itself. The faces of the actor-puppets are like masks which have the counter-effect of the one we might assume at first sight: through artificialisation they do not simply dehumanise the actors but make them visible as performers, and as such display expression more vividly. The fixity is also that of specific gender embodiments. In this respect, Cahun well illustrates Butler’s thesis according to which gender consists in ‘a kind of imitation for which there is no original’,14 not only dealing with the particular experience of the drag, but through parody, ultimately revealing the impossibility for anyone to embody gender. In short, Cahun's parodic performance reveals gender as artificiality. So when Cahun catches ‘herself’ in photography, she also catches the fixity and the artificiality of gender codes, revealing their imitative structure. In this respect, theatrical experience highlights a double artificialisation, of body and gender codes themselves; the second one being not directly a consequence of the first one, but facilitated by it. Gender embodiments must also be read more specifically in terms of a subjectivity which is twofold: confrontation vis-à-vis tradition and identification. It is a shame that we are so poorly informed about the ways in which Cahun performed on stage.15 But we can go further considering the very meaning of cross-dressing here. If, as we said, the female 14

J. Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ in D. Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, Routledge, New York, 1991, p. 21. 15 M. Welby-Everard and T.T. Latimer nevertheless have reported on the implications of the theatre work on Cahun’s wider oeuvre and the ways in which she took part in her own mise en scène.

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impersonator, (men who ‘camp’ as women), is traditional in theatre, the contrary, i.e. where women perform as men impersonators is less true. When Albert-Birot performs the café owner as a woman in the satiric play Banlieue, he reproduces something meaningful but which is not a particular innovation proper to avant-garde theatre and which is not situated at a particular moment in its broader history. We should therefore question the extent to which Cahun’s performance as a man is charged with one particular meaning. To accept such a position for a female subject, which Cahun nominally was, is subversive to the extent that it means, here again, to insert oneself into a tradition which has erased women’s presence. By the very act of playing, Cahun thus counters a tradition of male-to-female drag which instates the presumption of the male as the universal. Secondly, it is worth noting that several elements indicate that Cahun identifies with her roles. Welby-Everard notes for instance that Cahun made the costume of the Devil she wears in the play herself.16 The identification is increased by her using of the photographs she made of Elle and the Devil in the photomontages which illustrate her autobiographical writing Aveux non avenus. For instance, in the second plate which opens chapter II, Cahun incorporates the picture of Elle among other life portraits, particularly asserting the porosity of the boundary between fiction and life which is at the core of her work in general and this one in particular. Elle appears twice and is discreetly placed at the centre of the picture above a dominant image of the author as a child, a little girl dressed in a white Pierrot costume holding the symbolic apple. Two series of multiplied images taken in a different snapshot and costume from that of The Adam Mystery portray the devil. This very presence proves Cahun’s identification with the sexually ambiguous character, especially as ‘he’ appears stripped of his pompous items. It is also underlined by the incorporation of Cahun’s posing as Satan – that of the Mystery this time – in the photomontage present in chapter two placed under the sign of homosexuality as the title following the photomontage indicates: ‘You don’t really think you are more of a pederast than I am.’ The theatrical experience thus allows us to problematise gender and Cahun’s practice of cross-dressing and performance as drag, and highlights forms of subjectivity through her confrontational gesture as a female subject entering female to male impersonation and identification. I 16

Welby-Everard, ibid., p. 21.

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would like now to turn more specifically to the question of sexuality through the problematisation of eroticism in particular which is a major concern in Cahun’s work, and to explore and to apprehend, through some of her photographs, the ways in which this theme is embedded with gender and modalities of ‘becoming subject’.

Masquerade, Androgynisation and Eroticism Let us first take for example a photograph in which Cahun presents ‘herself’ naked, seated in front of a quilt, her hair cut very short, wearing a mask, in a game of light which gives a very sensual dimension to the photograph. Her sex is suggested and her elbows hide her breasts. Her body is placed at the centre of the quilt, almost mixing with it, and the curves of her body echo those of the decoration. A game between shadow and light structures the representation, with some parts of Cahun’s taut body being darkened while its extremities (knees, feet) are whitened. This duality is echoed in Cahun’s mask, black and white, the second colour replacing the cheekbones, the eyebrows and the eyes, giving the impression of a blind look. Is this body gendered? On the one hand, Cahun’s position is hyperfeminine. But at the same time, the short hair and the mask counterbalance this very idea. Cahun’s performance is close to that of a female drag in the sense that she parodies femininity, which necessarily fails. Masquerade, in Rivière’s sense, casts doubt on the nature of the subject as female. Indeed, the feminine dimension of the body is put into question by the performance which is displayed as such, through a too-visible eroticisation. If eroticisation succeeds, it is not because of the very femininity of the pose but rather of the playful duality between femininity and androgyny, revelation and concealment which structures the whole representation: the enigmatic and tempting body can be read as such because of its very ambiguity. At the same time, Cahun’s position is here particularly interesting. If we look carefully at the photograph, we can notice a shadow at the right corner. While it has been erased in a number of reproductions, its presence is particularly meaningful. It reminds us in the indexical dimension of photography, that there is an observer – probably here her lifetime partner Suzanne Malherbe/Marcel Moore taking the picture – who will be presumably looking at its subject. Cahun’s blindness makes this presence all the more meaningful to the extent that it seems to transfer a major power to the

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viewer, especially considering the relationship between the two. Does it only mean that Cahun abandons herself to the viewer/photographer? It is rather plausible that Cahun wanted to deliver through this representation some kind of tension, between object and subject, revelation and concealment: ultimately, while blind, Cahun renders visible to the viewer what she wishes. This tension between revelation and concealment, objectification and subjectification which gives the aesthetic and erotic dimension to the photography can also be read in other photographs. Let us take for example another of Cahun’s most famous self-portraits, probably also taken in the late twenties. Cahun is seated, her legs crossed, holding weight-training weights in her hands. She is looking at the camera, pouting. She is costumed in boxer shorts, wrist guards, and a leotard inscribed with hearts and the admonition ‘I am in training, don’t kiss me’. A mouth is drawn under this, echoing Cahun’s own pout almost like a marionette; her face is also depicted with hearts on her cheekbones. As with the preceding photograph, femininity is here counterbalanced by the visible nipples on the costume, displayed in the same way than in the devil’s performance that we discussed earlier. The body presented by Cahun appears both infantilised and objectified. The woman-child-puppet conveys here again the constructed and imitative nature of gender. Cahun performs womanliness, in such a way that she casts doubt on the nature of the subject as female reinforced by the genderneutral and ambiguous components of the picture. Cahun enacts a dialogical game between giving and prohibiting oneself, as testifies the opposition between the feminine and suggestive pose and the explicit interdiction displayed on the torso. In this respect, she echoes the subject position of the preceding photograph, ultimately posing as a subject of desire. Being a lesbian helped Cahun problematise ambiguity of gender, which is thus made particularly relevant in her questioning about eroticisation. I now would like to explore the ways in which being a figure of otherness complicates the categories of drag and cross-dressing to help us better understand a dimension which is at the core of Cahun’s work; that is a particular process of becoming subject, and as knowing and creating subject.

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From Categorisation to Universality Let’s take here as a paradigmatic example, a photograph by Cahun probably taken around 1928 where she appears in profile, her arms folded, with very short hair, dressed in a sober jacket. Whitney Chadwick has suggested among others the ethnicisation and a mise en avant of her Jewish origins because of the aquiline nose made particularly apparent by the profile.17 Being a Jew but also a lesbian, which can be read in the androgynisation of the body, as Chadwick too suggests, enables Cahun to position herself as a figure of otherness. But we need to go further. This photograph cannot be read anymore in terms of parody. Rather, I want to argue here that the category of passing might better fit with Cahun’s body exposure. This reading is justified in the sense that Cahun does not here simply cross-dress as a man or parody masculinity; rather as a woman, she experiences masculinisation as a way to insert herself into intellectual and artistic tradition, coded as male. I suggest that representing ‘herself’ in such a way, Cahun defends a right she has claimed since her very early writing, as noted earlier, that is to position herself into an artistic and intellectual tradition. The portrait is actually all the more fascinating because it echoes a photograph portrait she made of her father, Maurice Schwob, in a very similar position. As Whitney Chadwick suggests: […] both photographs intervene in a representational territory that most often produces images of masculine power and intellectual force.18

Women are consequently excluded from this kind of representation rather depicted with the gaze confronting, or escaping the viewer but not in such a way. This implies that we have to understand how powerful and meaningful this self-representation is, being signed by a female subject who is also aware of her exclusion of the world of culture as a woman; and who struggles with herself, and a complex inheritance, to exist as an intellectual. Here, confronting tradition means for her both challenging male tradition in general, and that of the father, in particular, whose intellectual inheritance durably weighs on Cahun's shoulders and explains

17

W. Chadwick, ‘Claude Cahun and Lee Miller. Problematizing the Surrealist Territories of Gender and Ethnicity’, in T. Lester (ed.), Gender Nonconformity, Race and Sexuality, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, pp. 141-159. 18 ibid., p. 153.

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her qualms towards writing and creating.19 Thus the masculinisation of the body which peaks in a process of passing is also part of the making of the artist and the intellectual, traditionally coded and represented as masculine. This placement is subversive fundamentally because of Cahun's enunciative position – even though it is only readable because of what we know about her. She represents women’s place in culture and the awareness that she is included only insofar as she is not a woman and by doing so, also reveals her female subject position. Passing necessarily fails in this representation, because of the viewer’s involvement and what we know about Cahun. This failure is twofold: first, we are forced to see gender ambiguity in the process because of Cahun’s continuous problematising of gender and her assertion to be considered as ‘neutral.20 But this reading is based upon a deeper assumption: we cannot but not read that Cahun problematises here again, as a figure of otherness in general, and as ‘woman’ in particular, her confrontational position to exist as artist and intellectual. Thus, this portrait can be read as the subjectification of both a masculinised and undecipherable body which is also, and foremost, the body of a woman who is a thinker and a creator in this representation. It is a portrait of a woman who, by escaping the traditional code of femininity and adopting masculinised traits without simply embodying it – essentially, displaying her inauthentic masculinity – claims this position of a knowing, thinking and creating subject. This portrait epitomises the position of a figure of alterity as a lesbian, a Jew, and here, foremost, a woman who both knows and wants to dismiss the impossibility to exist as an artist and an intellectual, slipping back and forth from categorisation to universality. While being trapped in language, we may tend to reproduce unwittingly the binarity of categories; we need bodies and figures who force us to escape it, which Cahun’s multiple activities and problematising allows. Cahun’s very questioning of gender, connected to the mise en scène of desire, reveals a broader becoming subject than the one which has commonly been examined by critics. The tension between the multiplying of identity in Cahun’s work and her very erasure within in it cannot be 19

Cahun found it difficult to publish publicly, although she wrote prolifically in private. 20 ‘Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me’. Cahun Aveux in Cahun, Ecrits, op. cit., p. 366.

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only read in terms of self-dissolution of the subject. It appears that at least one modality of the process of ‘becoming subject’ does not disappear, but on the contrary reveals itself in Cahun’s work; that of countering and placing oneself into an intellectual and artistic tradition. The very radicalism of Cahun’s female masculinity may lie in this claim.

Bibliography Birot, P-A., Si : 1916-1919, Jean-Michel Place, Paris, 1980. Blessing, J., ‘Claude Cahun: Dandy Provocatrice’, in Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture, in S. Fillin-Yeh (ed.), New York, New York University Press, 2001, pp. 185-203. Butler, J., Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York, Routledge, 1990. —. ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in D. Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, New York, Routledge, 1991, pp. 1331. Cahun, C., Aveux non Avenus (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions), Paris, Editions du Carrefour, 1930. Chadwick W., ‘Claude Cahun and Lee Miller. Problematizing the Surrealist Territories of Gender and Ethnicity’, in T. Lester (ed.), Gender Nonconformity, Race and Sexuality, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, pp. 141-159. Doy G., Claude Cahun, A Sensual Politics of Photography, London, I.B. Tauris, 2007. Harris S., ‘Coup d’oeil’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 24, no. 1, 2001, pp. 89111. Kline K., ‘In and Out of the Picture: Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman’, in W. Chadwick (ed.), Mirror, Images: Women, Surrealism and Self Representation, Massachusetts, MIT, 1998. Latimer T.T., Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 2005. Leperlier F., Claude Cahun: L’écart et la metamorphose, Paris, JeanMichel Place, 1992. Leperlier, F. (ed.), Claude Cahun: ‘Ecrits (Writings)’, Paris, Jean-Michel Place, 2002. Leperlier, F., Claude Cahun : L’Exotisme intérieur, Paris, Fayard, 2006. Monahan, L., ‘Radical Transformations: Claude Cahun and the Masquerade of Womanliness’, in C. de Zegher (ed.), Inside the Visible, Cambridge Mass, The MIT Press, 1996, pp. 124-133.

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Rivière, J., ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 10, 1929, reprinted in Burgin, V., J. Donald and C. Kaplan (eds.), Formations of Fantasy, London, Routledge, 1986, pp. 35-44. Welby-Everard, M., ‘Imaging the Actor: the Theatre of Claude Cahun’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 29, no. 1, 2006, pp. 1-24.

10. ILLUSTRATING THE COMING OUT STORY: SELF-DISCLOSURE AND THE TWELVE DANCING PRINCESSES DR CATHERINE STONES

Introduction The story is one’s identity, a story created, told, revised and retold throughout life. We know or discover ourselves and reveal ourselves to others by the stories we tell.1

This paper outlines the research and analysis stages of an illustration project that visually illustrates aspects of lesbians’ real coming out stories. Firstly, this paper discusses key issues surrounding the act of selfdisclosure, the function of the coming out story and briefly reviews the work of Alison Bechdel, an important graphic artist who explores lesbian themes. It then draws parallels between the coming out story and the folk tale, drawing on one traditional and fictional tale to enlighten a collection of true coming out stories. It discusses the pertinence of the Twelve Dancing Princesses for the creative underpinning of the illustration work. This paper also discusses the research methodology for gathering the women’s stories and discusses a selection of the illustrations and the creative challenges and opportunities prevalent in the gathered narratives. The illustration project is contextually situated within Plummer’s view that the queer identities expressed within coming out stories ‘have a home in

1

A. Lieblich, R. Tuval-Mashiach and T. Zilber (eds.), Narrative Research: Reading, Analysis and Interpretation, Applied Social Methods Research Series, vol. 47, Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi, Sage, 1998, p. 7.

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the wider world’.2 The personal story of coming out has resonance beyond the formation and expression of a sexual identity and can provide rich material to share with a wider audience. The project’s remit is to openly share and make visible coming out stories via an exhibition of illustrations, to offer the viewer, queer or not, insight into broader issues of identity, representation, trust, religion and family.

Coming Out and Coming Out Stories ‘Coming out’ as a term is used narrowly in this project to refer to the moment when a LGBTQI person discloses their sexuality to his/her parent/s. Coming out in a wider sense may also refer to an individual’s recognition of his/her own sexuality.3 It may also not be a singular moment but be a continual process throughout life. Coming out is a complex process, and one which can be a source of trauma. Berzon stated that there is a 7-point process for developing positive gay identity.4 The final point of that process is the disclosure of sexuality to family. Coming out to family members, and parents in particular, is often seen as the ‘final hurdle’ in a ‘rite of passage’ towards self-acceptance. The person who is self-disclosing may experience stress caused by the tension between the potential gaining of intimacy versus the fear of potential rejection and loss.5 Family reactions to the ‘news’ are ‘unpredictable’ at best6 and this ensures a constant element of risk prior to the event. Bacon describes coming out as being: […] much more than a string of words, it is a shift in perspective. It is a shift from the private sphere to the public, and also a shift from silence into speech.7

Queer scholars position coming out as a potentially empowering event that 2 K. Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds, London and New York, Routledge, 2002. 3 P. Davies, ‘The Role of Disclosure in Coming Out Among Gay Men’, Modern Homosexualities: Fragments of Lesbian and Gay Experience, London, Routledge, 1992, pp. 75-83. 4 Berzon, Positively Gay, op. cit., pp. 1-14. 5 J.W. Wells and W.B. Kline,‘Self-Disclosure of Homosexual Orientation’, The Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 127, no. 2, 1987, pp. 191-197. 6 M.V. Borhek, Coming Out to Parents: A Two-Way Survival Guide for Lesbians and Gay Men and Their Parents, New York, Pilgrim Press, 1983. 7 J. Bacon, ‘Getting the Story Straight: Coming Out Narratives and the Possibility of a Cultural Rhetoric’. World Englishes, vol. 17, no. 2, 1998, p. 251.

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helps strengthen both individual and community identities. Gray describes coming out as ‘visibility's master narrative event’8 and though the majority of stories are shared invisibly via an oral tradition, some of these master narratives exist more permanently in the world, beyond the family-friend nucleus. The coming out story is not, of course, the event itself. Bacon describes the coming out story as: […] the sort of stories that you share when you are not risking an identity crisis, but are solidifying a current moment of identity by highlighting its trajectory through time.9

The coming out story allows the storyteller to reflect on their feelings as the event unfolded and to select parts of the event to share with varying levels of intimacy. Coming out stories began to be collected and published in the 1960s as laws against homosexuality began to wane in power.10 Today there are extensive collections of stories such as It’s Ok to Be Gay11 The Coming Out Stories12 and A Woman Like That.13 One of the challenges however with the format is the essentially private nature of the book. In book format, the coming out story appears decidedly ‘in’, invisible within many pages and many words. Increasingly, access to coming out stories occurs online. Emptyclosets.com began in 2004 and offers a safe place for people to discuss their sexuality and, in its own words, is a place ‘where you can figure out who you are’.14 Template coming out letters are available to customise, representing a collaborative approach to the challenge of coming out – ‘I did it this way, you could 8

M.L. Gray, Negotiating Identities/Queering Desires: Coming Out Online and the Remediation of the ComingǦOut Story. Journal of ComputerǦMediated Communication, 14(4), 1162-1189, 2009 p. 1162. 9 Bacon, loc. cit. 10 E. Saxey, Homoplot: The Coming-Out Story and Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Identity, New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Vienna, Peter Lang, 2008. 11 A. Stokes, It’s Ok to Be Gay: Celebrity Coming Out Stories, Abercynon, Accent Press, 2013. 12 J.P. Stanley and S.J. Wolfe, The Coming Out Stories, Persephone, Watertown, MA, 1980. 13 J. Larkin, A Woman Like That: Lesbian And Bisexual Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories, USA, William Morrow, 1999. 14 Empty Closets, [website], 2014-2015, http://emptyclosets.com/, (accessed 18 February 2016).

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too’. Such sites, and coming out stories, are particularly popular with youth15 given the two-way dialogue allowed and the dynamic nature of the content. Gray states that young people: […] find comfort and familiarity in the narratives of realness circulating online. More so than fictional characters situated in urban scenes where a critical mass of LGBTQ visibility is taken for granted, these stories resonate with the complex negotiation of visibility and maintaining family ties that consume rural young people's everyday lives.16

According to Gray17 these stories have transformative powers that alter the way youth think about and form their own queer identities. As such the coming out story based on real testimony has particular resonance for queer communities. Gray cites a quote from Sarah, a 17 year-old from a rural town in the U.S. who claims to use ‘their experiences as possibilities for my own.’18 Coming out stories aid in understanding methods to come out and to raise awareness of the range of reactions by family members. They are means through which we can construct identities19 rather than simply a reflection of identities. This imbues the true coming out story with particular resonance. The need to retell the story reaffirms and shifts self-identity and the story’s origins in emotional dissonance add weight to the story’s substance. The importance of the coming out story’s function within queer culture, coupled with its unpredictability, makes it a powerful and meaningful subject to examine creatively and visually.

Providing Context: Fun Home and the Myth of the Folk Tale Visual artworks exist that facilitate the reading of autobiographic references to lesbianism (take for example, the romantic paintings of Romaine Brooks, the gender-challenging work of Claude Cahun or the more recent lesbian visibility found in the photography of Zanele Muholi). The coming out story however is less evident in the static visual arts, lending itself more neatly to novel or film formats given its narrative structure. Perhaps 15 M.L. Gray, ‘Negotiating Identities/Queering Desires: Coming Out Online and the Remediation of the ComingǦOut Story’, Journal of ComputerǦMediated Communication, vol. 14, no. 4, 2009, pp. 1162-1189. 16 ibid., p. 1172. 17 ibid. 18 ibid., p. 1173. 19 Saxey, op. cit.

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the most well-known lesbian coming out story that has been visually represented is Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home from 2006,20 an autobiographical graphic novel in which the author tells the story of growing up and discovering not only her own sexuality, but her own father’s closeted homosexuality. The narrative focuses around her relationship with her parents (and her father’s early death) as well as her own ‘coming of age’ story. For Cvetkovich, Bechdel’s work signals how important everyday and ordinary life is, in building meaning beyond that life.21 Bechdel’s work is important, according to Cvetkovich in that it makes public space for lives that, though ordinary, have historic meaningfulness.22 In the coming out scene the central character discloses her sexuality via a letter to her parents and the story relays a trio of aftermath events – the awkwardness of the resulting silence, the disapproving parental letter written in response and the subsequent re-building of relationships. Her own disclosure leads to discoveries about her father, a feature found in the real testimony of women interviewed in this project. One disclosure can often lead to another as the confidant shares their own story in return. The complex and often unexpected nature of the coming out conversation, whether face-to-face or mediated, synchronous or asynchronous, is captured well in Bechdel’s work. Despite its literal representation of events (frames are used conventionally and many of the illustrations are figuratively descriptive rather than metaphorical/fantastical) the complexity of Fun Home resides in its referral to other texts and works of fiction. Bechdel’s reality is partly mediated as a meta-text (the protagonist recounts that she sees her father stepping out of a Scott Fitzgerald novel whilst her mother belongs to the world of Henry James). At one point in the book the central character narrates that ‘my parents are most real to me in fictional terms’ and the work is rich in literary references – from Ulysses to James and the Giant Peach. Such references enable one personal story to intertwine with many others and push the story beyond that of sexuality to a huge range of emotions and complex characterisations that reflect a much deeper dialogue between the author and reader. The process of literary intertextuality has also played a key role in the creative underpinning of my work, driven in part by Bechdel’s approach. 20 A. Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, USA, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007. 21 A. Cvetkovich, ‘Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.’ WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 1, 2008, pp. 111-128. 22 ibid.

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Whereas Bechdel’s work reflects her literary upbringing and deeply personal response, I was seeking referral to texts that would facilitate accessibility and employ a more universal language, connecting many women’s stories together. Further direction was found within the academic text of Saxey23 and the fictional worlds of both Jeanette Winterson’s work and the folk tale. Saxey draws parallels between the structure of the coming out story and other stories24 discussing how the coming out story generally has a common structural form that can be analysed. It features common plot arcs such as the climax (the build-up, the moment of disclosure and the emotional reaction) and the denouement (the calmer reflection on the aftermath and the present day). Saxey also likens the coming out story to fictional storytelling in that certain figures are likely to regularly appear (examples might be the tom boy girl heading for freedom in the city or the strict, silent father).25 Saxey states ‘[the coming out story] is an apparently innocuous tale, but every aspect of it is a victory for one side or the other.’26 These commonalities, the acknowledgement that there are reoccurring structures and characters (as found in Propp’s archetypes within folk tales)27 provoked a new visual juxtaposition between the coming out story and the folk tale. Also of influence was the work of Jeanette Winterson and her queer/feminist imaginative agenda. In both Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit28 an influential tale of coming out, and Sexing the Cherry29 folk tales punctuate contemporary life and disrupt the narratives. In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the tale of a prince’s hunt for perfection leads to a bloody end and in Sexing the Cherry the tale of The Twelve Dancing Princesses30 (sometimes known as The Worn Out Dancing Shoes) is cleverly subverted and rewritten. Each princess becomes a powerful force against her husband and the princesses further embed other folk tales within their own stories.

23 A.C. Liang, ‘The Creation of Coherence in Coming-Out Stories’, Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality, no. 287, 1997. 24 Saxey, op. cit., p. 5. 25 ibid. 26 ibid. 27 V. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, Texas, University of Texas Press, 2010. 28 J. Winterson, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, USA, Random House, 1985. 29 J. Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, USA, Random House, 1989. 30 W. Grimm and J. Grimm, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, New York, Sterling Publishing Company Inc., 2009.

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The Twelve Dancing Princesses was identified as a suitable creative foundation for the coming out story due to its content and its link to Winterson. In the Grimm’s tale 12 sisters disappear every night to visit princes in the underworld. Since they are locked in their room, a trapdoor under a bed provides the escape hatch. They dance in a magical world until they have to return the following morning, with worn out shoes. Their father, the king, hires princes to discover where they go and the tale unfolds. Acts of necessary deceit, protection, control, parental mistrust, the need for freedom of expression, passion and confession are key ingredients for this story as they are in coming out stories. Their act of escape is only a temporary one31 which, in some ways, reflects the frustrated need to move from temporary deceit to seek permanent freedom. In addition, this particular story has provoked feminist readings.32 For Thomas33 the princesses in the underworld possess a powerful freedom and seem to control the princes, driven by autonomous desires (unlike the silent women usually populating folk tales). She also refers to the sexually potent symbol of the shoe, to re-enforce the prowess of these women and how they stand apart from usual princess protagonists. Whilst the repurposing and rewriting the folk tale is far from a new concept for women artists (see for instance the work of Angela Carter in fiction, Anne Sexton in poetry or Paula Rego in painting/print) it has only been aligned very broadly with coming out stories within academic research rather than the visual arts. In addition, there is a delightful tension in the alignment of a ‘princess’ (and the privileged, heterosexual, fantasy and patriarchal norms that the word represents)34 with the world of the real lesbian. Thus this is an area full of pertinent and creative possibilities, particularly when deeply rooted within real narratives.

Whose Coming Out Story is It? It was vital that the coming out stories used in the illustrations were real and sourced ideally from strangers from a variety of backgrounds. The women who took part in the project were recruited via flyers placed at 31

H.S. Thomas, ‘Undermining a Grimm Tale: A Feminist Reading of The WornOut Dancing Shoes, (KHM 133)’, Marvels & Tales, 1999, pp. 170-183. 32 ibid. 33 ibid. 34 Do Rozario, R.A.C., ‘The Princess and the Magic Kingdom: Beyond Nostalgia, the Function of the Disney Princess’, Women's Studies in Communication, vol. 27, no. 1, 2004, pp. 34-59.

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local LBGTQI venues, twitter (retweets via several international LBGTQI organisation) and over email (to secure interviews and share information sheets). The recruitment and research process was validated by the University of Leeds Faculty Ethics Committee and participation required signed consent. The resultant twelve participants (phase 1 of the project) originated from a variety of countries: Venezuela, the U.S.A, Northern Ireland and the UK. The sampling method was random as interviews were conducted with any lesbian who responded to the call for participation. As such, the project does not represent a deliberate selection of particular stories but simply shares all the stories of those who wished to take part. Why participants wanted to share their story is an important aspect of the project and one which the viewer is invited to consider via the exhibition’s accompanying text. Some participants ‘judged’ their own story as ‘a good one’ or ‘quite ordinary’, as if somehow pre-empting other’s engagement with it. All participants volunteered their story openly and enthusiastically. Stories were collected through interviews that lasted approximately one hour. Interviews were carried out either in person or on-line using Skype. The interviews were semi-structured – several questions were planned such as ‘Why did you come out?’, ‘Where were you?’, ‘What happened?’ though as the stories unfolded, bespoke questions were asked in response to particular events. Mostly the women talked freely and were encouraged to talk about any aspect of their coming out event/s. Though the women agreed to the use of their first names and age, it was subsequently decided to omit these to protect parental identity. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and then analysed to form a basis for the illustrations. Unlike the common view that coming out occurs as a troubled teenager35 most of the women interviewed came out during their twenties and even into their thirties. This resulted in some unexpected responses from parents that moved beyond ‘it’s just a phase’. Whilst the initial basic plotline may be simple in some cases36 the responses, feelings and events referred to by the women were complex. As Lieblich37 stated in the introduction of this paper, a story is constantly retold and revised and coming out stories are also prone to revision. Some of the participants admitted that they may have forgotten certain details or in some cases only recalled it again during the interview process. Some expressed surprise that they themselves had forgotten that particular detail ‘until now’. It is vital to acknowledge that 35

Saxey, op. cit. ibid. 37 Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach and Zilber, op. cit. 36

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only one instance of the story is collected in the transcript and the coming out story will vary on the day it is recalled, told in the context of a current queer identity that straddles the past and the present. As such the captured story is unique and itself is a record of a storytelling event tainted by the interview process. Sharing the coming out story to a stranger in a semiformal interview is likely to differ from telling it to a friend and this is one implication, and potential weakness, of this methodology. It does though allow the illustrator to provoke reflections from the storyteller first-hand, to transcribe and reflect themselves on the events and then to transform the story through artistic decision making.

The Work The work itself consists of 12 large figures with each ‘princess’ occupying a panel-like blank space, inspired in part by 15th century panel paintings and triptych wings occupied by saints or donors. Each figure represents one story rather than one woman. The visual style of the work is collagelike, making reference to both the work of Hannah Hoch, herself an artist known as sexually ambiguous who challenged the representation of women, and to the fragmented nature of the stories. Many stories consist of several juxtaposed parts. Work is made by paper-collage as the primary mark-making device, combined with mono-printing, digital scanning and final digital preparation. Collage allows for chance to play a large role in the creation of the pieces and for a more open method of working than a purely digital approach. Davies questions whether: […] there is in fact, one essential process of which each individual biography is an idiosyncratic variation, or is there a multiplicity of paths and experiences which bear only superficial resemblance to each other?38

The interviews revealed a multiplicity of paths in terms of feelings and, in particular, of parent responses. It was the latter that formed the basis of the illustrations, expanding the story outside participant’s queer identities, to often focus on heterosexual viewpoints, misunderstandings and reflections. I was drawn to the responses as a means of opening up the coming out story, for it being as much about family relationships as about selfdisclosure. Influenced in part by Bechdel’s focus on her own queer identity in relation to her father’s, I was interested in highlighting the 38

Davies, op. cit., p. 75.

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tensions and support systems between family members – a theme that ran deeply throughout the narratives. The princess’ bodies became a vehicle for this expression, representing the significance of the past event literally within themselves, part of themselves. As a lesbian with my own coming out story I frequently questioned my role as illustrator and the illustrations were constantly redrafted as part of this questioning. Questions emerged such as ‘Do the stories, in part, become part of my story?’, ‘How does my story impact on all the stories?’ and ‘Who is the owner of the text and should an illustrator ‘heighten’ a text that is not their own, despite being involved in its construction?’. By leaning on folk tales, and in particular The Twelve Dancing Princesses39 I was able to remove, to some extent, both myself and certain aspects of the women from the story. The conceptual framework offered a degree of objectivity and coherence. The ‘princess’ figures were almost able to suggest their own form to me given my immersion both in their true stories and the fictional worlds afforded through the folk tale. The concept allowed juxtaposition of the fantasy, where the Princess could be imagined as part-door, part-table or even a map of a journey, with the reality evident in the text. The original text of the transcript is also presented in the exhibition to allow the viewer to fully engage in the narrative as it was told and to invite the viewer to ‘read’ both visually and conventionally. The illustrated elements serve, on the one hand, to aesthetically invite the viewer ‘closer’ to read the text, whilst also adding cognitive or emotive visual prompts for considering the story’s resonance beyond one individual’s experience. It was not the intention to literally illustrate the stories, as was say Bechdel’s approach in Fun Home, but instead to attempt to condense and concentrate on one salient aspect of the transcript. The intention was both to increase accessibility and visibility through illustration and to challenge the viewer to consider their own family network of relationships. The folk tale, according to D.L. Ashliman40 is rife with symbolic objects. Objects take on magical properties and ‘ambiguity is part of the charm.’41 Part of the success of the folk tale is that people read them differently, extracting appropriate messages and morals for themselves. In this series 39

Grimm and Grimm, op. cit. D.L. Ashliman, Folk and Fairy Tales: A Handbook, Westport, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004. 41 ibid., p. 11. 40

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of illustrations, symbolic objects are also featured. One figure holds a ring whilst another holds a book. This, again, echoes the icons of female saints in panel paintings – the objects are a clue to their identities for the reader. Other symbols are used to suggest events in the story. In one of the images the key figure can be seen to press down on a car foot pedal and as she does so, squeeze a question mark rather than an accelerator. This is symbolic of her mother both driving the vehicle in the story and the onslaught of questions that followed. All the protagonist’s shoes are worn down, in reference to the Grimms’ tale. The women’s recollections often centred around one statement usually from the Mother. Phrases included ‘I’ll pray for you’, ‘don’t tell your brother’, ‘don’t ever ask me to accept this’ or ‘I blame Kylie’. These provided a strong catalyst for the illustrations in many cases given the intriguing and in some cases surprising nature of the statements that spanned an emotional spectrum. This again allowed for creative transformation and radical reshaping of the ‘princesses’ form. For example, one of the women spoke about her coming out moment in a car journey with her mother. Her mother, after picking her up from the airport, proceeded to ask her daughter many questions, wanting to know about her relationships. Once the truth was shared her mother warned that she shouldn’t tell her brother. When the daughter revealed that he already knew, her mother remained silent for the rest of the journey, perhaps hurt by not being the initial confidant. In the illustration these events were interpreted visually through the body of the ‘princess’ transforming into a map of that journey, populated by fields and roads. The moment of silence between the mother and daughter is represented by the darkness found in the lower right hand side of the dress. Another of the women’s stories involved a mother and father who, whilst very supportive overall, struggled to initially understand their daughter’s lesbianism due to her visual appearance. Upon receiving the news her mother said ‘but you wear lipstick’. This statement forms the focal point of the picture. The princess is part tower (representing a period of worried reflection in the upstairs bathroom prior to the disclosure) and part lipstick-swatch annotated with real names of lipsticks classed as overtly feminine and/or sexual. She is literally embodied by societal codes, whilst retaining a sense of self and stability by choosing when to disclose her secret. The heterosexual norms here are made explicit, despite only being implicitly understood by the Mother, mediated perhaps via typical lesbian characters on television. The illustration’s affective qualities reside in its

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ability to challenge the viewer (‘is this right?’) and to provoke a range of possible emotions from humour to anger. Here the illustration acts as a creative pause in the narrative. As the story is not mine I observe and then append, ensuring that the artistic intervention is kept separate, whilst the plain text allows the viewer to imagine other potential images within the actual transcript. One of the questions posed by Saxey42 is why do we keep returning to the coming out story? Why is there a need to retell and share? Despite fears about monolithic and formulaic plots the coming out story continues to reveal deep insights into the human condition and in particular, the relationships between children and their parents. In the small sample of interviews taken as part of this project a myriad of issues were raised which span beyond the realm of ‘queer’. As shown in the work of Gray43 the stories benefit from being made public in order to improve understanding of reception and to continue the push for increased visibility. As the set of work is completed and shown in its entirety in the future there will be much need for analysis of audience feedback, to investigate areas of controversy and to gauge the effectiveness of the role of illustration in prompting reflection, both emotional and otherwise.

Bibliography Ashliman, D.L., Folk and Fairy Tales: A Handbook, Westport, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004. Bacon, J., ‘Getting the Story Straight: Coming Out Narratives and the Possibility of a Cultural Rhetoric’, World Englishes, vol. 17 no. 2, Oxford, Blackwell, 1998, pp. 249-258. Bechdel, A., Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, USA, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007. Berzon, B. (ed.), ‘Developing a Positive Gay Identity’, Positively Gay, USA, Celestial Arts, 1979, pp. 1-14.

42

Saxey, op. cit. M.L. Gray, ‘Negotiating Identities/Queering Desires: Coming Out Online and the Remediation of the ComingǦOut Story’, Journal of ComputerǦMediated Communication, vol. 14, no. 4, 2009, pp. 1162-1189. 43

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Borhek, M.V., Coming Out to Parents: A Two-Way Survival Guide for Lesbians and Gay Men and their Parents, New York, Pilgrim Press, 1983. Cvetkovich, A., ‘Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home’ WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 1, 2008, pp. 111-128. Davies, P., ‘The Role of Disclosure in Coming Out Among Gay Men’ in Plummer, K. (ed.), Modern Homosexualities: Fragments of Lesbian and Gay Experience, London, Routledge, 1992, pp. 75-83. Do Rozario, R.A.C., ‘The Princess and the Magic Kingdom: Beyond Nostalgia, the Function of the Disney Princess’, Women's Studies in Communication, vol. 27 no. 1, 2004, pp. 34-59. Empty Closets, [website], 2014-2015, http://emptyclosets.com/, (accessed 18 February 2016). Gray, M.L., ‘Negotiating Identities/Queering Desires: Coming Out Online and the Remediation of the ComingǦOut Story’, Journal of ComputerǦ Mediated Communication, vol. 14, no. 4, 2009, pp. 1162-1189. Grimm, W., and J. Grimm, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, New York, Sterling Publishing Company Inc., 2009. Larkin J., A Woman Like That: Lesbian And Bisexual Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories, USA, William Morrow, 1999. Liang, A.C., ‘The Creation of Coherence in Coming-Out Stories’, Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender and Sexuality, no. 287, 1997. Lieblich, A., R. Tuval-Mashiach and T. Zilber (eds.), Narrative Research: Reading, Analysis and Interpretation, Applied Social Methods Research Series, vol. 47, Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi, Sage, 1998. Plummer, K. , Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds, London and New York, Routledge, 2002. Propp, V., Morphology of the Folktale, Texas, University of Texas Press, 2010. Saxey, E., Homoplot: The Coming-Out Story and Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Identity, New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Vienna, Peter Lang, 2008. Stanley, J.P. and S.J. Wolfe, ‘The Coming Out Stories’, Watertown, MA, Persephone, 1980. Stokes, A., It’s Ok to Be Gay: Celebrity Coming Out Stories, Abercynon, Accent Press, 2013. Thomas, H.S., ‘Undermining a Grimm Tale: A Feminist Reading of The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes, (KHM 133)’, Marvels & Tales, 1999, pp. 170-183.

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Wells, J.W. and W.B. Kline, ‘Self-Disclosure of Homosexual Orientation’, The Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 127, no. 2, 1987, pp. 191-197. Winterson, J., Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, USA, Random House, 1985. —. Sexing the Cherry, USA, Random House, 1989.

11. HOW MIGHT LITERARY DISABILITY STUDIES INFORM AN APPROACH TO TRANS* POETICS? DR CATH NICHOLS

Introduction The poem sequence discussed in this chapter incorporates a conversation between a trans-boy and his doctor where the boy’s identity was conflated into being a ‘cripple’. I have found that feminist theory engages poorly with trans* and disabled subjectivities and since both are essential to this work I have utilised literary disability studies’ analysis instead. After discussing some of the difficulties with feminism (where it tries to account for the existence of transsexuals) this chapter will go on to explore ground shared by trans* people and people with disabilities. Several of my poems will be quoted at length in order to further the discussion.1 I will also be referring to the problems of using disability metaphor in poetry. Circumstances experienced by trans* and disabled people may be more complex than some feminists acknowledge. For example, a disabled woman who chooses to have a child and live as a stay-at-home-mother might have views around fertility, abortion and the realities of independence that seem to oppose those of a traditional feminist. As well as feminist theory displaying a partial approach to disability, feminist theory that addresses transsexuals has a distinctly patchy history. Within the emergent queer studies of the 1990s the pushing of gender boundaries was celebrated. Feminist and queer scholars admired ‘gender-bending’ behaviour because its breaches of gender norms challenged the patriarchal status quo. Changing sex, however, was more suspect. (Here ‘gender’ 1

Cath Nichols’ poetry has been published in the following three anthologies Distance (Erbacce Press, 2012) and Tales of Boy Nancy (Driftwood, 2005) and a collection, My Glamorous Assistant (Headland, 2007).

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suggests performance or presentation, versions of masculinity and femininity, whilst ‘sex’ suggests a combination of genitalia, gonads, hormones, chromosomes and body shape.) For Judith Butler a wish to permanently change sex indicated a delusion that might be better addressed by a change in performativity, not the body.2 Anne Bolin also saw the figure of the transsexual as repeating an outmoded sex binary of the past.3 Jay Prosser paraphrases Bolin when he says that: transgender comes to stand for diversity […] transgender gets to play the postmodern second term (deliteralizing, transgressive) that puts into question transsexuality’s outdated modernism (literalizing, reinscriptive).4

Butler suggested gender was a bodily style and there was nothing ‘beneath’ that appearance, but Zowie Davy suggests performativity is not sufficient to explain sex and gender and that we need to ‘combine the fleshiness of the body with discourse’, and, I would add, not throw the baby (sexed embodiment?) out with the bathwater (gender binaries?).5 Feminists may embrace trans* people who inhabit fluid gender presentations but have been less accepting of those who want a permanent change of sex. Yet, arguably, bodily alteration for transsexuals in the West has been one of the most successful congruence-making services available to transsexuals, resulting in fewer suicides and greater contentment when compared to other forms of treatment that a purely performative understanding of sex/gender might advocate; for example, use of antidepressants or psychoanalysis. See Richard Green: To assert that such treatment is ineffective ignores the body of published medical research.6

We should also remember that a transsexual person may change their body and hormones and still ‘perform’ their gender, just as cis-gendered people 2

J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Oxon; New York, Routledge, 1990. 3 A. Bolin, In Search of Eve: Transsexual Rites of Passage, New York, Bergin and Garvey, 1988. 4 Prosser, J., Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, New York, Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 202. 55 Z. Davy, Recognizing Transsexuals: Personal, Political and Medicolegal Embodiment, Farnham, Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2011, p. 7. 6 R. Green, ‘Transsexual Legal Rights in the United States and the United Kingdom: Employment, Medical Treatment, and Civil Status’, Archives of Sexual Behaviour, vol. 39, no. 1, Springer Science + Business Media, 2010, p. 157.

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perform their genders. So performativity still has a place in theory as an expression of personal gender style even if it does not explain all aspects of sex/gender. Using a more intersectional approach to trans* through disability studies’ readings of the body, what might trans* and disabled people have in common?

Fear, Horror and Disgust Socially many people with disabilities have experienced the hatred and fear behind names such as ‘spaz’, ‘mong’ or ‘retard’. Children who feel their assigned sex does not match their self-knowledge might also be verbally abused. The trans* child or teen is likely to be called ‘lezzer’ or ‘dyke’ where a born-girl presents himself as male, or ‘queer’, ‘gay’, ‘poofter’ and ‘fag’ where a born-boy presents herself as female, regardless of their preferred companions (or later love interests) since sexual orientation is frequently conflated with sex. These social negations transfer to representations of disabled and trans* people in literature and on film. Audiences are frequently invited to view trans* and disabled characters with fear, horror and disgust. In fiction, disabled characters’ disabilities are rarely portrayed realistically nor are they incorporated into stories as part of ordinary life; instead they are the exception or interjection. For example, disabling injury is a regular trope in horror movies where the character has not adapted to their impairment. This might be a way of creating vulnerable victims – e.g. blind characters in Wait Until Dark (1967), Julia’s Eyes (2010) – but it is also a way of embodying villains: the deformed monster or hook-handed pirate, the increasingly prostheticised villain such as Darth Vader, or Alvin the Treacherous. Unrealistic trans* characters featured on film include the serial killers in Silence of the Lambs and Dressed to Kill. Film and fictions based on true-life stories may suggest that a permanent or lived change in sex will end badly (in murder in Boys Don’t Cry). Viewers might feel horrified and ‘warned’ by such representations.7 The public gaze finds 7

There is a genre of cheerful trans* film – the sex-swap comedy. Films such as Victor Victoria and Some Like It Hot show fluid transgendering that hinges upon disguise and the risk of discovery for narrative interest. See Tootsie (1982), Madame Doubtfire (1987), The Hot Chick (2002) and It’s a Boy Girl Thing (2006). In sex-swap comedies the potentially fearful trans* figure is neutralised as, once lessons are learnt, the protagonist is usually returned ‘safely’ to their original

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indeterminate or trans* individuals’ bodies abhorrent (or they become fetishised). Culture then reflects back and reinforces these negative attitudes. Even in autobiography Prosser notes that narratives risk subverting the transsexual subject into an ‘absolute other for the reader’s horror and/or fascination’.8 Trans* horror tropes on film are more readily recalled than examples in poetry. But poet Sharon Olds wrote an example of this with Outside the Operating Room of the Sex Change Doctor (1987): Outside the operating room of the sex-change doctor, a tray of penises. There is no blood. This is not Vietnam, Chile, Buchenwald. They were surgically removed under anaesthetic. They lie there neatly, each with a small space around it. The anaesthetic is wearing off now. The chopped-off sexes lie on the silver tray. (lines 1-6)9

The poem lists war-zones and a concentration camp, Buchenwald. Thus Olds draws attention to violence and the Nazis experimenting on those they deemed undesirable, even as she denies this (‘This is not…’). The poem’s position might be defended as presenting a fictional sex change doctor, one who does not perform surgery properly. But the poem is transphobic in the way it elicits fear through familiar conceits, e.g. vaginoplasty being the chop. Without the title and the opening line Olds’ poem would be less problematic, appearing as a poem about castration anxiety but since most readers will not know how MTF surgery works, the actions of the sex-change doctor might be read as fact. Prosser says that the poem: […] plays to the cultural stigmatisation of transsexuality and the misconceptions that underpin this: that transsexuality consists in the brutal mutilation of healthy bodies… [and] transmogrifies ‘normal’ men and women into unsexed or hermaphroditic monstrous others.10

gender at the end of the story. Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994), with two drag queens and a transwoman, and Transamerica (2005), with a transwoman, are notable exceptions where happy endings occur without a return to birth-sex. 8 See Prosser, op. cit., p. 129. 9 S. Olds, ‘Outside the Operating Room of the Sex Change Doctor’ in The Gold Cell, New York, Knopf, 1987. 10 Prosser, op. cit., p. 81.

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Later, the cut-off penises speak: ‘One says I am a weapon thrown down. Let there be no more/ killing’ (lines 7-8). Also: ‘The fifth says I was a dirty little dog, I knew he'd have me/ put to sleep’ (lines 11-12). These lines suggest the surgery has been performed as a punishment. Tropes in fiction also suggest that disability functions as punishment in many stories which colludes with a ‘horror’ reading of the poem. My response, The Violence of, remonstrates with Olds: the poet jabs out the title ‘Outside the Operating Room of the Sex Change Doctor’. She makes a row of penises the aftermath of something, hints that what is there might have mushroomed out of torture, war, or concentration camps. She gives voice to the penises, stokes up a ghoulish horror. But male-to-female surgery is not a severance; post operation, a penis wouldn’t lie intact upon a silver tray. The surgery is realignment, tissue scraped to hollow out the male member, penile skin then tucked inside to shape a new vagina. Vaginoplasty is creation not removal. It’s not a loss, a cause for grief, but gain. Instead of Dr Frankenstein that poet’s surgeon might have been a gardener in Eden restoring the should-be-ness of the body-in-waiting. (poem in its entirety)

The Deaf community have re-framed what hearing people regard as loss and turned it into an expression of cultural difference and ‘Deaf gain’. I have suggested the sex-change surgery of the original poem might be represented as gain rather than encoded as violent loss. I have also critiqued Olds’ aggressively experimental doctor in my reference to Dr Frankenstein and made the suggestion that a sex-change surgeon might be portrayed as assistive instead, using the image of a gardener.

Medicalisation and Issues of Mis/Interpretation Trans*, intersex and people with disabilities have long been misinterpreted by medical science. Prosser remarks that the diagnosis of transsexuality follows a period of a clinician listening to the presenting person’s lifestory. He aligns the clinician with a detective. The role of:

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11. Literary Disability Studies Inform an Approach to Trans* Poetics? […] interrogator/detective, brings to the fore […] the clinician’s unspoken fears of fraudulence in transsexual narrative [...] The patient’s position is to confess, the clinician’s […] to listen, to take note – and precisely to police the subject’s access to technology. Clinician as policeman is a shocking equation when we remember this is supposed to be a healthcarer/patient relation.11

Disabled people too are frequently on the sharp end of clinician ‘police’, especially with regards to medical assessments made for financial assistance. Even though only 0.3-0.5% of claims have been made due to fraud, UK governments persist in lengthy and over-rigorous assessment operations that may jeopardise claimants well-being.12 This approach assumes a level of fraudulent behaviour echoed in some literary and film representations of disabled people where characters fake a disability so as to be ‘beyond suspicion’ but who later turn out to be frauds and criminals (e.g. Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects). Davy notes the ‘accusation of “deception” [… running] through radical feminist criticisms about Transsexuality.’13 Some viewed transpeople as tantamount to sexchanging spies or agent provacateurs who disguised themselves in order to infiltrate (all-women) spaces. Such conspiracy theories and territorial disputes created by cis-gendered women occlude the actual experience of those who identify as transsexual. In addition, subjective accounts (or autobiography) by trans and disabled people may be neglected in favour of the apparently objective accounts of medical authorities. Medical discourse tends to pathologise transsexual and disabled people and many disabled and transsexual people learn to ‘tell the right stories’ to get medical assistance, yet they may not perceive themselves as ill, merely as different. Homosexuality was once listed as an illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in America but it is now no longer included. Some trans* and disabled people would prefer their conditions to lie outside the DSM-MD too: or at least not be labelled as ‘disorders’. 11

ibid., p. 111. Fraud for disability living allowance was 0.5% in 2013/14 and 0.3% for incapacity benefit, both lower than income support (2.8%) and jobseeker’s allowance (2.6%). Data on page 18 of a report available at Department for Work and Pensions, ‘Fraud and Error in the Benefits System 2013/14 Estimates (biannual)’ https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/371 459/Statistical_Release.pdf , 2014 (accessed 25th February 2015). 13 Davy, op. cit. 12

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Previous centuries lacked the concept of an average norm and had instead various super-human ideal-figures (mythical heroes, gods, goddesses) to which no-one measured up, disabled or otherwise. But in the midnineteenth century statistical science plotted bell curves and provided new information about population averages which were described as ’normal’. At the extremes of the curve, deviant or ‘abnormal’ human experience was found.14 This analytic discourse supported the new eugenics movements and corrective interventions on disabled, trans and intersex individuals. In the poem This is Not a Stunt I describe early European sexologists and their developing theories on sex: Invert theory grew from exploring hermaphrodites’ bodies, dead and alive: finding a true sex not a spectrum that was the sexologists’ grail. (lines 1-4)

The sexologists’ modus operandi were heavily influenced by the social anxiety that stemmed from new relationships between men and women in Victorian society.15 Thus the sex binary we know today was developed and strictly reinforced. The non-conforming sex ‘deviant’ might be imprisoned in a Victorian asylum. This is Not a Stunt shows an invert (an FTM man) signaling for help in this extract: [Asylums] enforced sexed clothing, reeducation. Guards with flaming swords stood at gates. One soul, asylum’ed for living as [no]man, wrote to Carl Westphal. The letter self-combusted in Carl’s hands. (lines 1-7, 12-18)

The poem moves on to Freud, who believed anomalous gender behaviour was caused by psychological dysfunction. Freud’s analysis of Daniel Paul Schreber’s memoirs is where we first find him psychoanalysing someone who might be trans*. Schreber was a high court judge who had experienced delusions, and had spent several years in asylums. Schreber’s delusion 14

L.J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body, London and New York, Verso, 1995, pp. 2-3. 15 A. Domurat Dreger, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1998.

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involved a ‘system of rays, divine beings, and a communicative God who had chosen Schreber to be his female consort’.16 After leaving the asylum Schreber continued to believe that God was transforming him into a fertile woman yet he was successfully ‘able to argue his sanity in court and to write the memoir’.17 Freud interpreted Schreber’s published account and suggested Schreber’s apparent attraction to men (or a male God) explained his identification as a woman, revealing Schreber to be a repressed homosexual.18 It is impossible to assess whether Schreber would have been a transwoman had s/he lived today. A society that allowed Schreber to live as a woman may not have ended Schreber’s visions, but living as a woman might have meant that any continuing schizophrenic visions exhibited different content.19 The second half of the poem comments upon today’s replication of some of these viewpoints: Freud then thought that invert males were deviants caused by arrested development, invert females: repressed homosexuals or narcissists when loving women. From medical error to mental case or social fraud, not much has changed, deviant, freak, liar, con, mistaken individual. But we’re still here: stunt-men and women without fire-suits. Watch us stumble, lift our arms like flaming swords. (lines 19-30)

16

M.E. Wood, Life Writing and Schizophrenia: Encounters at the Edge of Meaning. Amsterdam-New York, Editions Rodopi B.V., 2013, p. 128. 17 ibid., p. 131. 18 ibid., p. 138. 19 ibid. Schizophrenic visions are not thought to be interpretable data by most Western medical practitioners, but racist or sexist societies may produce people whose visions contain racist and sexist paranoid delusions. For example, a mixed race Jewish woman who despised her Jewish roots might, when ill, believe her neighbours are Nazis planning to abduct her.

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Presenting theory in a poem is tricky, but hopefully the dryness is enlivened by the motif of fire sustained throughout the poem: the guards whose swords flare (angels, messengers of the new science); the letter pleading for help that bursts into flames; the stunt-men and women set on fire. I hope the action of the raised arm reminds readers of Stevie Smith’s poem ‘Not waving, but drowning’. Do we understand the gesture of the raised arm? Is this flamboyance, defiance and bravery, or something else? We fall down (‘stumble’) but get up again (‘lift our arms’) in an ambiguous ending that echoes the imagery of swords outside the asylum. Is being a ‘stunt-man or woman’, work or a lifestyle choice, is the final image of an attack?

Invisibility and Erasures As already mentioned, both disabled, trans* and intersex people might have their self-diagnoses challenged or used as evidence of insanity. Nonpassing trans* people have sometimes found that their unexpected gender presentations are taken as evidence of a disordered mind or ‘madness’ (see memoirs of gender non-conformity and incarceration by Blackridge and Gilhooly and also by Scholinski).20 Incarceration in prisons, asylums and institutions is a form of invisibility, a social cleansing. Trans* and disabled people may also experience invisibility through violence and eugenics. The continuing situation in many countries with regards to abortion on the grounds of unusual fetuses may make LGBTQIA people, alongside disabled people, feel anxious when talk revives around finding a gay or trans* gene. If identified pre-birth we anticipate ‘correction’ at best, termination and removal at worst. Disabled and trans* people are at the forefront of many murder statistics (actual erasures). The risk of living as trans* is especially high for maleto-female transsexuals in countries such as Brazil and Bangkok where many can only afford hormones and surgery by working as prostitutes. Non-violent pressures may also challenge a trans* person’s visibility. In Crip Theory, Robert McCruer discusses a MTF transsexual Sara who has become HIV-positive.21 She works on the streets as a prostitute but trades in her trans* identity for a non-disabled self when a Christian outreach 20 P. Blackridge and S. Gilhooly, Still Sane, Vancouver, Press Gang Publishers, 1985; D. Scholinski, The Last Time I Wore a Dress. New York, Riverhead Books, 1997. 21 R. McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, London and New York, New York University Press, 2010, pp. 116-131.

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team offer her the HIV drugs she cannot afford provided she returns to being male and marries one of their members. Sara is erased by becoming Ricardo and ‘he’ marries a Church member. Sara’s trans* friend Gigi continues working the streets despite also being HIV-positive. Gigi is offered the same deal but ‘chooses’ disablement and likely death/ erasure in order to maintain her integrity as a trans* woman. Transphobia and poverty oppress both Sara/Ricardo and Gigi. Sara and Gigi are made invisible by actual erasures over time. Hostility and disgust directed at trans* people and disabled people may shame people into occupying private and not public space, thus making them socially invisible. In public, a non-disabled person may presume that a person with a mobility or speech impairment has an impaired ability to think for themselves, and will speak instead to a physically non-disabled person in the vicinity. This behaviour already indicates the disrespect accorded those who are cognitively different. In both cases the physically or cognitively disabled person may feel un-seen. Other disabled people may experience figurative erasures of their humanity by having an invisible disability such as epilepsy or fibromyalgia. They may pass as able-bodied in public but they may be mocked as they struggle to perform some physical acts, or react slowly (or ‘over’-react) in certain situations, due to their disabilities. My poetry considers how a trans* person might become invisible. In this poem, Corridor, 1973, Nathan comes to haunt his school corridors having been excluded from class: Nate’s behaviour in defence of others may have been a way of being seen. Wanting to be a classroom hero Nate flouted rules repeatedly, was sent out from maths class. He saw a lot of corridor; was later asked to see a shrink. (lines 3-6)

The image of Nathan in the corridor is repeated in other poems; he becomes a phantom, existing in a no-man’s land where even a support group he contacts gets his gender wrong: He had by then (without the aid of internet) found a group in London. He’d written a letter to them and received a letter back: to a Miss. But never mind, the letter was something. Nate then made a first request

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for sex-change interventions. In explaining why he thought such surgery would be wrong, the doctor said: It would be like cutting off the legs of a cripple. (lines 7-13)

This is the first occurrence of the problematic phrase that dismisses Nathan’s perspective: ‘It would be like cutting off the legs of a cripple’. The reader assumes that the doctor thinks surgery on Nathan would be like amputations performed on someone who has no hope of walking: a waste of time. The poem, Life Support considers the simile differently: might there ever be a good reason to cut off one’s legs? There are cases where cutting off a person’s legs might be advantageous: gangrene, for example, frostbite, that condition where the legs grow large and heavy like an elephant’s. Post-removal the patient might not run but they will become more agile. (lines 2-6)

This poem also considers the possible end-point of a life that is invisible: Some become so heavy in their bodies they may attempt self-removal. You’d think about it too, if every day you were taken for someone, some/ body else: a man or woman you’re not. ‘Sir?... so sorry, Miss.’ (lines 7-11)

This poem indicates that the transman is constantly seen as male and then ‘corrected’ into a female (the line ‘Sir?.... so sorry, Miss’). Such repeated invisibility or social erasure might result in a suicide, ‘self-removal’, a line that also refers to the possibilities of self-harm or self-surgery. I once heard about a transman who, prior to treatment, had come very close to deliberately trapping his breasts in a piece of machinery in order to have them amputated. I wanted to capture that shocking sense of desperation. I also wanted the line ‘some become so heavy in their bodies they may attempt/ self-removal’ to refer both to the transsexual person at odds with the world that cannot see him, and the disabled person previously described.

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Phantom Limbs and Proprioceptive Feeling The final area of poetics affected by literary disability studies is that which addresses phantom limb sensations as amputation amongst amputees and proprioceptive feeling in trans* people. The phantom limb metaphor jostles uneasily with reality in the poem Missing: Déjà vu, melt-water in the bones, ‘Since my wife died I feel like my arm’s been cut off.’ At home, he thinks she’s running a bath, hears phantom sounds. In the street she re-appears, phantom back, phantom hair. Pain, displacement, an itch. (lines 1-5)

This first use of a phantom limb is shown as a hallucination caused by a husband’s grief. Poet Gillian Weiss criticises this use, saying: I used to count the number of phantom limbs that cropped up in poems; the phantom limb is typically a metaphor for the loss of a loved one.22

As an amputee she notes that amputation has been co-opted to mean a painful experience of absence. It strikes her ‘as funny because my phantom limb is ticklish rather than painful.’23 Phantom limb sensations have been partially explained as severed or blocked nerve pathways where nerves that used to reach into the extended limb are still connected to the brain and still firing, whilst the limb itself is absent. Is it not conceivable that the much-used habitual nerve pathways that recognise and interact with a loved person on a daily basis might also continue to fire after the loved person has died, resulting in the bereaved person ‘seeing’ or ‘hearing’ the deceased beloved? If this is so then the metaphoric use of ‘phantom (ghost-like) limb’ for amputation sensations and hallucinatory grief may actually correlate to a degree. Prosser explores phantom limb sensations to discuss transsexual embodiment. Prosser suggested that the phantom feelings are akin to proprioceptive feelings and this helps to explain a self-knowing that is not dependent on a

22

J. Weiss, ‘The Disability Rights Movement and the Legacy of Poets with Disabilities’ in S. Bartlett, J. Black and M. Northen (eds.), Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, El Paso, Cinco Puntos Press, 2011, p. 143. 23 ibid., p. 144.

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mirror’s reflection of the self.24 My poem Knowledge starts: I put my arm behind my head and shut my eyes: I still know my arm is there. Some people also feel their bodies’ absences, a proprioceptive grace. (lines 1-3)

Prosser proposed we consider the felt experience of transsexuals towards their sex rather than rely on previous ideas that sex is always seen.25 Prosser noted that the felt absence-as-presence does not require the thing absent to have ever been concretely present (as an amputated limb will have been) as some brain-nerve-body connections may have already formed in utero, resulting in the mature brain believing its sex to be different from that which outwardly presents itself. The poem Knowledge refers to the proprioceptive phantom feeling thus: it is a feeling for their absences as presence, whether that be for an altered voice, smooth skin (or beard), more (or less) chest. It is a doubling ontology. (lines 4-7)

However, I am not aware of transsexuals who experience physical pain in their absent organs akin to traditional phantom limb experience. But the phantom limb/ proprioceptive experience is part of what enables an amputee to intuitively embrace a prosthetic limb when that time comes. The transsexual person must also adjust to prosthetic enhancement for their surgeries to be successful. Success rates for sex change surgery suggest that the transsexual person’s brain may re-configure itself well in advance of surgery. A metaphor is a form of language that makes connections across disparate states in order to elucidate some matter that is otherwise difficult to express. Within disability studies this sharing of imagery and metaphor across experiences has been a problem when disabled bodies have been over-used as metaphors for generations. Scholars like Snyder and Mitchell have suggested that narrative prosthesis and the use of disability as 24

Prosser, op. cit., pp. 78-90. The situation of Emily Brothers, the blind transwoman political candidate who was trolled on twitter with the attempted joke ‘how can she see if she’s a man or woman?’, emphasises how the general public still thinks that sex is known purely by what is seen. 25

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metaphor is predominantly unhelpful and reductive.26 An example of a disability metaphor would be the character who becomes temporarily blind because they have failed to ‘see the truth’ about their situation. Other disability metaphors use disabled characters to represent damage or contagion. For example, authors might show a city or country full of disabled people in order to make industrialisation or colonialism extra vivid. Clare Barker argues in her book on postcolonial literature and disability that some of these disability metaphors could potentially expand our ways of thinking about both the metaphorised topic and disability (for example, where the protagonist is disabled in a country where disability is commonplace).27 Perhaps the thing to be skeptical towards is not so much disability metaphors per se, but how such metaphor is utilised? Some metaphors may help readers explore disability and make connections, other metaphors may work as reductions of human experience, neglecting the real dimension of disability. I have tried to be respectful to both the trans* and disabled experience of phantom bodies in my poetry. The other disability term explored in the poetry is a simile: the comment that Nathan’s situation makes him like a cripple. The phrase was based on a real conversation that took place in the 1970s. I hated the dismissal in the sentence, when I first heard it, but I did not want to counter it solely as a verbal aggression directed towards the transboy. I needed to simultaneously reject the notion that being a cripple was a bad thing. My penultimate poem, Time lapse, attempts to do this: Back in the corridor a thirteen-year-old boy caught in the conundrum of his already-being yet body not matching. He has periods, the wrong kind of chest. (Shh-shhh, we do not use those words. This is not happening.)

26

S. Snyder and D. Mitchell, Narrative Prosthesis and the Dependencies of Discourse, Michigan, University of Michigan, 2007. 27 C. Barker, Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, Metaphor and Materiality, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

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It would be like cutting off the legs of a cripple. But Nate thought, No. It would be like offering me wheels, giving me freedom and movement. (poem in its entirety)

The boy is belligerent enough to disregard the doctor’s crushing attitude and sees sex change surgery as useful to him, just as a wheelchair would be useful to the imaginary cripple. Both the wheelchair and the sex change surgery do not remove either party’s situation but they make it more liveable. Neither person is pathologised in this narration; practicality is Nathan’s concern, not analysis, theory or cures. My final poem, Corridor, 2013, harks back to the invisibility discussed in Corridor, 1973. It encapsulates many of the linguistic and ethical struggles I had with writing the poem sequence and the problem of using disability metaphors and similes. It also draws together other recurring motifs. I had already included poems that demonstrated my relationship to Nathan, therefore the final line is not a revelation but an affirmation: These days I reflect on the absent cripple in that doctor’s simile. The cripple is taken from his reality and shifted ontologically. In the 1970s few would have baulked at such a term, but still, to have used this other state of being to try and explain his refusal to act on Nathan’s behalf, was muddled. There is an analogy, but not the one he made. It’s wrong to have said this to that lad, it’s wrong to have said this line at all, suggesting disability’s a lost cause, as though its usefulness lies only in simile or metaphor. Which brings us back to the phantom limb. Since a phantom is usually thought of as dead, a ghost absent/present, a soul in some distress, this won’t do anymore. A trans person’s body lives, their bodily knowledge is warm, is not to be found lying dead in a surgeon’s tray, it is a schoolboy stood in a corridor, outside a maths room

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11. Literary Disability Studies Inform an Approach to Trans* Poetics? facing a door wearing a girls’ school uniform, he’s not a phantom, though he knows he is not seen. Nate chews the inside of his cheek, kicks against the wall, inks letters on his arm, daydreams. He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be... Nate scrapes his nail against his thumb, unpicks his skin. Stop. No more metaphors, that time is done. These are my lover’s limbs, waiting.

These poems exist in the tension of accepting the need to change a body whilst also believing that we need to change the world. Pragmatically sexchange surgery is a solution for some transmen and women, but we still need to strive for a more multi-gender-accommodating society. This compromise with medical science is one that many disabled people also make. I have found the application of literary disability studies theory to be extremely helpful in helping me think about my poetic response to a real-life situation. It has challenged me but also helped me assess what might work poetically and metaphorically for both trans* and disabled people in all our lives.

Bibliography Barker, C., Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, Metaphor and Materiality, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Blackridge, P. and S. Gilhooly, Still Sane, Vancouver, Press Gang Publishers, 1985. Bolin, A., In Search of Eve: Transsexual Rites of Passage, New York, Bergin and Garvey, 1988. Butler, J., Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Oxon and New York, Routledge, 1990. Davis, L.J., Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body, London and New York, Verso, 1995. Davy, Z., Recognizing Transsexuals: Personal, Political and Medicolegal Embodiment, Farnham, Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2011. Department for Work and Pensions, ‘Fraud and Error in the Benefits System 2013/14 Estimates (biannual)’ https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_d

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ata/file/371459/Statistical_Release.pdf , 2014, (accessed 25th February 2015). Domurat Dreger, A., Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1998. Green, R., ‘Transsexual Legal Rights in the United States and the United Kingdom: Employment, Medical Treatment, and Civil Status’, Archives of Sexual Behaviour, vol. 39, no. 1, Springer Science + Business Media, 2010, pp. 153-160. McRuer, R., Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, London and New York, New York University Press, 2010. Nichols, C., Tales of Boy Nancy, Tampa, Florida, Driftwood, 2005. —. My Glamorous Assistant, West Kirby, Headland, 2007. —. Distance, Liverpool, Erbacce Press, 2012. Olds, S., ‘Outside the Operating Room of the Sex Change Doctor’ in The Gold Cell, New York, Knopf, 1987. Prosser, J., Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, New York, Columbia University Press, 1998. Scholinski, D., The Last Time I Wore a Dress. New York, Riverhead Books, 1997. Snyder, S. and D. Mitchell, Narrative Prosthesis and the Dependencies of Discourse. Michigan, University of Michigan, 2007. Weiss, J., ‘The Disability Rights Movement and the Legacy of Poets with Disabilities’ in S. Bartlett, J. Black and M. Northen (eds.), Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, El Paso, Cinco Puntos Press, 2011, pp. 138-144. Wood, M.E., Life Writing and Schizophrenia: Encounters at the Edge of Meaning. Amsterdam-New York, Editions Rodopi B.V., 2013.

12. RESISTING FREAKERY JUDE WOODS

With no supplies, Livingstone had to eat his meals in a roped-off enclosure for the entertainment of the locals in return for food.1

There is a well-established body of scholarship on ‘freakery’2 and ‘enfreakment’3 particularly examining the Victorian freak show as a subject.4 Exploring ‘freak discourses’5 referencing the ideas emerging from these enquiries onto the enfreaking dynamics at play, I will explore the strategies of refusal revealed in two examples of resistance to freakery and enfreakment; the photographs Dance with the Dead Cock (2009) by Anthony Clair Wagner and Freakified (1989) by Jude Woods. 1

E. Wright, Lost Explorers: Adventurers Who Disappeared Off the Face of the Earth, Sydney, Pier 9, Murdoch Books, 2008, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Livingstone (accessed 18 February 2016). 2 R. Garland Thomson, ‘Introduction: From Wonder to Error – A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity’, in R. Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 1-17. 3 D. Hevey, The Creatures Time Forgot Photography and Disability Imagery, London, Routledge, 1992, p. 58. 4 Scholarship on Freakery includes: R. Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York, New York University Press, 1996; E. Grosz, Freaks. A Study of Human Anomalies Social Semiotics vol. 1, no. 2, 1991; E. Clare, Exile and Pride, Cambridge MA, South End Press, 1999; M. Tromp (ed.), Victorian Freaks, The Social Context in Britain, Columbus, The Ohio State University Press, 2008; N. Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity, Freak Shows and Modern British Culture, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2010; A. Kerchy and A. Zittlau (eds.), Exploring the Cultural History of Continental European Freak Shows and ‘Enfreakment’, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Cambridge Scholars, 2012. 5 Garland Thomson, Freakery, ibid., p. 3.

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Freaks The dictionary definition of freak is ‘a person, animal or plant that is abnormal or deformed; monstrosity’;6 the key terms contained in this definition are loaded with powerful cultural histories and associations which I will touch on in this chapter. Freak refers to the person at the centre of the spectacle, the person whose atypicality is the focus of attention in the (often but not always) performed and (always) constructed embodiment presented to an audience. I use atypicality in preference to terms like ‘person with a disability’, ‘dis/abled’ or ‘crip’ although I do also use disability in some contexts. This terminology and the related conceptual models and philosophies have and are contested by disability theorists.7 My use of atypicality is an attempt to apply a rhizomic approach8 linking analyses of the othering process acted on all those deemed ‘other’, I hope to open up space for simultaneously addressing multiple hegemonies interacting and competing in this extremely complex landscape. The term and related anti-binaric critiques are well established amongst Autistic people, it was first used by sociologist Judy Singer in 1998.9 Although, in a neurodiverse model the term neurodivergent10 is more commonly used to refer to people who have been designated atypical, I am proposing embracing a wider use of the category of difference or otherness beyond neurodivergence and so I have used the term atypicality to reflect this.

6 ‘Freak’, in P. Hanks, W.T. McLeod and L. Urdang, (eds.), The Collins English Dictionary, 2nd edition, London and Glasgow, Collins, 1986. 7 Including Materialist Disability Studies theorists like M. Oliver, C. Barnes, C. Thomas; Critical Disability Studies theorists like L. Davis, D. Goodley, F. Kumari Campbell and R. McRuer; and Critical Realists Studies theorists like T. Shakespeare and N. Watson. 8 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 14th edition, London and New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 1998. 9 J. Singer, Odd People In, The Birth of Community Amongst People on the Autistic Spectrum, Degree Thesis, University of Sydney, 1998. This can be downloaded via the following link: ‘J. Singer’, Academia.edu, [website], ND, http://www.academia.edu/4129151/Odd_People_In_A_personal_exploration_of_a _New_Social_Movement_based_on_Neurological_Diversity, (accessed 18 February 2016). 10 N. Walker, Neurodiversity: Some Basic Terms and Definitions, 2014 http://neurocosmopolitanism.com/neurodiversity-some-basic-terms-definitions/, (accessed 7 July 2016).

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I am aware of the transitory shifting of meanings and values and that consequently with common usage typicality/atypicality could become a substitute for the normal/abnormal oppositional binary. I have observed that negative attitudes and the perceived ‘naturalness’ and dominance of oppositional binaric concepts often move around to inhabit the new more favourably intended vocabulary. The shifting associations over the past 50 or so years with the word ‘gay’ are a good example of this. So, it may be that my use of the terms typicality/atypicality will outlive their usefulness as the unfinishable project of social change and reconstructing these vocabularies continues. As this terminology and conceptual terrain is not the central focus of this chapter I cannot give these concerns the in-depth explanations they deserve, however this brief overview will help readers locate the contexts from which my use of key terminology is informed. There has been some critique of the tendency to use ‘freak’ and ‘disabled’ as interchangeable terms,11 particularly identifying the problem of methodological ‘presentism’ - the unhelpful application of contemporary terms and concepts to historical contexts.12 This collapsing of ‘freak’ and ‘disabled’ into each other is also troubled by the evidence generated by freak discourse that there were a diverse range of people who were (and continue to be) designated as freaks. Applying a broadening term like atypicality may be helpful to reflect this diversity and to build understanding of the themes running across these different differences. The framework, which I am building my proposals about freakery and enfreakment upon, are that the atypical traits associated with the person, who has been designated and/or ‘chosen’ to place themselves in this category, may have been present from their conception, birth or then acquired. These traits may have corporeal and/or neuro elements, but they are also fabricated through sexualised, racialised, gendered and/or other social constructs. There may be some materiality associated with corporeal/neuro atypicality as in the case of people who would probably be designated ‘disabled’ in contemporary western society, like those with 11

N. Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity Freak Shows and Modern British Culture, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California, 2010, pp. 16-20. 12 Halberstam refers to ‘perverse presentism’ as a more useful tool, as it can reduce the problem of ‘[…] projecting contemporary understandings back in time, but that one can apply insights from the present to conundrums of the past.’ J. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1998, pp. 52-53.

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the genetic condition achondroplasia (‘dwarfism’) who perform in various arenas including freak shows.13 However, it may also be the case that the atypicality is conceptually constructed but also completely immaterial. The non-European people displayed in Victorian freak shows known as ‘Human Zoos’, presented as an evolutionary ‘missing link’14 or ‘dying race’15, performing ‘race’ for a European audience would be a good example of this.16 Although the perceived naturalness of race may interfere with the reading, so the audience may still experience the subject’s atypicality as having materiality, rather than seeing the illusionary impact of the othering. However, there is still no materiality associated with the atypicality in this racialised phantasmal moment, as Armand Marie Leroi in Mutants confirms: Generations of scientists have expounded these results much as I have here – and asserted that, as far as genetics is concerned, races do not exist. They are reification, social constructs, or else they are the remnants of discredited ideologies.17

John Willinsky in Learning to Divide the World details the imperial history of education and its use as a tool of European colonisation. Charting the use of display he describes ‘the exhibitionary formation of imperialism’ and that it: […] sought to amaze, intrigue, titillate, and inform the public who were to see themselves, whatever their station in life, as the benefactors of empire by virtue of their race.18

Leonard Cassuto in Freakery also dissects racialised constructions: Freak shows filled a gap that they did not create. This space, between the desire for absolute racial difference and the fact that none exists, was wide

13 L. Merish, ‘Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple’, in Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery, op. cit., pp. 185-203. 14 Durbach, Spectacle, op. cit., p. 130. 15 ibid., p. 147. 16 B. Lindfors, ‘Ethnological Show Business: Footlighting the Dark Continent’, in Garland Thomson, Freakery, op. cit., pp. 207-213. 17 A. M Leroi, Mutants On the Form, Varieties, and Errors of the Human Bodies, London, Harper Collins Publishers, 2003, p. 339. 18 J. Willinsky, Learning to Divide the World Education at Empire’s End, Minneapolis and London, University of Minneapolis Press, 1988, p. 86.

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12. Resisting Freakery and deep in a culture that relied on such difference for its very organizing principles.19

Whether there is materiality associated with the atypicality or not, I am in agreement with Margrit Shildrick in Embodying the Monster Encounters with the Vulnerable Self when she says that her approach is […] unashamedly postmodernist in that I understand all bodies to be discursively constructed rather than given.20

Although there may be some theoretical challenges and risks when using such a broad grouping in the way that I am proposing in this unifying category of atypicality, but there could be benefits from a strategy of category refusal and ally-building as methodologies of subversion. I also share this interest in broadening and connecting up a radical integrated model of other resistance with Robert McRuer, in Crip Theory he calls for a […] post-identity politics that allows us to work together, one that acknowledges the complex and contradictory histories of our various movements, drawing on and learning from those histories rather than transcending them. We can’t afford to position any body of thought, not even disability studies, as global in the sense of offering the subject position, the key. 21

Rosemarie Garland Thomson, introducing the collection of essays Freakery, presents the case made by scholars that the freak is a social construct: […] its purpose is to reveal the practices and cultural logic that construct certain corporeal variations as deviant and to denaturalize the generally assumed opposition between normal and abnormal bodies. The essays assembled here invoke a wide range of disciplinary approaches within cultural studies to argue collectively that the freak is a historical figure ritually fabricated from the raw material of bodily variations and

19

L. Cassuto, ‘“What an object he would have made of me!”: Tattooing and the Racial Freak in Melville’s Typee’, in Garland Thomson Freakery, op. cit., p. 244. 20 M. Shildrick, Embodying the Monster, London, Sage Publications, 2002, p. 4. 21 R. McRuer, Crip Theory, Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, New York and London, New York Press, 2006, p. 202.

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appropriated in the service of shifting social ideologies. In short, we show the freak of nature to be a freak of culture.22

As with the presentistic risks found with the retrospective application of contemporary terms on historical figures and cultural practices speculative assumptions concerning the agency of the person assigned freak have also been investigated and contested.23 Although there is limited space here for a detailed investigation of agency in freakery I do want to at least acknowledge the presence of a pragmatic continuum of agency. This arises out of the limited choices available for those assigned as freaks to sustain themselves (and their dependants) and the influences of the psychological impacts of cultural socialisation as other.24 It seems that in general for any individual it is likely that coercion and exploitation from outside and individual agency affected by poverty and discrimination are all interacting and operating in varying degrees on this continuum of ‘choice’.

Freakery and Enfreakment Enfreakment25 was first proposed by David Hevey in Creatures Time Forgot, in The Enfreakment of Photography26 he identifies the use of disabled people as symbolic stand-ins for the anxieties of normalcy.27 Rosemarie Garland Thomson took this vocabulary forward and in this passage she defines both enfreakment and freakery: Enfreakment emerges from cultural rituals that stylize, silence, differentiate, and distance the persons whose bodies the freak-hunters or showmen colonize and commercialize. Paradoxically, however at the same time that enfreakment elaborately foregrounds specific bodily eccentricities,

22

Garland Thomson, ‘Introduction’ in Freakery, op. cit., p. xviii D. A. Gerber, ‘The “Careers” of People Exhibited in Freak Shows: The Problem of Volition and Valorisation’, in Garland Thomson, Freakery, ibid., pp. 38-54. 24 Clare, Exile and Pride, op. cit., pp 67-101. 25 ‘Freaking’ and ‘freaked’ are also variations used by some authors: N. Rothfels, ‘Aztecs, Aborigines, and Ape-People: Science and Freaks in Germany, 18501900’, in Garland Thomson, Freakery, op. cit., pp. 158-163. 26 D. Hevey, The Creatures Time Forgot, Photography and Disability Imagery, London and New York, Routledge, 1992, p. 53. 27 ‘Normalcy is a descriptor of a certain form of governmental rule […] over bodies.’, L.J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards, Disability, Dismodernism and other Difficult Positions, New York and London, New York University Press, 2002, p. 107. 23

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12. Resisting Freakery it also collapses all those differences into a ‘freakery’, a single amorphous category of corporeal otherness.28

This broader category of freakery sits well with my use of the concept of atypicality especially if it can be untied from materiality, so it could be characterised as a category of both corporeal and non-corporeal otherness. A broad understanding of enfreakment could be seen as a process of applying a constructed freak identity and narrative to a person (or group), where the exploitation of the perceived atypicality is used to promote the normative ideologies (constructed ideas to delineate between oppositional binaries like abnormal and normal) which benefit the agents of enfreakment, what Hevey calls ‘enfreakers’.29 Enfreakment provides us with a description of the process of othering/pathologising found in freak cultural performance and materials: specifically, that it is a process done to the subject (even if they ‘choose’ to participate in the performance of the illusion) and that freakiness is not intrinsic to the person assigned ‘freak’ (even if they have come to believe this) but projected around and upon their embodiment, it exploits their perceived atypicality (regardless of any associated materiality). If all the versions of freak identity are constructed as Garland Thomson describes using ‘mediating narratives’30 and each is created individually moulded from the traits (regardless of materiality), it follows that if the culturally competent material is available and has currency then anyone could be enfreaked. Linked to the idea that social anxieties are projected onto the freak figure is that the enfreaking process is fundamentally one of normalcy confirmation, Andrea Zittlau applies this to various locations of freakery: […] the cabinet of curiosity, the medical collection, and the freak show – serve to exclude certain bodies from the discourses of normality and thus reassure the identity of the masses.31

28

Garland Thomson, Freakery, op. cit., p. 10. Hevey, op. cit., p. 4. 30 Garland Thomson, Freakery, loc. cit., p. 10. 31 A. Zittlau, ‘Enfreakment and German Medical Collections’, in Kerchy and Zittlau, op. cit., p. 152. 29

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Many of the themes found in ‘freak discourse’32 are consistent with ideas emerging from monster theory and there are also many overlapping and interconnected historical stories. Stephen T. Asma describes the monster as ‘a kind of cultural category, employed in domains as diverse as religion, biology, literature, and politics.’33 The evidence suggests that both freaks and monsters represent the fears and anxieties about social change within the wider culture. Those assigned freaks/monsters disrupt the comforting illusion of social homogeneity; they undermine binaric and predictable social categories which are based on inaccurate belief systems, and linked to the dominant hegemonies (gender, class, race, and normalcy). This is why neuro and corporeal atypicalities, hybridity, in-between-ness, gender variance and (often racialised) ‘foreigner’ typologies are constantly recycled in enfreaking materials.

Pathologies The vocabularies and mediating narratives of enfreakment shift over time, Foucault charts this in Abnormal Lectures34 and also Garland Thomson who says here: As modernity develops in western culture, freak discourse logs the change: the prodigious monster transforms into the pathological terata; what was once sought after as revelation becomes pursued as entertainment; what aroused awe now inspires horror; what was taken as a potent shifts to a site of progress. In brief, wonder becomes error.35

Medical nomenclature is the dominant language of enfreakment of our times and this is why paying attention to pathologising content is so important. Normal needs abnormal, one cannot exist without the other. Audre Lorde described a ‘mythical norm’36 and freak discourse exposes the delusional 32

Garland Thomson, Freakery, op. cit., p. 2. S. T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 13. 34 M. Foucault, Abnormal Lectures at the College de France 1974 - 1975, New York, Picador, 1999. 35 Garland Thomson, Freakery, loc. cit., p. 3. 36 A. Lorde, Sister Outsider Essays and Speeches, Freedom CA, The Crossing Press, 1984, p. 116. 33

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qualities of both normality and abnormality. The normal/abnormal oppositional binary functions as a foundation lying underneath other commonly identified binaries like racialised notions of black/white, gendered ideas associated with male/female, self/other and so on. Recognition that pathological concepts sit underneath all of these binaries lends weight to the argument that the identification and analysis of these pathologising ideologies is crucial to the deconstructive project found in the study of freakery. Resistance to enfreakment therefore must include a rigorous identification and critique of the pathologising elements expressed in the acts of and/or enfreaking materials.

Location The events, activities and the cultural materials associated with the spectacle of viewing and exhibiting freaks appear in many places. Including visible and symbolic suggestions freak spectacle can be found in multiple locations; geographical, temporal, cultural, digital, linguistic, institutional, domestic, public, private, material, gestural and/or interactive. Freakiness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder and this is revealed in Garland Thomson’s paper The Beauty and the Freak37 which traces and compares the histories and cultural meanings of the beauty pageant and freak shows in the USA from the late nineteenth century. Garland Thomson describes here the normative mechanism commonly identified by scholars: By analysing the conventions of display and the narratives of embodiment that the beauty pageant and the freak show employ, I will suggest here that the cultural work of these two public spectacles is to ritually mark the bodies on view, rendering them into icons the verify the social status quo. Although one traffics in the ideal and the other the anomalous, both the beauty pageant and the freak show produce figures – the beauty and the freak – whose contrasting visual presence gives shape and definition to the figure of the normative citizen of a democratic order.38

Location awards freakiness in the story of David Livingstone quoted at the beginning of this chapter. In 1869 he was enfreaked by the African people he lived amongst. His own agency was limited by jeopardy and as he was, 37

R. Garland Thomson, ‘The Beauty and the Freak’, Disability Art and Culture, (Part Two), vol. XXXVII, issue 3, 1998. 38 ibid., p. 2.

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in this context, the ‘atypical other’. He provided entertaining confirmation of normalcy and typicality, during the display he performed the routine domestic activity of eating with a knife and fork. There are some interesting parallels with freak show performances here39 but more importantly, this rather ironic role reversal illustrates the constructed, transitional and context-based locations of freakery and the potential transnational fluidity of freak status. Many activists and authors have extended identification and investigation of the locations of freakery beyond the Victorian freak show and have generated more examples both from historical and contemporary locations and embraced a range of cultural forms for enquiry. This could include; the Cabinet of Curiosities; museums, historical and teratological specimen based collections;40 medical and academic archives/teaching resources; archival film and photographic collections (particularly eugenic photography); fashion shows, beauty pageants and body building shows; artworks and cultural practices, literature, theatre and film, particularly horror genres.41 Contemporary television and internet materials provide many examples: 1. Documentaries: ‘you tube’ clips and ‘virtual staring’42 constructed as formulaic variations on key themes of enfreakment; these impairment-focused documentaries usually follow atypical individuals (as well as disabled people this can also include transpeople, obese people and people who have had body modifications like tattoos, cosmetic surgery, piercings). The narrative is often centered on notions of recovery, courtship and/or performing routine daily activities. Also what has become known as ‘victim porn’ or ‘poverty porn’ again is usually predictable documentary style constructions which confirm self/other binaries 39

Garland Thomson, Freakery, op. cit., p. 6. A. Crockford, ‘Spectacular Medical Freakery: British “Translations” of Nineteenth Century European Teratology’, in Kerchy and Zittlau, op. cit., pp. 112128. 41 J. Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1995. 42 R. Garland Thomson, ‘Staring at the Other’, Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 4, 2005, p. 1. 40

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enfreaking victims of crime and economically disadvantaged communities. 2. Telethons: positioning atypicality as passive and ‘in need’ and providing opportunities for altruistic psychological gain as well as normalcy confirmation. 3. Talent shows: where a large part of the entertainment is at the expense of the ‘untalented’ who become targets of derision. Susan Boyle was an exception, although she had ‘talent’ this did not protect her from enfreakment. This wide-ranging list offers a substantial source of potential multiply connected cultural forms to investigate as sites of freakery. It is also a rough outline of examples to support the provocation that freakery and enfreakment are still simultaneously ubiquitous and disavowed in contemporary western culture.

The Enfreaking Stare Looking, seeing and display are key parts of this enfreaking process. Critical thinkers have defined the gaze43 as an act of gender dominance, an objectifying and colonising mechanism. Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic proposes that Western medicine is based on the perpetual gaze of the medic.44 Hevey analyses the use of disabled people in the work of photographers like Diane Arbus: While this symbol functions as a ‘property’ of disabled people as viewed by these photographers, it does not function as the property of those disabled people observed. Its purpose was not as a role model, or as references for observed people, but as the voyeuristic property of the nondisabled gaze. Moreover the impairment of the disabled person became the mark, the target for a disavowal, a ridding, of the existential fears and fantasies of non-disabled people.45

Garland Thomson explores this in her article ‘Staring at the Other’ making a distinction between different types of looking and identifies staring as a good description of the ‘being looked at’ experience of disabled people.

43 L. Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasures and the Narrative Cinema’, Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975. A.E. Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze, New York, Routledge, 1997. 44 M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, London, Routledge, 1973. 45 Hevey, op. cit., pp. 72 – 73.

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Staring at disability choreographs a visual relation between spectator and a spectacle. A more intense form of looking than glancing, glimpsing, scanning, surveying, gazing and other forms of casual or uninterested looking, staring registers the perception of difference and gives meaning to impairment by marking it as aberrant.46

Informed by Garland Thomson’s extensive analysis here,47 it seems like a more relevant term then ‘gaze’, despite its scholarly role, so my preference is for the phrase ‘the enfreaking stare’. Transpeople are also enfreaked by the medical gaze - the enfreaking gender stare. Zowie Davy in Recognizing Transsexuals describes the part played by subjective aesthetic criteria and suggests that: […] the medicolegal prescriptions and discursive constructions about acceptable bodily aesthetics and of Gender Dysphoria do not have mediological consensus.48

The extent to which these subjective visual assessments, often based on binary and stereotyped gendered assumptions, impact on transpeople’s lives is well documented in the many trans narratives. Davy summarises: […] the decision to grant legal recognition to transpeople is based on subjective, aesthetic evaluations by ‘experts’ which have been influenced by wider cultural and academic debates about embodiment and bodily aesthetics.49

The enfreaking stare is a daily routine for people whose atypicality is visible; intrusive staring, abusive comments and unwanted touching - all acts of enfreakment (and hate crime). Donna Reeve in Arguing about Disability describes the impact of this discrimination as: […] existential insecurity associated with uncertainty of not knowing how the next stranger will react further compounds this example of psychoemotional disableism.50

46

Garland Thomson, ‘Staring’, pp. 56 -57. ibid. 48 Z. Davy, Recognizing Transsexuals Personal, Political and Medicolegal Embodiment, London, Ashgate, 2011, p. 37. 49 ibid., p. 44. 50 D. Reeve, ‘Biopolitics and Bare Life: Does the Impaired Body Provide Contemporary Examples of homo sacer?’, in K. Kristiansen, S. Vehmas and T. 47

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Tom Shakespeare is also quoted talking about the experience of being photographed in public without permission and how difficult it is to resist this enfreakment: […] while its unpleasant to be the subject of intrusive attention, it feels even more disempowering to be captured on camera phone. There’s no possible answer to that click which could make it better. Making a rude response only shows that the perpetrators have succeeded in getting under your skin. There is no point in complaining to the police, because unless the photo is published, then no crime has been committed. If you smash their phone then you become the criminal.51

Photography is an important historical and contemporary tool of enfreakmental visioning. As a technology its invention and application parallels the development of the pseudo-science of eugenics, itself a site of freakery and enfreakment. The stories of these phenomena are entwined, as charted by Anne Maxwell in Picture Imperfect Photography and Eugenics: […] photography helped popularize and legitimate eugenics by providing visual evidence of scientists’ racial theories and the hereditary basis for low intelligence, disease and crime, it clearly functioned as a tool of propaganda and violent repression.52

Ironically photography was also the tool used by some anthropologists and social scientists to create materials to challenge these enfreaking ideologies, Franz Boas, W.E. Du Bois, Julien Huxley and Alfred J Haddon all adopted photographic methods within their research and activism.53 As with freakery, photography itself is phantasmal, John Tagg identifies the political dimension of this: Yet the mechanism that plugs the viewer into ‘the plane of decent seeing’ is a political technology that effectively has nothing to do with corporeal vision but merely works through visual recruitment to hold the viewer in place: to capture the viewer as a function of the State.54

Shakespeare (eds.), Arguing about Disability: Philosophical Perspectives, New York, Oxon, Routledge, 2010, p. 210. 51 Reeve, ibid., p. 211. 52 A. Maxwell, Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics, 1870 –1940, Brighton and Portland, Sussex Academic Press, 2008, p. 15. 53 ibid., p. 232. 54 J. Tagg, ‘Mindless Photography’, in J.J. Long, A. Noble and E. Welch (eds.), Photography Theoretical Snapshots, London and New York, Routledge, 2009, p. 29.

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Resista ance Reflecting back the ennfreaking starre and perforrming a rejeection of normalcy caan be an efffective method of resistannce. Garland Thomson explores starring back: Staring is a high stakes social interacction for everyybody involved d. The w to look k away. The sttruggle for starrees is struggle for starers is whether how to loook back. Starreable people have h a good deeal of work to do to assert theeir own dignityy or avoid an uncomfortablee scene. Peoplee with unusual llooks come to understand u this and develop reelational strateg gies to amelioratte the damage staring can infflict. Rather thhan passively wilting w under inttrusive and disscomforting staares, a staree ccan take chargee of a staring ssituation, usingg charm, frien ndliness, humoor, formidability, or perspicaccity, to reduce inter-personal tension and eenact a positivee selfrepresenttation.55

Figure 23. D Dance with th he Dead Cock,, Anthony Cllair Wagner, 2009. Visual artissts, with livved experience of atypiccality, also have an opportunity to finesse thee skills to ‘tak ke charge’ of eenfreaking en nvisioning in the makinng of artworkks. In Anthony y Clair Wagneer’s photograp phic self55

Garland Thhomson, ‘Starinng’, op. cit., p. 84. 8

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portrait Dance with the Dead Cock, we see a confident transperson in their transbody, asserting hybridity, returning the gaze of the viewer directly whilst holding this symbolic comment on heteropatriarchy. Wagner describes the approach: In my art I seek to practice a kind of diversification by increasing the complexity of the transgender imaginary through adding my own visibility. My radical approach makes use of the figure of the monster as well as the confrontational potential of the so-called abnormal transgender body. Heteronormativity has long divided bodies into the normal, that is, proper human, and the other, commonly regarded as less than human, even monstrous.56

Carefully structuring the elements in the picture to intentionally reflect back the enfreaking stare with intelligent humour, gracefully negotiating vulnerability, Wagner says: […] yet the monster in this photograph seems neither ashamed nor fearful but, rather, assertive and protective of the object in its hands.57

My own photographic self-portrait, Freakified, was a similar attempt to express this reaction to the enfreaking stare. It was intentionally made to be both confrontational and vulnerable and deliberately lit to echo horror/monster cliché imagery in popular culture. At the time I made this picture my own theoretical understanding of enfreakment and disability scholarship was limited, but I knew that I was trying to communicate a feeling I experienced living with visible atypicalities and constantly facing this enfreaking stare whilst simultaneously meeting complete denial from (both knowing and unknowing) enfreakers. As my own activism and study of disability politics in the 1990s unfolded, I found the vocabulary to describe the earlier expression shown in this artwork. Wagner described a similar realisation in the context of transgender scholarship: I discovered eerily paralleled elements in my art, whose initial development predated my first knowledge of these aspects.58

56

A.C. Wagner, ‘Artist Statement: Visible Monstrosity as Empowerment’, Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 2, 2015, p. 341. 57 Wagner, ‘Artist Statement’, op. cit., p. 342.

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Figure 24. Freakified, Jude Woods, 1989.

58

A.C. Wagner, ‘On Elves and Beasts: An Intervention into Normative Imaginaries’, Graduate Journal of Social Science, vol. 7, no. 2, 2010, p. 45.

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Both of these self-portraits use art making as a way to ‘take charge’ of staring, as described by Garland Thomson. By exploiting portrait photography, the body of the person assigned freak, the props and performance of the freak show and using a chosen narrative these artworks expose the constructedness of the cultural materials of enfreakment. They reflect back and parody the enfreaking stare as a method of resistance to freakery and enfreakment, as Wagner says ‘to decolonialize the imaginary that was used to suppress’59. There are many more thematic avenues of investigation and methods of resistance to explore. My initial foray has unearthed far more potential than I have had time and space to encompass here. I hope I have shown the value of analysing strategies of resistance to freakery (whatever cultural form they take and whoever is enfreaked) and that it can be a productive endeavour which can further inform the effectiveness of both activism and art making. Critiquing pathologising constructions and reflecting back the enfreaking stare are powerful methods of undermining enfreakment, celebrating survival and so resisting freakery.

Bibliography Asma, S.T., On Monsters an Unnatural History of our Worst Fears, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003. Cassuto, L., ‘“What an object he would have made of me!”: Tattooing and the Racial Freak in Melville’s Typee’, in R. Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York, New York University Press, 1996. Clare, E., Exile and Pride, Cambridge MA, South End Press, 1999. Crockford, A., ‘Spectacular Medical Freakery: British “Translations” of Nineteenth Century European Teratology’, in A. Kerchy and A. Zittlau (eds.), Exploring the Cultural History of Continental European Freak Shows and ‘Enfreakment’, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars, 2012, pp. 112–128. Davis, L.J., Bending Over Backwards, Disability, Dismodernism and other Difficult Positions, New York and London, New York University Press, 2002. Davy, Z., Recognizing Transsexuals Personal, Political and Medicolegal Embodiment, London, Ashgate, 2011.

59

Wagner, ‘Artist Statement’, op. cit., p. 344.

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Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 14th edition, London, Bloomsbury, 1998. Durbach, N., Spectacle of Deformity, Freak Shows and Modern British Culture, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2010. Foucault, M., Abnormal Lectures at the College de France 1974 - 1975, New York, Picador, 1999. —. The Birth of the Clinic, London, Routledge, 1973. Hanks, P., W.T. McLeod and L. Urdang (eds.), The Collins English Dictionary, 2nd edition., London and Glasgow, Collins, 1986. Garland Thomson, R. (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York, New York University Press, 1996. —. ‘Introduction: From Wonder to Error – A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity’, in Garland Thomson, R. (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 1-17. —. ‘The Beauty and the Freak’, Disability Art and Culture, (Part Two), vol. XXXVII, issue 3, 1998, pp. 2-6. —. ‘Staring at the Other’, Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 4, 2005, p. 1. —. Staring: How We Look, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2009. Gerber, D.A., ‘The “Careers” of People Exhibited in Freak Shows: The Problem of Volition and Valorisation’, in R. Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 38-54. Grosz, E., ‘Freaks, A Study of Human Anomalies’, Social Semiotics, vol. 1. no. 2, 1991. Halberstam, J., Female Masculinity, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1998. —. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1995. Hevey, D., The Creatures Time Forgot Photography and Disability Imagery, London, Routledge, 1992. Kaplan, A.E., Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze, New York, Routledge, 1997. Kerchy, A. and A. Zittlau (eds.), Exploring the Cultural History of Continental European Freak Shows and ‘Enfreakment’, NewcastleUpon-Tyne, Cambridge Scholars, 2012. Leroi, A.M., Mutants On the Form, Varieties and Errors of the Human Bodies, London, Harper Collins Publishers, 2003.

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Lindfors, B., ‘Ethnological Show Business: Footlighting the Dark Continent’, in R. Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 207-213. Lorde, A., Sister Outsider Essays and Speeches, Freedom CA, The Crossing Press, 1984. Maxwell, A., Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics, 1870 – 1940, Brighton and Portland, Sussex Academic Press, 2008. McRuer, R., Crip Theory, Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, New York and London, New York Press, 2006. Merish, L., ‘Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple’, in R. Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 185-203. Mulvey, L., ‘Visual Pleasures and the Narrative Cinema’, Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975. Reeve, D., ‘Biopolitics and Bare Life: Does the Impaired Body Provide Contemporary Examples of homo sacer?’, in Kristiansen, K., S. Vehmas and T. Shakespeare (eds.), Arguing About Disability: Philosophical Perspectives, New York, Oxon, Routledge, 2010, pp. 210-211. Rothfels, N., ‘Aztecs, Aborigines, and Ape-People: Science and Freaks in Germany, 1850-1900’, in Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 158-163. Shildrick, M., Embodying the Monster, London, Sage Publications, 2002. Singer, J., Odd People In, The Birth of Community Amongst People on the Autistic Spectrum, Sydney University, 1998. ‘Singer, J.’, Academia.edu, [website], ND, http://www.academia.edu/4129151/Odd_People_In_A_personal_explo ration_of_a_New_Social_Movement_based_on_Neurological_Diversit y, (accessed 18 February 2016). Tagg, J., ‘Mindless Photography’, in J. Long, A. Noble and E. Welch (eds.), Photography Theoretical Snapshots, London and New York, Routledge, 2009. Tromp, M., (ed.), Victorian Freaks, The Social Context in Britain, Columbus, The Ohio State University Press, 2008. Wagner, A.C., ‘Artist Statement Visible Monstrosity as Empowerment’, Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 2, 2015, pp. 341 – 342. —. ‘On Elves and Beasts: An Intervention into Normative Imaginaries’, Graduate Journal of Social Science, vol. 7, no. 2, 2010, p. 45.

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Willinsky, J., Learning to Divide the World Education at Empire’s End, Minneapolis and London, University of Minneapolis Press, 1988. Wright, E., Lost Explorers: Adventurers Who Disappeared Off the Face of the Earth, Pier 9, Murdoch Books, Sydney, 2008. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Livingstone (accessed 18 February 2016). Zittlau, A., ‘Enfreakment and German Medical Collections’, in A. Kerchy and A. Zittlau (eds.), Exploring the Cultural History of Continental European Freak Shows and ‘Enfreakment’, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars, 2012, p. 152.

CONTRIBUTORS

Dr Michela Baldo holds a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Manchester and is a lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. She is a former Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW), University of London, where she investigated the reception through translation of ItalianAmerican women writers in Italy. Michela has written articles on ItalianCanadian writing and its written and audio-visual translation into Italian, and on the concept of ‘queer’ and its migration/translation into Italian. She has co-edited a book on drag kings in Italy, which came out in March 2014, and is now pursuing research on translation in queer transfeminist activist movements in Italy. Dr Susan Clayton is honorary Maîtresse de conférences at the University of Paris 7 (Denis Diderot), France. Her doctoral thesis was defended in 1991 and focused on the corpus of the comparative (England / France) analysis of the social representations of male homosexuality from the Oscar Wilde trials till 1980s including dictionary entries, literature, parliamentary debates and the press. She has given many papers in Europe and published articles in several countries on topics which include, female husbands, both textual and cinematographic portrayals of them, the Victorian New Woman, and terminology connected with same-sex sexuality. Dr Olivia Fiorelli graduated in contemporary history at the University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy and completed a PhD in gender studies at same university. S/he has completed a post-doc at the ICS/Universidade de Lisboa and is currently “cultore della materia” in women’s history at Roma Tre University. Olivia’s research interests range between gender history, trans/feminist perspectives on health and medicine and queer studies. S/he has published various papers on peer reviewed journals and has authored a monograph titled La signorina dell’igiene. Genere e biopolitica nella costruzione dell’infermiera moderna, Pisa, Pisa University Press 2015. Together with Michela Baldo and Rachele Borghi, Olivia Fiorilli has co-authored the book Il Re Nudo. Per un archivio queer in Italia, Pisa, ETS 2014.

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Eve Gianoncelli is completing a thesis in political science and gender studies at the university of Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis and is a teaching assistant at Paris Dauphine University, France. She has also been invited as a Lurcy-Fulbright Fellow at Columbia University in 2011-2012. Her thesis is about the problematic ways in which women may become intellectuals in the 20th century. Her research is situated at the crossroads of intellectual history, political theory and gender studies. She has different articles about Cahun and in particular the differing processes of reception of her work which have been shaped in antagonistic ways between ‘French’ and ‘American’ genealogies waiting to be published. She is also currently co-coordinating an issue of the French review Les cahiers du genre, about the pioneer sociologist of women and gender in the UK Viola Klein. Dr Lucy Howarth Lucy Howarth is an independent art historian who wrote her PhD thesis on the British constructivist Marlow Moss. She is currently preparing a monograph on the artist. She co-curated the Tate Moss display, which toured nationally 2013-2015, and is now working on another exhibition of Moss works to open at Haus Konstruktiv in Zürich in 2017. Lucy has taught at the universities of Plymouth and York, and has worked in the Tate Research Department. Dr David Annwn Jones. My translations of Claude Cahun's poetry and writing in tribute to her work appear in Disco Occident (2014). I have collaborated in Dadadollz (2011), a celebration of Dada women artist's work with Christine Kennedy. I write about postmodern gay poet Jonathan Williams's work in the online essay: 'Mustard and Evening Primrose'. I gave a filmed reading and talk about Barbara Hepworth, the innovative film-maker, Maya Deren and Dylan Thomas at the Hepworth Gallery and Swansea University. I've written extensively about Gothic sexuality in Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern (2014) and my exhibition of poetry in collaboration with the calligrapher, Thomas Ingmire, appears at the California Book Club in San Francisco, January-April, 2016. I have taught for many years on the Open University MA Literature line and, most recently, have worked as a poetry tutor for Sunderland University, UK. Dr Nina Kane is a researcher, performer and Artistic Director of Cast-Off Drama – www.castoffdrama.blogspot.com. She has enjoyed a 16-year association with Leeds Art Gallery, developing gender-based education,

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community and research projects from its collections and exhibitions, and is currently working on an LGBT*IQ project and symposium for York Art Gallery in response to the Flesh exhibition (2016-17). A radical feminist and queer, she is active in the trans* arts and drag scenes of Leeds, York and Manchester, and involved in charitable and voluntary support work with LGBT*IQ projects in those cities. She is also on the Board of Trustees for Greentop Circus, Sheffield. Nina gained her doctorate in feminist, queer and clown dramaturgies of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and Blasted at the University of Huddersfield in 2013, and specialises in the philosophies of Luce Irigaray. Author of a forthcoming book for Routledge on the playwright, she lectures and explores practice on Sarah Kane’s work internationally. Her current Irigarayan work on ‘abyss’ and ‘the caress’ focuses on the role of the gender binary in public bathing, and the philosophical implications of a decline in diving boards in British municipal pools. Having spent much of the last 23 years bringing up two beautiful children who are now ‘flying the nest’, she looks forward to travelling widely, making theatre and ‘taking the plunge’ wherever possible! Charlotte Mallinson is a single mother, P/T lecturer and Ph.D. researcher in the History Department at the University of Huddersfield. Charlotte returned to education as a mature student in 2008, and at the age of 37, in 2011, she achieved a combined First Class Honour’s Degree, in English Literature and Heritage Studies, at Huddersfield. From this Charlotte was awarded a bursary from the university, which permitted her to undertake her MA in History. Here Charlotte’s interests led her to, Whitechapel, 1888, and the completion of her component dissertation, ‘Ripped Whores and Heritage Tours: Dehumanisation of the Whitechapel Murder Victims’. Charlotte was once again awarded a bursary from the university. This time permitting her to undertake her doctoral degree. The working title of her thesis is: "How ‘Monsters’ are Made: An Intersectional Deconstruction of the ‘Cult’ure, Mythology and Media of the Whitechapel Murders". The overarching aim of her PhD thesis is to historicise how the women killed in the Whitechapel Murders have been represented culturally since 1970. It will, in particular, be examining how compounding constructs of class, gender, race, religion, sexuality, addiction and morality are used within master-narrative of the murders, to build upon the negative historical and cultural associations with sex-workers, and their relationship with violence (sexual or otherwise). Accordingly, Charlotte’s research interests include: the history of sex-work, true crime genre, the history of sexual violence,

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‘the murder industry’, corporeal feminism, intersectional feminism, sex and morality, gender identity, and sexuality. Jade Montserrat is an artist. She lives and works in Scarborough. Jade received a BA in the History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and an MA in Drawing from Norwich University of the Arts in the UK. Dr Cath Nichols was a queer journalist for print media and BBC Manchester radio in the 1990s, and started writing poetry in 2000 as drag queen Daisy Buttercup. Her poetry publications include Tales of Boy Nancy (Driftwood, 2005), My Glamorous Assistant (Headland, 2007) and Distance (erbacce, 2012), and she is widely published in journals and magazines. Liverpool’s Capital of Culture funded the making of a short film utilising the poetry of the sailor-suited Boy Nancy, the skills of three actors and original musical composition by Helen Maher. The Arts Council of England funded an international tour of poetry from My Glamourous Assistant which featured a narrative linking Liverpool and New York via the first ever UK Woolworths store. Cath’s PhD in Creative Writing (2011, Lancaster University, UK) investigated poets' preferred techniques when writing for performance, radio and stage. She now teaches Creative Writing at Leeds University, UK. Cath has a chapter on third year studies and writing poetry in English Literature, Language and Creative Writing: A Guide for Students (Anthem, 2014). A chapter ‘Literary disability studies in Creative Writing: a practical approach to theory’ is in the book Disability, Avoidance and the Academy (Routledge, 2015). She co-founded the Facebook group Disabookability where books that feature atypical minds and bodies are discussed. She belongs to the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and is currently developing various picture book stories. She is also writing a time-travel adventure series for readers over ten that follow Shazia (who loves swimming and has cerebral palsy) and Rachel (who loves animals and is trans), as they investigate places such as medieval Hamelin and Joan of Arc’s France. Dr Matheus Odorisi Marques is a queer researcher and a recent PhD linguistics student in the Brazilian university Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and the Spanish university Pompeo Fabra. He has just successfully passed his viva and achieved doctoral status. He works as a Portuguese professor and teacher. His academic interests concern homosexual identity and homophobia in public and religious discourse,

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analysed through textual linguistics, queer theory and ideology concepts He is associated with queer studies groups and offers workshops about gender discussion in schools and through the media. He has written numerous publications on metaphor and embodied language. Dr Catherine Stones is a lecturer in Graphic Design at the University of Leeds, UK. She has a strong interest in illustration and visualisation and in particular the 'image' and its representation of and influence on human experience. Her work has been featured in Aesthetica magazine and she has regularly exhibited her work in the North of England. In addition to the queer project outlined in this paper she has also worked creatively with LGBTI Asylum seekers to help them express their sense of belonging in the UK. Jude Woods combines visual arts practice and group work with activism, sustaining a portfolio of community development posts and freelance projects spanning: community arts workshops, writing, research, training and consultation. This work reflects a long-term focus on equality and multiple discrimination and is informed by research and exploration across the fields of; sociology; criminology; social history; art history and visual theory; theories of embodiment, disability and neuro-atypicality; queer theory; feminism; bioethics and philosophy. Jude Woods holds a BA Hons in Fine Art from Humberside College of Higher Education (1984) and an MA in Fine Art (Contemporary Practice) (2004) from Leeds Metropolitan University (now Leeds Beckett University).

INDEX

abnormal 217, 229, 235, 242, 245 abnormal/normal binary 229, 230, 232-236 see also norm Acquistapace, Alessia 174 aesthetic 18, 19, 99, 21, 22, 24, 99, 130, 141, 182, 187-189, 192, 206, 214, 231, 239, 246 agency 4, 8, 107, 112, 119, 125, 134, 135, 145, 162, 233 agender 131, 147 Agender: Conference on Female and Transgender Masculinities 1, 2, 3, 5, 9, 135, 162 Albano, A.A. 112, 121, 160 Albert-Birot, Pierre 187, 190 Le Plateau 187 Alessandrin, Arnaud 166, 167, 178 Allen, James (also Mary Allen) 6, 86, 87, 88, 92, 95 ambiguous sex or gender 15, 33, 185, 190, 192, 204 anaphore, anaphoric process 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62 Anderson, Sophie 124 androgyny 7, 76 androgynisation 183, 191, 193 androgynous 14, 21, 22, 71-72, 187-188 Archer, Claire, character of – see Susan Glaspell Art of the Life-Model course – see Cast-Off Drama Art Party Conference 100-101, 111 Ashliman, D.L. 206, 208 atypical, atypicality 8, 229-232, 234-239, 242 typical/atypical binary 230 Avant-garde 13, 100, 110, 187-190

authenticity 99, 177, 178 autobiography, autobiographical 148, 161, 182, 184, 190, 200, 201, 214, 216 Bacon, Jen 198-199, 208 Baker, Josephine 6, 99-110 The Josephine Baker Story (Brian Gibson 1991) 104 family, ‘The Rainbow Tribe’ 99-100 Shadowing Josephine and related performance projects – see Jade Montserrat Bangkok transsexual, transsexuality 219 Baldo, Michela Drag King DIY 171 Barker, Clare 224, 226 Barnes, Djuna 21, 33 Barney, Natalie 21, 31, 32 Barns-Graham, Wilhelmina 15, 26 Bauman, Zygmunt 105, 109, 110 Beach, Sylvia 31 Bean 101-102 Bechdel, Alison 7, 197, 201, 202, 205, 206, 208, 209 see also Twelve Dancing Princesses myth becoming, becomings, theories, politics, practices of 7, 23, 89, 90, 93, 94,121, 157, 159, 182, 183, 184, 191, 192, 194, 195, 220 Benson Smith, Barbara (MBE) 101 Bernhardt, Sarah 152 Bettcher, Talia Mae 168-170, 177, 178

254 Beuys, Joseph with Heinrich Böll 99, 101, 110 Bevan, Tony 7, 164 Tender Possessions (1986) 157, 159 binary, binaries, binarism, binarity 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 20, 21, 50, 108, 121, 152, 158, 167, 170, 171, 194, 212, 217, 229, 230, 234236, 237, 239 non-binary, non-binary gender 147, 171 see also genderneutral, gender-fluid and third gender bisexual, bisexuality 5, 27-47, 68, 71, 199, 209 dual-sexuality 28-29, 32, 34, 36, 41, 43-45 Bloomer, Amelia 18 Boas, Franz 240 body 6, 21-23, 25, 51, 52, 60, 99101, 103, 107, 109, 112, 116, 119-121, 123, 125, 129-132, 137, 139, 147, 157, 161-163, 169, 173, 166-178, 179, 180, 183, 186, 188, 189, 191-194, 207, 212, 213, 215, 223, 226, 227, 237, 239, 242, 244, 246 Black female body 103 contagious, infected body, in relation to queer or female, feminised 132-140, 216, 240 disabled, disability 211-227, 228-247 drag king, uses of, ideas of 166178 freak 227-247 embodied, embodiment, embodying 5, 7, 90, 112, 115, 116, 119, 134, 140, 154, 160, 162, 170, 174, 188, 189, 194, 207, 212, 213, 222, 226, 229, 232, 234, 236, 239, 244, 246

Index erotic, eroticisation of 7, 30, 38, 40, 44, 64, 79, 94, 103, 108, 165, 173, 182, 183, 191-192 morphologies of, morphology 6, 112, 115, 119, 120, 121, 125, 140, 155, 157 queer bodies, trans* bodies 112121, 165-172, 211-227, 232, 237, 228-247 techniques du corps 166 Body Art 99, 101-102, 103-105, 112-121, 135, 162, 232, 237, 239-244 Bolin, Anne 212, 226 Borghi, Rachele 171 Bourcier, Marie Hélène 166, 179 Brazil evangelical, evangelism, evangelist in 5, 48, 49, 51, 56-59, 61 homosexuality in 5, 48-62 transsexual, transsexuality 219 Brewer, Derek S. 122-123, 128, 160, 162 Britomart (also Britomart and Amoret) 6, 80, 81-85, 89, 93-95, 96, 97 Brooks, Romaine 12, 14, 16, 24, 200 Bryant, Louise 33 Boyette 18 Boys Don’t Cry (film) 6, 80, 89, 93, 95, 213 Butler, Judith 23, 24, 25, 27, 29, 41, 42, 45, 90, 93, 95, 107, 110, 168, 182, 183, 188, 189, 195, 212, 226 Cahun, Claude 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 12, 14, 200 androgyny 71-72, 186-190 autobiography 182, 184, 190 bird imagery in the work of 7274 Buddhism 74-75

Reflections on Female and Trans* Masculinities and Other Queer Crossings cat imagery in the work of 6, 63-69, 73-74 cross-dressing, drag and passing 182-210 eroticism 7, 64, 79, 182, 183, 190-192 esoteric, mysticism, occult 5-6, 63-79 see also Aleister Crowley Jewish heritage, Judaism 6, 67, 72, 75-77, 79, 193-194 Le Plateau 187 lesbian life and identity, lesbianism, also lesbian icon 71, 73, 182, 184, 187, 189, 191-195 Masonic imagery and influences 6, 68, 70, 72, 76 Parallel Lives exhibition 1, 2, 5 Théâtre ésotérique 187 Califia, Patrick 170, 179 Calloway, Cab Pickin’ up the Cabbage 100 Cameron, Julia Margaret 124 capitalism, capitalistic 89, 91, 96, 104 patriarchal capitalism 9 Carter, Angela 203 Cast-Off Drama, (Nina Kane), theatre and galleries, gender and performance 1, 7, 10, 112-121, 123-125, 140-164 Art of the Life-Model, course (Leeds College of Art) 115, 116, 118, 160, 162 Elements project 144-147 Foil and Feathers 114 Lady of Shalott myth 112-164 Leeds Art Gallery 1, 113-115 life-model, life-modelling theatre practice, theory and politics 112, 115-121, 140164 Modelworks project 158

255

morphology, Trans* morphology of art 112-121, 140-159 PoMoGaze 1, 3 Skin 120 Queer Eye 1, 3 Unquiet Susan 157, 159 Cavalcante, M. and L.W. Santos 55, 62 Chadwick, Whitney 18, 26, 193, 195 Changing Places: Phil Sayers and Rikke Lundgreen exhibition 154-158, 163 Charlestown, Co. Mayo, Ireland, Lady of Shalott 123 chivalry, gallantry, valour 80, 81, 93, 94, 123, 131 female chivalry, gallantry, valour 6, 81, 83, 87, 88, 91, 93, 94, 95 see also knightess choerography 101 Christie, Agatha The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side 132-140 cis-gender, cisgender 131, 166, 176, 212, 216 cis-normative, cisnormative, cisnormativity also cisprivilege, cis-gender privilege 7, 165, 167-169, 172, 174, 175-177, 178 cis-sexism, cissexism 167 cis-sexual, cissexual 167, 169 class 5, 16, 18, 20, 26, 50, 71, 129, 176, 220, 235 clothes, clothing, dress 5, 7, 11-26, 83, 85, 86, 104, 119, 120, 145, 146, 151-154, 165, 182-196, 207, 213, 217, 225-226 costume and theatre or performance 16, 23, 104, 151, 188, 190, 192 gender play, gender choices see cross-dress

256 modernist culture and identity, modernity 5, 11, 16, 18, 20, 23, 26 sartorial choice, self-expression 11, 16, 18, 86 see also tattoo, transvestism, transvestite codes, encoding – class, cultural, dress, gender, institutional, racial, sexual, societal 38, 82, 91, 131, 132, 138, 156, 189, 193, 194, 206, 214 colonial, colonialism, colonialist, colonisation 92, 100, 103, 104, 109, 111, 152, 224 anti-colonial, decolonise, resistance 101, 244 see also post-colonial Colette 21 collage, as art form 67, 68, 71, 75, 77, 205 Collins, Patricia Hill matrix of domination 112-113, 160 Colquhoun, Ithel 67, 70 76 coming out 4, 7, 189 coming out stories, illustrations project 197-210, see also Twelve Dancing Princesses Consultoria queer di Bologna 174 contagion, plague, infection, pollution, in queer theory 132140, 216, 240 Conway Cohort residency 106 Conway Hall 106-109 courtly love, courtly lover 122, 123, 131 Cotton Club 100 Craig, Edy 30, 34 crip, crip theory – see disability cross-dress, cross-dresser, crossdressing 7, 11, 19, 21, 154, 161, 165, 182-196 see also clothes, clothing, dress, and transvestism, transvestite Crowley, Aleister 6, 72, 73, 78

Index Daly, Mary and Jane Caputi 115, 126, 141, 143, 160 Dallas, Hilda 83, 84, 96 dance, dancer, dancing 8, 67, 98, 101, 102, 107, 108, 109, 110, 152, 154, 203, 228, 241 see also Twelve Dancing Princesses dandy, dandy-aesthete, dandyism, flâneur, fop, foppish 16, 183, 188, 195 Davy, Zowie 212, 216, 226, 239, 244 de Beauvoir, Simone 23, 24 de Troyes, Chrétien 122, 128, 161 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 96, 229, 245 deviant 217, 218, 232 disability, disability theory, literary disability studies, people with 211-227, 228-247 crip, crip theory 219, 227, 229, 232, 246 dis/ability 176 disabled, disabled people, disabled subjectivities 8, 211, 213, 216, 217, 219221, 223, 224, 226, 230, 233, 237, 238 disabled characters in books or film 133, 213-215, 219, 224 disablement 220 Disability Living Allowance (UK) 216 dismodernism 233, 243 disorders, mental health difficulty 216, 219 impairment 43, 213, 220, 237, 238, 239 poetry, Trans* poetics 211, 214, 220-226 see also Cath Nichols see also Freak and Rosemarie Garland Thomson Doan, Laura with Jane Garrity 31, 33, 46, 47, 138, 161 see also Sapphic Modernity

Reflections on Female and Trans* Masculinities and Other Queer Crossings drag, dragging 4, 7, 23, 93, 121, 154, 157 Drag King, drag kinging, history of, drag king practice, DIY/DIT drag workshops 4, 165-181 Italian drag king scene 172-178 transtemporal drag 153, 157 Drag King Danny (Fra) 175 Drag King Pedro (Gina) 176 duality 191 Du Bois, Wiiliam Edward Burghardt 240 Duchamp, Marcel 12 Dufour, Elsie 33 Elaine of Astolat 113, 121, 122, 124, 128-132, 141 Eleanor of Aquitaine 122 embodiment – see body empowerment 108, 113, 160, 242, 246 Ernst, Max 73 erotic, eroticisation, eroticism, symbols of 7, 30, 37- 40, 44, 45, 64, 79, 94, 103, 108, 165, 173, 182, 183, 191-192 eugenics 217, 219, 237, 240, 246 evangelical, evangelism, evangelist – see Brazil fantasy 90, 107, 152, 153, 188, 196, 203, 206 Faerie Queene, The Edmund Spenser 81, 82, 84, 85, 89, 94, 95, 97 Mary Macleod 81, 82, 83, 96 A.G. Walker 82 female, femaleness 5, 6, 7, 11, 14, 15, 18-23, 27-30, 34, 45, 48, 51, 71, 76, 78, 81, 83, 91-94, 103, 112, 115, 116, 119-122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 132-134, 136, 138-140, 144, 154, 155, 157, 158, 161, 162, 165, 166, 168170, 174, 175, 180, 184, 186,

257

187, 189, 190-195, 207, 213, 215, 218, 219, 221, 230, 236 female bisexual 5, 27, 28, 31, 34 female chivalry, female gallantry, female valour 6, 81, 83, 87, 88, 91, 93, 94, 95 see also chivalry, courtly love and knightess female desire, for men and women, female to female romantic and sexual desire, female sexual activity, female sexual imagery, kissing between women, masturbation, orgasm, tribadic desire, tribadism see also lesbian, erotic and Sappho 29, 30, 31, 34, 37, 38, 45, 138, 187 female drag, female impersonator, impersonation 189-191 female homosexual see female desire, also lesbian and Sappho female husband 6, 80-97, 130 female genealogy 121-122, 123125, 136, 138, 207 see also mother female masculinity 1, 2, 8, 9, 10, 16, 21, 24, 80, 81, 85, 86, 93, 96, 121, 130-132, 157, 161, 165, 168, 169, 180, 195, 230, 245 female modernists 11, 24 see also modernism female morphology – see morphology female role, female roles, social and theatrical 184, 186, 187 female sexuality – see female desire feminine, femininity, feminised, feminising 7, 8, 16, 17, 19, 2022, 24, 26, 34, 39, 46, 51, 119, 123-125, 133, 138, 139, 146,

258 164, 167, 172, 174, 176, 180, 182, 183, 187-189, 192, 194, 207, 212 hyper-feminine 191 feminism, feminisms, feminist theory 2, 5, 9, 11, 20, 23-25, 37, 38, 40-42, 45, 46, 83, 93, 101, 103, 108, 109, 111-113, 115, 116, 119-121, 124, 125, 127, 139, 142, 145, 154, 155, 157, 160, 162, 163, 167, 169, 171, 172, 174, 177-179, 181, 188, 195, 202, 208, 209, 211, 212, 216, 226, 238, 245 see also Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray fetish, fetishised 152, 214 Fielding, Henry 85-86, 90, 92, 95, 96, 97 Fiorelli, Olivia (Roger Fiorelli) Drag King DIY/DIT 171 Flying With One Wing 86-87, 91-92, 96 folk tale 7, 122, 128, 197, 200, 202, 203, 206, 208, 209 see also Twelve Dancing Princesses and La Donna Di Scalotta Foil and Feathers 114 see also CastOff Drama Fortescue Brickdale, Eleanor 124 Foucault, Michel 27, 29, 45, 46, 235, 238, 245 Freak, freak theory, freakery, freakified, enfreaking, enfreakment 8, 136, 163, 218, 228-247 Freud, Sigmund 38, 40-42, 69, 145, 146, 161, 217-218 gallant, gallantry – see chivalry and female chivalry galleries, museums and archives, gallery and museum education and studio activity, art-making and performance in 1-5, 7, 14, 15, 106-108, 112-164, 237-238 see also Cast-Off Drama,

Index Margaret Harrison, Jade Montserrat and Phil Sayers gay 4, 29, 30, 32, 34, 36, 39, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48-62, 138, 171, 180, 182, 189, 195, 197-210, 213, 219, 230, see also homosexual, lesbian and LGBT*IQA Garland Thomson, Rosemarie 228247 gaze (the), gazing back, 1, 8, 17, 66, 74, 103, 107, 108, 114, 115, 124, 129, 133, 134, 136, 144, 146, 152, 175, 193, 213, 238, 239, 242, 245 stare (the), enfreaking stare, staring as agency, staring back, as resistance 8, 17, 74, 133, 134, 136, 238, 239, 241, 242, 244 gender – see also identity anomalous 217, 236 gender-bender, gender-bending 211 gender binary – see binaries gender-crossing 6, 7, 80-97, 112-164, 128, 130, 151 genderfluid, fluid gender presentation 129, 147, 212, 213 gender-fuck, gender-fucking strategies, to fuck with gender 27, 45, 147, 165, 179 gender play 17, 112-164, 165-181, 182-196 genderqueer, gender-queer 4, 147, 157, 171 gender role 12, 80-97, 184187, 189 gender-neutral 192 see also binary mis-gender (to), misgendering 170 third gender 147 Glaspell, Susan The Verge 5, 27-47

Reflections on Female and Trans* Masculinities and Other Queer Crossings Greco, Luca 165, 166, 172, 179 Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, art inspired by, recalling, weaving webs, fence 124, 144-147 Haddon, Alfred J. 240 Hale, Ruth 34, 45 Halberstam, Jack (Judith Halberstam) 8, 9, 10, 21, 24, 86, 91, 96, 130, 131, 161, 165, 166, 168, 169, 172, 180, 230, 237, 245 see also female masculinity Hall, Radclyffe The Well of Loneliness 18, 93 Hallam, Arthur – see Tennyson Hamilton, George (Mary Hamilton) 6, 85, 86, 87, 90, 92, 96 Handagama, Asoka 86, 87, 92, 96 Harrison, Margaret 7, 124, 129, 160, 163 Common Ground 144-147 The Last Gaze 123-124, 129 Reflect 144-147 see also Lady of Shalott hermaphrodite, hermaphroditism 21, 67, 68, 214, 217, 227 Heterodoxy club 33-34, 46 heterosexual, heterosexuality, hetero-monosexual, heteronormative, heterocentric, heteropatriarchy, heterosexism 15, 19, 27, 29, 34, 35, 37, 41, 48, 51, 57, 58, 61, 91-94, 137, 138, 152, 156, 170, 175, 203, 205, 207, 242 Hevey, David 228, 233, 234, 238, 245 Hoch, Hannah 205 homoerotic, homoeroticism 131 homophobia 51, 52, 58, 61, 136, 152 homosexual, homosexuality 3, 4, 5, 10, 16-21, 27, 29-31, 36, 37, 39, 43, 45, 48-62, 127, 131, 137, 140, 162, 163, 168, 171, 175,

259

177, 179, 180, 190, 198, 199, 201, 209, 210, 216, 218 decriminalisation of (UK) 3-4 see also gay, LGBT*IQA and lesbian hormones 212, 219 horror 211-213, 215, 235, 237, 242, 245 Huffaker, Lucy (Lulu) 31 Hughes, Arthur 81 Huxley, Julien 240 icons 5, 63, 156, 207, 236 identity bisexual 27-47 class 129 freak 234 gender, gendered, sexual 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 16, 18, 19, 23, 24, 29, 32, 37, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 63, 69, 86, 93, 122, 129, 137, 152, 161, 167, 168, 170, 179, 183, 186, 188, 194-200, 205, 208, 209, 226 homosexual 48-62 lesbian 137, 161, 197-210 Trans* and intersex 2, 15, 120, 154, 157, 211-213, 219 mass 99, 104 post-identity, post-identity politics 232 ideology 48-54, 61, 62 invert, inversion (gender and sexuality) 17, 21, 42, 136, 141, 185, 217, 218 illustration – see Hilda Dallas and Caroline Watts illustrations project, lesbian – see Twelve Dancing Princesses impersonation – see female and male intersectional, intersectionality, intersectional theory 1, 112-113, 160

260 intersex 147, 215, 217, 219 also see LGBT*IQA invisible, racial, sexual, social 45, 115, 123, 162, 168, 170, 175, 180, 199, 220, 221 Irigaray, Luce 9, 10, 115, 119, 120, 122-125, 132-134, 139, 145147, 160, 161, 163, 164 Joan of Arc 6, 80, 83 Kaiser, Bill 30, 46 Kaiser, Julius with Jurij Zoltan Kurgan 173 and with Kyraham 172, 180 Kane, Nina theatre and galleries – see CastOff Drama Kay, Jackie Trumpet 88-89, 96 Kings of Rome, Italian drag troupe 172, 173 knightess 80-97 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve 120, 162 La Belle Dame sans Merci 6, 80, 81, 84, 85, 95, 96 Lacan, Jacques 40-41 La Donna Di Scalotta (The Lady of Scalotta) 122 Lady Lever Gallery, Liverpool Changing Places: Phil Sayers and Rikke Lundgreen exhibition 156 Lady of Shalott myth 6, 112-115, 117-119, 121-140, 141-142, 144-145, 150-157 see also CastOff Drama, Charlestown Co. Mayo, Elaine of Astolat, Margaret Harrison, Phil Sayers, Tennyson, Waterhouse and web-building Lagnokka, Gustavo (Illud Shone, Leandr* Monachino) 172, 176 LaGrace Volcano, Del 165, 166, 172, 180

Index Lancelot, Knight of the Round Table – see chivalry and Lady of Shalott Latimer, Tirza True 13, 16, 18, 21, 25, 26, 67, 71, 79, 182, 189, 195 Lawrence, David Herbert The Rainbow 39, 46 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) 19-20 Leeds Art Gallery Agender: Conference on Female and Transgender Masculinities 1-3, 5, 9, 135136, 162 Education – see Art of the LifeModel and Cast-Off Drama Changing Places: Phil Sayers and Rikke Lundgreen exhibition 154-163 Collections 1-2, 112-116, 124, 129-130, 134-135, 144-147, 149, 154-157, 159, 163 Parallel Lives: Marlow Moss and Claude Cahun exhibition 1, 2, 5 PoMoGaze 1, 3 Queer Eye project 1, 3 Leeds College of Art – see Art of the Life-Model Leeds Musems and Galleries Collections – see Leeds Art Gallery Community Engagement – see Agender Conference, PoMoGaze and Queer Eye lesbian, lesbianism ‘Language of Flowers’, lesbian imagery in literature 28, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44, 46 Mother, relationship to 207-208 sexuality 27-47 see also female desire see also coming out, contagion, female, feminist, Greenham Common, Heterodoxy, LGBT*IQA, Paris, Sappho

Reflections on Female and Trans* Masculinities and Other Queer Crossings Leroi, Armand Marie 231, 245 LGBT*IQA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer or Questioning, Asexual or Agender) 2, 3, 4, 172, 198, 200, 219 family – see coming out and mother language, terminology, names affirmative and negative, reclamations, reappropriations 3-5, 169, 213 medicalisation and mental health 215-219 religion 5, 48, 49, 51, 56-59, 61 rights 48 Lieblich, Amia with Rivka TuvalMashiach and Tammar Zilber 197, 204, 209 life-drawing, contemporary theory, model-led practice – see CastOff Drama life-model, life-model theatre – see Cast-Off Drama Lorde, Audre 235, 246 Lorenz, Renate 136, 139, 140, 152, 154, 157, 163 Lundgreen, Rikke – see Changing Places MacDonald, Margaret 124 Maddox Brown, Lucy 124 Marie de Champagne 121-123 Malafaia, Silas (Minister) 5, 48-49, 56-57, 60-61, 62, see also Brazil, evangelical male, maleness 7, 15-21, 23, 28, 34, 35, 42, 48, 51, 71, 72, 76, 81, 86, 90, 108, 120, 121, 130, 131, 132, 148-149, 154, 157, 161, 165, 166, 169, 170, 175, 178, 181, 184, 187, 190, 193, 213, 215, 218, 219-221, 236 male-dominated, male domination, male privilege (white male) 72, 175

261

male impersonator, impersonation 165, 190 see also Drag King and female husband male homosexual 48-62 see also homosexual and gay male femininity 8 male role, social and theatrical, 11-26, 34-35, 42, 182-196 see also Drag King and modernist masculinity Malory, Thomas 122-123, 157, 160, 162, 163 Manju, character of, see Flying With One Wing 6, 86 87, 91, 92 marionette 187, 189, 192 Marple, Jane (Miss), character of 132, 133, 134, 137, 138 see also Agatha Christie masculine, masculinity, masculinised, masculinising masculine, masculinised female identity 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 1419, 21, 26, 41, 51, 66, 74, 80, 81, 103, 108, 121, 129131, 136, 153, 156-157, 161, 166-168, 173-178, 179, 182, 184, 187-189, 193-194, 212 see also female masculinity mask 14, 50, 64, 66, 68, 75, 85, 99, 129, 137, 146, 183, 186, 188, 189, 191 masquerade 7, 17, 129, 154, 170, 182, Joan Rivère, womanliness as 23, 25, 26, 170, 182, 183, 188, 191, 195, 196 maternal-feminine 123-125, 138139 matrix of domination – see Patricia Hill Collins Max (Massimo Tiberio) 173-174 Maxwell, Anne 240, 246 McGregor, Sheila 154, 163 McCruer, Robert

262 Crip Theory see under disability Miglioranza, Irene 174 modernism, modernist, modernity 2, 5, 11, 16, 18-21, 23, 24, 26, 31, 33, 42, 46, 47, 68, 78, 108, 110, 138, 161, 186, 212, 228, 232, 233, 235, dismodernism 233 244 Mondrian, Piet 13, 21-26 Montserrat, Jade, performance, body art Communion 6, 100-106 Interrogations & Interrelations: Iterations of the Rainbow Tribe 102, 105 The Rainbow Tribe project 6, 98-111 The Rainbow Tribe, Chorus Line 6, 100, 106-107 Sets and Spectacles 6, 105-106 Shadowing Josephine 6, 100108 monster, monster theory 121, 213, 232, 235, 237, 242, 244, 245, 246 see also vampire mother, figure of, foster-mother, influence, step mother 17, 128, 201, 207, 211 female to child transmission, le corps-à-corps avec la mère (Irigaray), matriarchal lineage, placental economy 57, 90, 121-122, 123-125, 136, 138, 162, 185 Greenham Common, mothers, daughters 145 patriarchal construction, expectations of, Madonna and Child, maternal rejection, religion 57, 120125, 136, 138-139, 162 Moore, Marcel (Suzanne Malherbe) 5, 6, 63, 66-71, 73, 74, 79, 182, 184, 189, 191 see also Claude Cahun

Index morphology 6, 61, 115, 119, 120, 140-159, 202, 209 Mort Artu, Morte D’Arthur, Le (Death of Arthur) 122, 160, 163 Moss, Marlow (Marjorie Moss) 1, 2, 5, 11-26 Muholi, Zanele 200 Nazimova, Alla 34 neurodiverse 229 Nichols, Cath, poetry, poems 211227 Corridor, 1973 220 Corridor 2013 225 Distance 211, 227 Knowledge 223 Life Support 221 Missing 222 My Glamorous Assistant 211, 227 Tales of Boy Nancy 211, 227 The Violence of 215 This is Not a Stunt 217 Time lapse 224 Nietzsche, Friedrich 12, 14, 19, 23 25 Nijhoff, A.H. (Netty) 11, 13, 25 Nijhoff, Stefan (Stephen Storm) 11, 16, 17 Nogueira, Lucia 135 non-binary gender - see binary norm, normal, normalcy, normalcy confirmation 20, 40, 51, 57-59, 61, 70, 115, 138, 140, 163, 167, 173, 175, 178, 179, 186, 188, 203, 207, 211, 214, 217, 226, 229, 230, 232-238, 241-245 see also cis-gender and heteronormative Obama, Barack 106, 111 object, object-choice (sexual), objectification 17, 37, 41, 51, 52, 54, 57, 62, 97, 108, 134, 157, 175, 176, 192, 206-207, 232, 238, 244

Reflections on Female and Trans* Masculinities and Other Queer Crossings gift-space/object (Irigaray) 122, 147 occult – see Claude Cahun Olds, Sharon Outside the Operating Room of the Sex Change Doctor 214 other, othered, othering, otherness 7, 16, 21, 24, 37, 39, 41, 52-53, 57, 68, 72-73, 75, 77, 89-91, 93, 94, 103, 106, 108, 115, 116, 119, 126, 129, 134, 136, 140, 142, 157, 160-162, 175, 184, 192194, 214, 229-231, 233-239, 244, 245 Paris Bohemian, bohemianism 11, 19, 72-74 lesbianism, Paris Salon, 13, 15, 19, 21, 23, 25, 31-32, 43, 182, 195, see also Natalie Barney 31-32 see also Avant-garde and modernism Paolo (Tati) 174-175 Pearsall, Derek 122, 128-130, 163 Peirce, Kimberly with Andy Bienen 89, 95 Penrose, Valentine 67 Powell, Richard J. and David A. Bailey 104, 111 parody 46, 71, 133, 154, 165, 186, 188, 189, 193, 244 pathologise 216, 225 patriarchy, patriarchal, heteropatriarchy 9, 28, 52, 60, 61, 115, 133, 138, 139, 145, 146, 203, 211, 242 performance, theatre 27-47, 98-111, 112-164, 165-181, 182-196 performativity 37, 168, 212, 213 ]performance s p a c e [, London 102 phantom, phantom-like, phantom limb 129, 222-226

263

photograph, photography 5-8, 11, 16-17, 22-26, 63-79, see also Claude Cahun, Phil Sayers, Anthony Clair Wagner and Jude Woods photomontages 70, 73, 190, Pinckney, Clementa (Hon. Rev.) 106, 111 plurality 4, 5, 27, 39, 43, 183 Plummer, Ken 197, 198, 209 poetry, trans* see under Cath Nichols Pollock, Griselda 103, 108, 111, 116, 119, 163 pollution, in queer theory – see contagion PoMoGaze 1, 3 postcolonial, post-colonial postcolonial 224, 226 see also colonial, anti-colonial, resistance postmodern, post-modern, postmodernist postmodernism 1, 29, 47, 129, 134, 212, 232 post-porn activism 167 Preciado, Paul B. 166, 167, 172, 173, 180 presentism 228 Prinner, Hans Anton 12, 14, 15, 16 proprioceptive 222-223 Prosser, Jay 168, 170, 180, 212, 214, 215, 222, 223, 227 public funding of the Arts (UK) 98 queer, queering, culture, practice 110, 27-47, 112- 164, 165-181, 182-196, 197-210, 210-227, 241-244 Queer Eye project 1, 3 race 5, 6, 104, 111, 176, 193, 195, 218, 231, 235 Rainbow Tribe – see Josephine Baker and Jade Montserrat rape – see violence

264 resistance 6, 29, 46, 103, 119, 123, 134, 178, 228, 232, 236, 241244 Reeve, Donna 239, 240, 246 Rego, Paula 203 rhizome, rhizomatic, rhizomic 5, 6, 7, 121, 229 Rowe, Dorothy 156, 163 Rupp, Leila J. 28, 31-32, 46 Salomé 152 Sandys, Emma 124 Sappho, Sapphic Modernity, Sapphists, Sapphistries 5, 21, 28-34, 36-40, 43, 45-47, 138, 161 Sauret, Henrietta 18 Saxey, Esther 199-200, 202, 204, 208, 209 Sayers, Phil 7, 128 Shalott (after J.W. Waterhouse) 155 transvestism in art 129-130, 154-157 with Rikke Lundgreen see Changing Places Who is this? and what is here? after Tennyson 128 Science, Johnny 166, 180 Sennett, Jay with Sarah Bay-Cheng 170, 171, 180 Sexton, Anne 203 Schwarz-Friesel, Monika 56, 62 self-portraiture 182, 241-244 Serano, Julia 167-170, 180 segregation 100, 108 sex - see erotic and female desire sexual violence – see violence sexologists 20, 42, 217 Shildrick, Margrit 232, 246 Shakespeare, Tom 229, 240, 246 Shapiro, Eve 167, 173, 174, 181 Siddal, Elizabeth Eleanor (Lizzie) 124, 142 Singer, Judy 229, 246 Smith, Bob and Roberta 101

Index Smith, Stevie 219 Spain, Nancy Poison for Teacher 138 Spartali (Stillman), Marie 124 spectacle 6, 22, 82, 83, 97, 98, 100, 105-107, 109, 233-238 stare (the), enfreaking stare, as agency - see gaze Stein, Gertrude 11, 28, 31, 32, 47 stereotypes, stereotyped, stereotyping 16, 23, 186, 239 Stones, Catherine – see Twelve Dancing Princesses Storm, Stephen – see Stefan Nijhoff subject, subjectivity – see becoming Suffragette, Suffragist 18, 83, 84, 96, 108, 110 Surrealist, Surrealism 17, 20, 24, 64, 67, 69, 76, 183, 193, 195 and Spiritualism 6, 70, 71, 73, 78 Swynnerton, Annie 124 tattoo, tattooing the body 104, 232, 237, 244 Teena, Brandon 6, 80, 87-88, 91, 93 Tennyson, Alfred (Lord) 6, 142, 151, 153, 154, 161-164 Agatha Christie, literary reference 132-140 Arthur Hallam, death of 127, 151, 162 Lancelot and Elaine 121-122, 128-132 The Lady of Shalott 113, 119, 121-124, 125-128, 141 The Butterfly Kings, Italian drag troupe 172 The Ethical Society, Humanist research resource 106 The Eyes Wild Drag, Italian drag troupe 171-172 The Studio Museum, Harlem 104 Thorndike, Sybil 34 Toklas, Alice B. 31 Tommaso (Laura Sergiampietri) 175 tranny, use of term 3

Reflections on Female and Trans* Masculinities and Other Queer Crossings Trans, Trans* 1-10, 11-26, 80-97, 112-164, 165-181, 182-196, 211-227 Trans* activist, transactivism 168 Trans* body – see body and Body Art Transfeminist, transfeminism 167, 171, 174, 177, 178, 181 Trans* man, Transman, transmen, trans men 3, 6, 166, 169, 170, 174, 180, 181, 221, 226 Trans* morphology of art – see Cast-Off Drama Trans* narrative 7, 168, 239 Transphobia 51, 167, 168, 170, 172, 177, 178, 220 Trans* poetics 211-227 see also Cath Nichols Trans*tastic, definition of 6-7, 147-148 Transwoman, trans* woman, transwomen, trans women 3, 168, 180, 214, 218, 220, 223 Transgender, transgendered, transgenderism, mtf, ftm, maleto-female, female-to-male 1-10, 11-26, 80-97, 112-164, 165-181, 182-196, 211-227 transgressive 101, 212 Transsexual, transitioning 3, 147, 156, 167-169, 178-180, 211227, 239, 244 Transvestite, transvestism 11-26, 80-97, 128-130, 154-157, 165181, 182-196 see also crossdressing transvestism in art and performance – see Claude Cahun, Cast-Off Drama, Drag King, Margaret Harrison, Marlow Moss and Phil Sayers Twelve Dancing Princesses myth, lesbian coming out story, illustrations project, self-

265

disclosure, Catherine Stones 196-210 Jeanette Winterson 7, 202, 203, 210 See also Alison Bechdel and folk tale Tagg, John 240, 246 Tanning, Dorothea 67 Theatre of the Absurd 187 theory - see disability, feminist, freak, queer, monster Torr, Diane 166, 175, 176, 181 Toyen 67 vampire, vampyric – see also contagion 139, 140 Van Dijk, Teun Adrianus 50-62 Varo, Remedios 67-69, 79 Vézelay, Paule 15 Victorian Freak Show 228, 231, 237 violence, abuse, assault, gender and sex based, murder, rape, in literature and film 28, 36, 51, 71, 91, 92, 108, 116, 132-134, 137-139, 146, 163, 169, 177179, 213-215, 219, 250 visibility, invisibility 7, 40, 109, 175, 199, 200, 206, 208, 217, 219, 221, 225, 242 Vulgate Cycle 122-123, 162, 164 Wagner, Anthony Clair, visual art Dance with the Dead Cock 8, 228, 241-244, 246 Walker, Mary 18 Waterhouse, John William 81 Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses 156-157 The Lady of Shalott – Falmouth sketch 153 I am Half-Sick of Shadows 113 The Lady of Shalott (1888) 113 The Lady of Shalott (1894) 112115, 117-118, 135 Cast-Off Drama 150-154, Margaret

Index

266 Harrison 129, 144-145, Phil Sayers 129-130, 154-157 see also Lady of Shalott Watts, Caroline 82, 97 web-building, weaving, community arts, feminist politics 144-147 Welby-Everard, Miranda 186-189, 190, 196 Willinsky, John 231, 247 Winterson, Jeanette 7, 202, 203, 210 Woods, Jude, visual art and photography

Freakified 8, 228, 241-244 PoMoGaze 1, 3 Queer Eye 1, 3 Woolf, Virginia Orlando 15, 26, 89, 93, 94, 97 WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union) 83 Zittlau, Andrea 228, 234, 237, 244, 245, 247 Žižek, Slavoj 50, 62