Mourning Sex

Reviewed by: Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories Janelle Reinelt Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. By Peggy Phelan. London and New York: Routledge, 1997; pp. x + 187. $17.95 paper. Mourning Sex in many ways follows Phelan's earlier book Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Routledge, 1993), as is clear from her opening introduction. Phelan recalls that, as a child, she snatched a model of human anatomy out of her science book to create an image of human absence. "The loss of the pop-up model," she writes, "revealed the anatomy of the body more fully than the drawing" (1). While Unmarked asserted the value of the unmarked over the visible, Mourning Sex utilizes the visible to achieve a relationship of mourning and grief with what is missing, what underlies what-it-is-that-one-wants-to-see. Using Freudian and Lacanian theory to describe the working of trauma, death, and mourning, Phelan links the psyche to social and political features of contemporary life. These essays embed intense inner processes of wounding, grieving, and sometimes healing within the social imaginary of the lived present. Phelan's ability to discuss a variety of art forms under the rubric of performance continues to provide rich insights. Her first chapter, Caravaggio's "The Incredulity of St. Thomas," establishes the focal point for a discussion of the problems of perspective and the limits of bodily representation, the desire of the viewer to see who and what cannot be seen: The point is not so much to 'find' the Other, but rather to play the drama in such a way that the stand-ins come to reveal that the kernel of the drama of the Other is that the Other is always a stand-in. [33; original italics] Phelan parallels the enactment of Thomas's and Christ's gestures of approach and avoidance, along with the viewers—the "motion we make toward and away from our own deaths" (35). She explores embodiment as experience and concept, performing her own vacillation between desire and terror: [End Page 547] "[t]his endless looking for an interior beneath the surface of the bodies and images with which we are forever ensnared is the catastrophe of living (in) skin" (42). The discussion here plays on her earlier argument in Unmarked that the vanishing point and the viewing point are similar, and that the "centrality of the single perception . . . is fortified through the experience of its loss, just as the endless process of establishing psychic identity is punctuated by its loss" (25). This book most obviously departs from Phelan's previous one in terms of style. Her previous work has often made use of personal narratives, childhood memories, and fiction to embellish, explain, or embody her arguments. Mourning Sex deliberately mixes these moments with those of fictional personae, weaving the stories of these posited subjects through the critical discourse of her essays: Performative writing is solicitous of affect even while it is nervous and tentative about the consequences of that solicitation. Alternately bold and coy, manipulative and unconscious, this writing points both to itself and to the 'scenes' that motivate it. [12] This strategy is successful when it makes vivid and distinct aspects of her argument that would be less forceful in traditional discursive prose; it is not as successful when it competes with or obfuscates the main thrust of the essays, which, by Phelan's own claim, are still "critical writing." Two essays that use the frame of a fictional narrator, but also pursue a theoretically cogent psychoanalytic argument, show this performative writing at its most powerful and persuasive. Chapter 3, "Immobile legs, stalled words: psychoanalysis and moving deaths," begins with first-person narration: a member of the corps de ballet at the New York City Ballet becomes interested in the relationship between dance and psychoanalysis when she breaks her hip. She ends up studying psychology and writing a treatise (the inter-text of the chapter) with her "young, apparently serious but not especially talented, lecturer" (49). Reading Freud's famous case of Anna O., the two writers realize that psychoanalysis gives a temporal narrative to the body through its talking cure; the piecing together of the past yields the

Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Psychology