The Post Avant-Garde Aesthetics of the Glitch
Caroline Bergvall’s “Flèsh” as Feminist AntiScripture
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12920483 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lionel Fournier (0000-0002-7354-4709, York University, corresponding author), Lauren Fournier (York University, Toronto, Canada) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 101-119 |
| Publication date | 2018-03-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Contemporary Women s Writing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1754-1476 • E-ISSN: 1754-1484 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/cww/vpy005 |
| OpenAlex | W2789946361 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
Flesh is the extravagance within us set up against the law of decency – Georges Bataille, Erotism A different, anarchistic type of struggle requires a new grammar, possibly a new voice, potentially the passive voice. – Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure Feminists artists, writers, and scholars throughout history have responded to the ways in which what was once called “women’s experience,” and is now understood more plurally and strategically through intersectional and transinclusive feminist frameworks, has been suppressed, repressed, and oppressed by patriarchal systems of power and discourse, including institutions like the medical system, education, religion, art, and language. Different strategies of feminist subversion have worked in different ways across different contexts, and, in the twenty-first century, the question of how to reinscribe a feminist (whether female or otherwise) presence in a way that is politically and aesthetically efficacious continues to be up for debate. Performance scholars like Peggy Phelan have taken this up, arguing for the paradoxical need for women to “write themselves toward disappearance” and resist being “marked” in order to effectively express women’s subjectivity, yet ultimately conceding that “the price of that disappearance is difficult to calculate” (31). Wendy Brown comments on contemporary political discourse that straightforwardly equates voice, visibility, and recognition with agency, arguing that the act of “speaking ourselves” has the “capacity to bind rather than emancipate us” (83–84). In Caroline Bergvall’s “Flèsh,” a four-part poem commissioned in the year 2000 by Susan Johanknecht and Katherine Meynell of Gefn Press, London, as part of a playfully counter-millennial project, Bergvall paradoxically asserts female presence through a faltering terrain of glitchy language. The lives and work of women from history who were known for their intensity and excess – be it related to mysticism, mental illness, or sexuality – and, in turn, were rendered abject by the patriarchal systems that they found themselves in, are rendered anew through glitchy text in Bergvall’s performative, cross-disciplinary poetic practice. Through the prism of “failure” as a queer1 mode of agency (Halberstam), the glitches in “Flèsh” can be read as the trace of Bergvall’s process of bearing witness to, and attempting to process, the experiences of women from premodernism through postmodernism. The glitch comes to stand simultaneously for the embodiment of a system’s failure – to understand and properly signify the experiences of intense women – and the aesthetic potentiality for feminist subversion that lies within that failure
Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Art history · Biography · Feminism · Life writing · Literature · Order (exchange · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Queer · Sociology · Subjectivity · Subversion · French Literature and Poetry · Latin American and Latino Studies · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy
| Highly cited | No |
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