Resisting/Performing/Femininity

Karen Finley prefaces her performance piece The Constant State of Desire (TCSD) with a performance.1 Finley walks onstage, telling the audience that she wants to say something first. In a meta-reflexive gesture, she describes how nervous she is prior to performances. She sits calmly in front of the audience and lists her body's hysterical symptomatology in the face of its impending exhibition: she smokes, she has the jitters, she is nauseated and sometimes throws up. With a discernible smirk on her face, she concludes, You make me sick. The laughter this comment provokes is tentative--many in the audience seem uncomfortable. I'm not sure if she's serious or not, if she's encouraging us to laugh at her or at ourselves. With this gesture, Finley undermines audience expectations and reverses the traditional spectator-performer relationship, rendering the audience members the nervous and jittery ones. In taking us through her body in pain prior to her body in labor, we are reminded that she is body, is organic material, with openings and smells, with responses to her own status as subject and object of performance. She sets the stage for a profoundly uncomfortable viewing experience, not only because she constantly reminds the audience that we are an audience, making any un-self conscious or objectifying interpretation of her staged flesh difficult if not impossible, but also because in foregrounding the condition of her body, she implicates our own desiring bodies as they comprise her paying audience

Aesthetics · Art · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Face (sociological concept · Femininity · Gesture · Laughter · Literature · Object (grammar · Performing arts · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Subjectivity · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Theatre and Performance Studies

• The Female Immigrant Stereotype Representation in Two Selected Israeli Plays

  Ester Levanon-Mordoch•Israeli Studies Review•2009

  Add to list