Wordscapes of the Body

If the stage is a place where (as Helene Cixous has claimed) it is possible to get across the living, breathing, speaking body,' does that body constitute a in and of itself? In performance art an often-cited example of the female body text is Carolee Schneeman's Interior Scroll (1975), in which she appeared naked before her audience, extracted a long scroll from her vagina, and read aloud the words on the scroll.2 More recently, Karen Finley has used her body as the site of transgressive (some might say counter-pornographic) acts: by arousing the mechanisms of disgust in her audience, her performances parody and subvert the associations between the female body and its role as sexually evocative signifier.3

Aesthetics · Art · Humanities · Performative utterance · Theatre and Performance Studies