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Theatres of the Female Body: Gender Essentialism and Deconstruction in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Dianne Hunter "A woman is not born, but made." (Simone de Beauvoir) "When you look at Dionne Warwick I think you see all the people who made me what I am." (Dionne Warwick) Lyposuction and bone implants, forms of synthetic body building, have become routine among show business performers and models in the fashion industry. A look at the woman now famous as Marilyn Monroe before her chinbone -implants produces the response: "That's not Marilyn Monroe!"1 The pop star George Michael sings: "Went back home, got a brand new face for the boys at MTV." Between 1970 and 1986, the comedian Phyllis Diller had no fewer than ten cosmetic surgery operations, including several eye lifts, eyeliner tattooing, cheek-implants, tummy and breast reductions, a neck job, two nose jobs and two face lifts, plus lyposuction. This work, which was carried out by eight different surgeons, has been accompanied by extensive dental work, including teeth straightening in 1970, and teeth bonding, in 1984 and 1985. This impressive resume has led the feminist philosopher and culture critic Susan Bordo to rank Phyllis Diller with Michael Jackson as notable defiers of the limits of the human body, as rich and famous molded human faces, a form of "cultural plastic" (654). Collogen injections in the skin are believed to erase signs of human aging, and they are supposed to increase sex appeal. Thierry Besins, inventor of the Paris Lip, executes the latest technique for synthetically creating a kissable mouth. By driving a hypodermic needle into the fold of skin produced by pinching each lip between his thumb and forefinger, Dr. Besins injects collogen to produce a mouth that looks, says The New Yorker fashion writer Holly Brubach, "like a ripe piece of fruit" (80). Besins forms the "signature" of his Paris Lips technique by injecting the two vertical ridges above the woman's lips, to produce a pronounced Cupid's bow, or deep V (Brubach 80). 8 Dianne Hunter This "V," which artificially creates a carnal form with which some people are born, is not only the "signature" of the doctor who has written himself into history on the mouths of the models who choose his treatment, it is also a letter, or even, in the eyes of gender essentialists, potentially a sign of who/what these women are, for a "V" can be interpreted as an icon of what Sigmund Freud has called "the essential thing in woman."2 Essentialism and Deconstruction, two (perhaps dialectical) themes in contemporary culture and feminist theory and practice, can be differentiated through works by Carolee Schneemann and Toni Dove. Their respective theatres of the female body bring into play gender essentialism and deconstruction in the age of mechanical reproduction.3 Schneemann and Dove are artists who began as painters and then developed female imagery-centred performance works foregrounding the site of the female body. In proceeding to stage the site of the female body with voices in performance, Schneemann and Dove illustrate in contrasting ways claims the French feminist Helene Cixous has made about contemporary women's labour of self-birth as texts in the theatre. I argue that Cixous's pronouncements about women in contemporary theatre giving birth to their bodies as vocal texts is born out by Schneemann's performances of female biological creativity; whereas, Dove, in contrast, debiologises creativity. Whereas Cixous and Schneemann speak with Freud-inflected voices, Dove is most clearly aligned with Marxism and influenced by the work of Frederic Jameson. Both Cixous and Schneemann seek to represent a biological womanliness with a deep, archetypal past. But Dove is thoroughly historicized in her outlook; a self-proclaimed "multimedia artist," she seeks artistic control of and power through technological projection (Dove 62-76). Making herself an agency of images (rather than making herself into an image, as for example the pop star Madonna has done), Dove's Mesmer installation ruptures icons and zaps with strobe lighting the echoes of patricarchal verbal constructs of femininity and womanhood. In this multimedia technological fashion, Dove's work is thematically aligned with the future of the age of mechanical reproduction...

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