Performing the Body/Performing the Text (review)

Performing The Body/Performing The Text. Edited by Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson. London: Routledge, 1999; pp. xii + 306. $24.99.

Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson's engaging collection, Performing the Body/Performing the Text, contains seventeen articles and one performance text which explore gender and racial constructions enacted on the body. In their introduction, the editors state: "The body . . . is known and experienced only through its representational performances--whether presented 'live,' in photographs, videos, films, on the computer screen, or through the interpretive text itself" (8). The individual works within this book investigate themes of the flesh, spanning varied time periods and cultures, concerning such issues as sexuality, mutilation, and the grotesque.

One of the most intriguing articles, Michael Hatt's "Race, Ritual, and Responsibility," focuses on the highly charged issue of black lynching in the late nineteenth century as a type of performative ritual. Hatt provides solid background information regarding the "justice" of lynching, describing in horrific, but necessary detail the tortures that befell thousands of black individuals in the South. The author categorizes the act of the lynching as a performance in which the audiences of these events viewed the killings as entertainment, attracting an enormous number of spectators "by substituting the gestural for the verbal, by dealing with the body rather than the person, [and thus] specific ideological differences could all be accommodated by the performative nature of the lynching" (80). The white spectators, both male and female, silenced black voices at the lynchings, disallowing any of the victims to question the rulings forced upon them, judgements arbitrarily decided without legal proceedings in a formal court setting. Further, Hatt explores how the act of dismembering a black body in a lynching wrongfully warrants the classification of the black person as subhuman. The notion of the black individual as a subspecies, therefore, becomes a fixed identity created by the white prosecutors of the lynching.

Aside from racial politics constructed on the body, Fionna Barber, in "The Politics of Feminist Spectatorship and the Disruptive Body," looks at the gender constructs imposed on the female form by reinvestigating a series of portraits by Willem de Kooning. Barber argues that while the majority of interpretations of art evolve through time, perspectives regarding Kooning's Woman I seem fixed within the feminist agenda of the seventies. While Barber does not invalidate feminist work of this period, the author suggests that other critical readings should be explored in regard to the significance of the painting. When feminists first challenged this piece, they linked the harsh images associated with Woman I with literal occurrences of violence against women. In contrast, Barber explores Woman I as a representation of the female grotesque body, as opposed to the classical male body. Drawing on such theorists as Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva, Barber discusses Mary Russo's notion of the female grotesque as: "One that focuses on the transgressive aspects of the body's cultural significations--the excessive, the uncontained, a body that is both cavernous and oozing secretions from its orifices--and which names this body as female" (133). Barber explains that Russo's theory, unlike Bakhtin's, positions the female grotesque not as a figure of containment but as one of female identification among numerous other categorizations. Therefore, Barber concludes that a "revalorized" (133) perception of the body in Woman I becomes possible and worthy of research, despite the figure's classification as transgressive.

In addition to the female grotesque, this collection investigates the notion of the queer body as a violation of the normative. Jonathan Katz, in his article "Dismembership," looks at how Jasper Johns's Target series delineates itself as outside the standard classical male figure. Specifically, Johns's piece Target with Plaster Casts compartmentalizes numerous painted casts of male body parts, including a penis, into a series of boxes. "Johns queers the body, twists it away from its pre-authorized meanings and leaves it hanging--framed, subsumed, dominated" (175). Katz explains the significance of separating...