As far as Irigaray's concept of 'doubling' or difference is concerned, this is pertinent to broader arguments in this thesis, and of course relates back to the discussion of subjectivity in Chapter One, for I contend repeatedly in that Chapter and beyond it that, in order for the symbolic contract to be transgressed, exclusive dichotomies between masculine/feminine, language/flesh and indeed time/space will need to be thought through, that is, the threshold be transgressed. This transgression can be thought of as a kind of fold, or doubling of surfaces/spaces. In this sense, the gendered division between public and private space can be recuperated critically as a point of social and economic intersection: a fold, rather than a division, where gender politics operates in tenuous relation, open to change. Of course this is not a new contention, indeed it harks back to the second-wave feminist mantra of 'the personal is the political', which was rooted in an interrogation of the gendered power relations between the domestic, private sphere and public life.
Clearly, one of the dominant spatial relationships that have defined the female body is the domestication of women in terms of their biological function and their social role in this sphere (as wives, mothers and daughters). It will be seen in the discussion of the selected performance artists that the division between the domestic interior, the private 'self and public discourse is interrogated and transgressed, for it is a division that maintains strongly the female body as a spatialised object.
'woman', as the inferior subject in patriarchal systems, is instated as a visual object in masculine spatial networks.
2.4.i Body-object
As an object, the body takes up space. However, the spatialisation of the feminine body-object, and indeed the spatialisation of the bodily interior as discussed in terms of biomedical discourse, regulates strictly her ability to engage with and author space. Thus, the social standards of gendered movement in space become inculcated in the embodied subject. Young (in Garner 1994:201) argues that girls cannot throw, so to speak, because the standards of feminine body comportment result in women making less ergonomic use of their bodies than men and instead move parts of their bodies in an inhibited and discontinuous fashion, hence "...the phenomenon of 'throwing like a girl'" (ibid). Thus, the female body that moves in spatial pathways that are inconsistent with femininity potentially disrupts the mechanics of the social theatre. The image of the female body moving in unbounded pathways. For instance, the Bacchae or the Victorian 'hysteric', is consistently accompanied by fear and fascination. The version of femininity described in terms of softness, vulnerability and weakness (shadowed of course by the image of monstrous excess) is not given to the construction of worlds in the way that masculinity (logos, telos) is given to the muscular sculpting and mapping of the unknown. The territorializing of female flesh has led to distinctive mappings of the female body itself that have negated or dumbed down female self-representation, including the ways in which women move their bodies in space.
Garner (1994:201-202) states that: "a woman's modalities of bodily comportment, motility and spatiality...are characterised by tension, ambiguity and duality". These affectations can hardly be separated from their ontological imperatives that dislocate female corporeality from the production of language and culture, that is, the authoring of social spaces, in the first place. Garner (ibid) emphasises that these modes of feminine bodily experience are social in origin rather than physiological and that "...such structures of feminine existence derive from the fact that a woman's body is presented to her as an object rather than an instrument of possibility" (emphasis mine). Garner's statements have important links to Chapter One wherein canonical psychoanalytic theory was seen to construct accounts of feminine psychic morphology that typically privileges the phallus
and the tracing of a masculine morphology in the symbolic order. It can be seen that women in the dominant patriarchal order are precluded from symbolic and material authorship because they lack the instrument of privilege, that is, the phallus. This issue provokes the question of representation, for the way in which one uses and moves the body in the world, in space, is a way of representing one's self as a subject (and I will pursue the question of representation and aesthetics further in terms of a discussion on the construction of theatre space). The presence of the biological penis and its reification in the psychoanalytic symbolic contract conventionally privileges the instrumentality of the male subject and his body in space. The crush between the psychoanalytic interpretation of feminine lack and the perceived biological inferiority of the female body contributes to the discursive production of the severely limited spatial pathways and patterns that women tend to follow.
2.4.ii Surveillance and control
Drawing upon Foucault's (1977) thinking on the panopticon, feminists such as Bartky (1988) have theorised the multivalent sites of surveillance and control that discipline the female body specifically. The modern state produces what Foucault (1977) refers to as 'docile bodies' that operate under the machinery of power, these bodies being non gender-specific. The production of these so-called 'docile bodies' relies upon the mechanisms of regulating the body's time in space (through devices such as timetables, bells and whistles) and the maintenance of that control via continuous surveillance (for example, guards and video surveillance). This constant surveillance induces in the subject a mode of self-surveillance and a ubiquitous 'docile body'. This self-regulatory discipline, states Foucault (1977:138) "...disassociates power from the body, it turns it into an 'aptitude'". When we turn to consider the means whereby patriarchy has consolidated its functions, it is apparent that the female body has been subjected to gender-specific forms of surveillance and control.
It has been discussed in some detail that the mechanism of dividing public and private spaces between men and women, that has been consolidated in the modern patriarchal state, enables feminine domestication and self regulation in this sphere. Added to the discourse of domesticity, particularly within modernity we see a shift towards targeting the female body as the object of biomedicine's scopophilic tendencies (perhaps
we can view this shift to biomedicine as one that takes up the place of religious regulation and the all-seeing, despotic God). The spatialised female body, then, is rendered visible to the disciplinary gaze and its anthropological investments in hierarchy and taxonomy. This disciplinary gaze is identified by theorists such as Laura Mulvey, a film theorist, as quintessentially masculine and encountered as an internalised phenomenon in the feminine subject. We have already seen how a penetrating gaze has mapped out the female biomedical subject, and this scrutinising gaze is reproduced in anthropological discourse that organises bodies in terms of visible taxonomies. In classical anthropology, the other is pinned under the gaze of the anthropologist (the universal intellectual) whose gaze constitutes cultures "...as if they were theatres of spatialised arrays" (Clifford and Marcus 1986: 12). The connection that I make here to the broad issue of the female body fixed by and fixated upon by scopic, masculine intelligence is that, as the object of an intracultural anthropological gaze, 'woman' becomes something of a curiosity: 'woman' becomes a site of spectacle or, to use Fabian's terms, a 'spatialised array'. This theatricalisation of the female subject, I argue, dislocates women from both culture and themselves (that is, a subjectivity or self that is not the inferior term of a masculine/feminine binary). In other words, the condition of the feminine subject is to be a perpetually embodied foreigner.
Indeed, Kristeva (1993:17) contends that it is hardly coincidental that the first foreigners mentioned in Greek mythology are women, the Danaides, who spoke a different language and were unavailable for marriage. As a perpetual 'foreigner', then, 'woman', if she is to be intelligible as such, is dogged by self-conscious attempts to perform a feminine physicality appropriately.
2.4.iii Towards a critical mimesis
It has been established that simply reversing the instrumentalism of phallocentric discourse will merely reiterate the privilege of the phallus to signify and dominate space representationally. In phenomenological terms, the uncritical reproduction of typically masculine modes of embodiment, and masculine spatial pathways, will not serve to destabilise masculine privilege (I specify uncritical as the critical mimicking of modes of masculine embodiment in cross-gender play can be considered as transgressive). Irigaray (1991) suggests that a way for women to deconstruct their position is through the practice of critical mimesis, that is, a miming back of the rules and regulations of the system that enabled feminine subjectivity in the first place. Irigaray (1991:123) states that:
[t]he scenography that makes representation feasible, representation as defined in philosophy, that is, the architectonics of its theatre, its framing of space-time, its geometric organisation, its props, its actors, their respective positions, their dialogues...that allows the logos, the subject, to reduplicate itself...have to be re- enacted... in order to shake discourse away from its mooring in the value of 'presence'...we have to point out how the break with material contiguity is made, how the system is put together, how the specular economy works.
This view resonates with Butler's stance (1990a) on 'gender as drag'. The improper or catachrestic use of language in written texts can perhaps assuage the omnipotence of phallic law, but I think that it is in the use and remarking of live flesh, in feminist performance art particularly, that critical mimesis takes place most effectively, for the site of language and struggles over power, the body, is paramount to feminist performance art.
The feminist performance artist uses her body that is marked 'female' to mime femininity back across the flesh, against mimetic convention. It is in the literal interrogation of the 'architectronics' of the theatre space, the visible organisation of bodies in space and the mooring of logos to presence that I hope to clarify just how feminist performance art transgresses conventional theatrical time-space matrices and moves towards a kind of anti- aesthetic that could be referred to as 'the intensity of being' (that I might add incorporates the notion of becoming).10 Hence, in the following section, I take a broad overview of historical gendered constructions of actual theatre spaces.