PART TWO—
SUSTAINING BODY/MIND/SOUL

Polymorphous Perversities
Female Pleasure and the Postmenopausal Artist

Work on this paper was supported by a Faculty Research Award from the University of Nevada, Reno. I especially appreciate the travel funds that allowed me to interview artists across the United States. My deep thanks go to the artists, for their time, honesty, and interest in this project.

Parts of this chapter appeared in M/E/A/N/I/N/G 14 (November 1993) and are reprinted by permission of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues.

Other versions of "Polymorphous Perversities" have been delivered at:
The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, June 1993
Art Works Gallery; San Jose, California, July 1993
Artemisia Gallery; Chicago, Illinois, October 1993
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, February 1994
Women in Photography Conference, Houston, Texas, March 1994

[Wearing a form-fitting minidress that reveals her shoulders and arms, Frueh assesses the audience. Her pearl necklace and bracelet are visible to them, as are her sheer black stockings and short black boots with low heels. ]

In The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography Angela Carter writes, "It is in this holy terror of love that we find, in both men and women themselves, the source of all opposition to the emancipation of women." In D. V. , Diana Vreeland states, "The beauty of painting, of literature, of music, of love  . . . this is what men have given the world, not women."^[1] I vehemently agree with Carter and disagree with Vreeland. The circulation of love, within the bodies of women and within civilization, which supposedly sustains human life, accounts for the (im)possibilities of pleasure. Vreeland turns love into a misogynistic joke against women, for to claim love as men's invention is to hate women and implicitly to laugh at their displays of passion and creations of pleasure in art or in life, to infantilize them, and to turn them into sphinxes—mysteries and monsters.

Reconceive the monster. She is an emancipatrix in her perversities, a muse of beauty and hilarity, a circulator of love.

Research and conversation tell me I would be unwise to generalize about postmenopausal women. But society's erotic and aesthetic aversion toward old(er) women drives me to speak for their pleasures, to theorize them, and to situate this material in my continuing development of a feminist erotics. I base my ideas on four areas of study: looking at and loving old(er) women, the experiences and art of women visual artists over fifty, feminist writings on female pleasure and eroticism, and literature on menopause and women's aging.^[2] My desire is to make connections between visual pleasure and female pleasures from a position of difference, female aging, that is a largely uncharted territory, outside cultural maps of conventional femininity, and that consequently may provide feminism with new models of female pleasure.

Theorizing Observation

I remember grandma with her silver-white hair in a French twist.

She faces me in a white mink coat, wearing a diamond wedding ring, pearl necklace and bracelet. Five feet tall and unmadeup, my grandma embodies an oxymoron, unpretentious opulence.

After grandma died Aunt Sylvia and I found raspberry suede gloves in grandma's dresser. Sylvia asked, "Do you want them?" I said, "No." I was a fool.

But the diamonds and pearls have become mine, the link to a love-site of visual pleasure, my grandma, the legacy that charges me to articulate how seeing and being an old(er) woman need not be disjunctive.

Often the old do not like to recognize themselves, for aging can be a process of "adaptive repulsion" that may indicate psychic ill health.^[3] Getting used to the mirror's "ugly" reflection may give in to the social incorrectness of embodying a difference, old(er) age, that is more apparent and more deeply felt by people than that between the sexes. The young(er) woman wants to be seen, the old(er) woman is hypervisible, yet, paradoxically, erased by society's alienation from its aging bodies.^[4]

In my Performance Art class, women students in their early twenties talked about beauty. They cited beautiful old(er) women—a grandmother, Georgia O'Keeffe. Then one asked, with witty humanity, "But do you want to look like that?"

I catch myself staring at an over-fifty woman in a conservatively patterned miniskirt that matches her blouse. She leans on the counter in a SoHo gallery and runs her fingers through wheat-in-moonlight hair. I turn away, embarrassed to be scrutinizing a gesture and a look that seem forcedly sexy. Then I question the force of sociovisual conventions—only young(er) women can assume the appearance and postures of sexiness—and of two wishes: that her sexuality disappear and that her desire for her visual pleasure in herself not compel me to look at her.

I revise my fearful need for her and other old(er) women to age gracefully, a euphemism for fading away, lulling lust. Grace derives from Latin gratia, a pleasing quality. An old(er) woman who doesn't act her age is not pleasing, unlike a young(er) woman in the guise of femininity, because the old(er) woman exposes her pleasure, which society tries to deny and names indecent.

Gratia also means thanks.

Amazing grace.

I thank the woman in the gallery for the indecency of defiance.

I watch my aesthetician's hands as she prepares to give me a facial. She grooms them as glamorously as she does her face. Deft knowledge about beauty rituals need not hide age, nor does it necessarily betray submission to the cosmetic industry. My aesthetician's hands declare attentiveness to detail: the contrast between lightly tanned skin, mottled by darker spots, and madder red polish, the just-this-side-of-exotic nail length, the well-lotioned skin. I respond to the thick veins underneath as one more element in a picture of lush softness and lucid style.

Love of color and texture is not a crime that old(er) women commit against themselves. Old(er) women's self-aestheticization is autoerotic action and event that destroy visual pleasure as we have known it.^[5] For the postmenopausal woman cannot be the feminine fetish, eroticized by patriarchal womb-worship. The nonreproductive woman's self-aestheticization deaestheticizes Woman as socially constructed femininity.

In society's eyes the old(er) woman who costumes herself in feminine beauty has usurped it from the young. But if there is a costume, anyone can wear it, anyone can be feminine, including the erotically disenfranchised postmenopausal woman. It is not that she makes femininity ugly but, rather, that she refuses to accept the exclusive canon of womanly beauty. Her defiance both shatters and expands the aesthetic of femininity and opens the way to new meanings of woman.

One of my friends wears her hair in a braid that reaches the middle of her back. She used to ask me, "Do I look old and severe like this?" I'd look at her hair, which is whiter each time I see her, once or twice a year, and the lines in her face, the creamy peach or subtle pink lipstick, the lavender, apricot, or buff eyeshadow, and her radiant complexion, and I'd say, "You're beautiful." Now she no longer asks the question. "It suits me," she says of her hairstyle and adds, "Fuck 'em."

Carolyn Heilbrun writes,

Biographers often find little overtly triumphant in the late years of a subject's life, once she has moved beyond the categories our available narratives have provided for women. Neither rocking on a porch, nor automatically offering her services as cook and housekeeper and child watcher, nor awaiting another chapter in the heterosexual plot, the old woman must be glimpsed through all her disguises which seem to preclude her right to be called woman. She may well for the first time be woman herself.^[6]

I am not promoting femininity but, rather, its fluidity. Even though femininity is misogyny's attempt to sanitize the female body, femininity is also a complex of pleasures that are lived and available and that women can use in order to change them. The heterosexual plot may try to entrap old(er) women in youth, the purchase of beauty products, plastic surgery, and gym memberships, but age triumphs over youth and cannot be contained by purchases or by the fictions in outworn biographical narratives. Postmenopausal eroticism, which includes taking pleasure in the vision of oneself and creating that pleasure, is overt triumph over societal and self-repulsion.

Women can choose dyed hair, red lipstick, "inappropriate" dress, styles of flamboyance, spectacle, elegance, or "tastelessness" that may be indicators of self-love and lust for living. Margaret Simons recounts her first sight of Simone de Beauvoir: "I was shocked when she opened the

door. In spite of looking old and wrinkled, she had the audacity to wear red lipstick and bright red nail polish!"^[7] In this context the word audacity seems ageist. Although I like the implication or effect of red's rudeness, the idea that an old(er) woman must be brave to wear bright cosmetics saddens me. Color is pleasure, and Simons's shock suggests partial recoil. A viewer cannot assume that an old(er) woman alive with colors and sensuous bodily and clothing surfaces is trying to mask her age because she hates herself.^[8] Then the narrative closes. The old(er) woman who chooses pleasure does not wait for the next chapter, which patriarchy has already written. The heterosexual plot, having excluded old(er) women from the love story of romance and breeding, has no words for women's love of themselves.

My mother dyes her hair bird's-wing black, and she wears crimson lipstick. After almost forty years of cutting her hair very short, she's growing it, at age 81.

My father tells her she has a heartshaped face.

[Frueh 's voice becomes soft and especially smooth. ]

My mother is the face of love.

Well-preserved does not describe mom or grandma, my aesthetician or my friend, for femininity has not mummified them. To preserve is to protect, to save from spoilage or rotting, to keep for future use, to maintain an area for hunting, to put up fruit. The well-preserved old(er) woman is always in danger of becoming overripe, damaged by age, unsavable and unsavory, worthless for the mating chase because she is a victim of language whose hatred of her rigidifies pleasure. The well-preserved woman is a dead body, embalmed by a disgusted secularization of women once the culturally sacred womb can no longer bear children.

The postmenopausal body deserves cultural resurrection as a site of love and pleasure.

Without love, there is no revolution,

And without pleasure, there is no freedom.

The Other Side of Privilege

Female pleasure has been theorized in terms of sexual difference but insufficiently in terms of women's differences from women. This mat-

ters, because patriarchy has determined reproductive woman to be desirable, a site of pleasure, and postreproductive woman to be undesirable. Younger women live the privilege of bondage to the eroticized reproductive ideal. Old(er) women live beyond that privilege.

The castrated woman of Freudian theory gains power, the phallus, by bearing a child. Her erotic power is beholden to insemination, imagined or real, and erotic myth builds on woman's capacity to seduce the male organ into the hole/hold of creation or to mangle male hopes. Man fears the cunt (vagina dentata ), for it may destroy him, but he worships the womb, for it aggrandizes his self-image. This story lays the groundwork for hatred of old(er) women. A man cannot impregnate a postmenopausal woman, cannot even imagine his creativity visible in her body. Thus menopause is a subversion of female reproductive organs as the origin of male desire (and greed), of erotic symbols and narratives, and of womanhood when spiritualized as cosmic center of the female body.^[9]

Womb-privilege operates along with the eroticization of young(er), firm(er) flesh and muscles, which represent the phallic symbol, the penis, in its state of power, erection. The old(er) body is the equivalent of detumescence and represents phallic failure. So man must avoid entry into the tomb of his desire.

Womb is a privileged word, whereas uterus is not used in a spiritual or romantic context. Menopausal and postmenopausal hysterectomies remove the uterus, not the womb. Elinor Gadon writes, "I suggest that women s wombs are their power centers, not just symbolically but in physical fact. When we say we act from our guts, from our deepest instincts, this is what we are speaking of. The power of our womb has been taken from us."^[10] She is not talking about hysterectomy but, rather, of the devaluation of soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-the-body wisdom.

I agree that the body, woman's and man's, is a vehicle and site of wisdom, and perhaps Gadon's old(er) woman could retain her wiseblood regardless of whether she had a uterus. In Privilege (1990), filmmaker Yvonne Rainer presents the information that "by age 50, 31% of U.S. women will have had a hysterectomy. Hysterectomy is the most frequently performed operation in the U.S. . . . Hysterectomies . . . garner $800 million a year in gynecological fees. There is a popular saying among gynecologists that there is no ovary so healthy that it is not better removed, and no testes so diseased that they should not be left in-

tact." I question the wisdom of locating female power—erotic, mystic, intuitive—in an organ that reads differently according to its owner's or former owner's age.

Luce Irigaray's "Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un," as title, pun, and article, poeticizes and analyzes female pleasure as multiple, a polyvocality of organs, surfaces, sensations, and as inclusive of differences among women. I gather from Irigaray's arguments and ecstasies that any and all female bodies are erotic. Patriarchy, then, is arbitrary in its eroticization of the firm(er) phallic body, the vagina that is the corresponding nothing to man's something, the womb that is his dream of himself, and in so doing more severely castrates the old(er) woman than the young(er).

Arbitrariness is historically specific, so if Cranach's, Rubens's, Titian's, Renoir's, Boucher's, and Modigliani's nudes, all young but variously fleshed, have been seen as erotic, so can the old(er) female body. For the eye is polymorphously perverse and can be trained and lured into diverse pleasures, just as the libido can be.^[11] Erotic desire floats, ready for grounding, awaiting direction from a desiring or loving subject. Changing the image of female erotic object from the youth ideal of Western art and advertising demands a change in the parameters and focus of love, the applications of femininity, and the source of female privilege, which has been patriarchy's maintenance of its own empire of desire that has used the female body to further male ends. In actuality, pleasures can abound in any body and therefore appear on "the other side of privilege."^[12]

Rainer's Privilege presents variously privileged voices and characters, female, bourgeois, African-American, Nuyorican, male, poor, lesbian, heterosexual, young, menopausal, and postmenopausal. The last two positions receive the greatest attention and are spoken by a number of women and in diverse visual and narrative contexts. One story appears on a computer screen, and part of it reads:

A woman who is just entering menopause meets a man at a conference at the University of El Paso. They hit it off. Later, after hearing his lascivious remarks about a much younger woman, she is shocked at having misinterpreted what she had thought was mutual sexual attraction. Toward evening, from the hilltop heights of the university, a Mexican-American student points out to her the sprawling shanties of Juárez across the Rio Grande. In the gathering dusk she realizes she is on two frontiers: Economically, she is on the advantaged side

overlooking a third-world country. And sexually, having passed the frontier of attractiveness to men, she is now on the other side of privilege.

This declaration of self-recognition stuns me. I see a European-American woman of independence, self-esteem, professional standing, more than adequate income, and confidence in her attractiveness shocked to be persuaded that she is other from the self and persona she believed in. I see her standing above the Rio Grande, dumbstruck and fucked by a society in which, just as suddenly, women of fifty or so wake up to find that men have been the locus of their existence and to ask, now that they have fallen from the grace of womb-love, what do they love in themselves and in their unbecomingly hypervisible because erotically invisible sisters? In Privilege , Jenny, the menopausal hub figure, starts up from the bed where she has just had sex with a male lover, who is young in this flashback where she is her contemporary fiftyish self, and she exclaims, "My biggest shock in reaching middle age was the realization that men's desire for me was the lynchpin of my identity."

The El Paso story and the images it creates in my mind haunt me and force rumination. They point out a gap in women's lives and in the stories about them that begs to be filled by an eros that is self-reliant and resilient. The El Paso story speaks of loss and of the silence of teller and audience at the end of a sad or amazing tale. But to maintain that silence would be to accept the closure provided—dictated—by Heilbrun's heterosexual plot. So I continue the story and say that, loosened from the privilege of constrained eros, an old(er) woman adventures after different pleasures, polymorphous and perverse because they neither play to nor rant at the father who demands erotic conformity and submission and therefore provokes hostility, and because they demonstrate the impropriety of existing at all and the intractability of a subject who will not nullify her lust for living.

Grant Kester's discussion of alternative art's rant genre, practiced in large part by performance artists, including postfeminists, started me thinking about the rant nature of much visual art by postfeminists and post-postfeminists, exemplified in works by many young(er) women in 1920: The Subtlety of Subversion, the Continuity of Intervention at the New York Gallery Exit Art/The First World (6 March-7 April 1993). Kester writes, "The implied viewer . . . is often a mythical father figure conjured up out of the artist's imagination to be shouted at, attacked, radi-

calized, or otherwise transformed by the work."^[13] I believe the old(er) woman artist of feminist conscience speaks to the world, not to the father. When she taps into the polymorphously perverse libido, she can circumvent—and demolish—people's domination by the father-in-the-brain who oversees and de-eroticizes most bodies.

Awakening is a passage (El Paso, The Pass) on the great river (Rio Grande) of life, after which women can no longer pass for young. Passage releases them from the social order's dominant erotic games of coercive femininity and heterosexuality, and conscious passage encourages new formulations of desire. The proliferation of polymorphous perversities from and within the postmenopausal soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-the-body open-ends female ways of seeing and being pleasure. The old(er) woman need not be the Crone or the matron or feminine forever, ways of aging that satisfy some women but are insufficiently diverse. The Crone archetype offers a model of wise old age, usually earth-connected; the matron is a model of self-sufficiency and welcome invisibility; and feminine forever may necessitate posthuman control—cosmetic surgery and hormone replacement therapy.^[14]

The social order is safer with fewer models than with many and is especially secure when women mourn their youth. They mourn because they see so few models of power and pleasure. The proliferation of polymorphous perversities in postmenopausal women's self-presentation and -concept would help reify historian and singer Bernice Reagon's statement about menopause, and I paraphrase her, It's the point from which you fly.^[15]

The Art of Flying

Visual art reifies pleasure. Images, objects, and artmaking processes are testimonies to artmaking as the production of pleasure, for the artist and for the viewer. Making art is the practice of love, and many women artists over fifty say that doing what you love keeps you young. Underlying the various ways women express belief in artmaking as fountain of youth, I find erotic motivation.

The erotic is rich living and, ultimately, an involvement in the transformation of self and society. The erotic is pleasure-work, the means and ends of flight. Its practitioner engages in social risk and provides social sanctuary, for the art of flying is a provident skill. I think of Erica

Jong's Fear of Flying (1973), about a young(er) woman's investment in erotic action and fantasy—the Zipless Fuck—and compare the novel with Privilege , in which Jenny finds that men have flown, and I imagine she must search out new ways to fly, not necessarily without men but definitely different from a young(er) woman's assertions of erotic will.^[16] Jenny exemplifies Maxine Kumin's Sleeping Beauty:

When Sleeping Beauty wakes up
she is almost fifty years old.^[17]

The rude awakening is the beginning of mature yet strangely fledgling flight, of a new erotic movement and new aesthetic assessments that do not demean Awakening Beauty for either the phobic dreams of old(er) women's age she has shared with patriarchy or for innocence about the mysterious beauty that has become aware of itself and that she must investigate. Sleeping Beauty wakes herself up from the coma of delivery by man, and though her prince may come, erotic union with him will not fit into the heterosexual plot. One reason is that she has negotiated an autoerotic awakening. Beauty Aroused is an erotic agent, Dorothy Sayers's "advanced old woman [who] is uncontrollable by any earthly force," for she can fly.^[18]

A number of women artists over fifty are overcoming Sleeping Beauty's fear of flying. Below I discuss the work of three: Bailey Doogan, Claire Prussian, and Carolee Schneemann.^[19] Each formulates a reification of the aging physical and psychic body, a way to see and experience sensation, emotion, and palpability, to understand erotic accesses and outlets of the self, whose wholeness an individual, looking at or touching her body, cannot entirely grasp.

Beauty Aroused is pleasure-vehicle, the artist, and pleasure-product, the art. Beauty Aroused is subject, muse, and artist in service of her self, a triune power whose erotic engagement in visual and female (self-) pleasure dismantles Diana Vreeland's misogynistic, Paglian statement that opens this paper: "The beauty of painting, of literature, of music, of love  . . . this is what men have given the world, not women.

I do not want the listener to think that just because Doogan, Prussian, and Schneemann all deal with the female body I am reducing visual pleasure in women's art to anatomical or somatic expression. Visual pleasure, and its relationship with female pleasure, continues to be a largely unarticulated aspect of feminist discourse. I attribute that partly to the lingering success of Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and

Narrative Cinema" (see note 5, below) and partly to feminists' body-phobia, even prudery, this despite a growing literature on the body.

Theoretical focus on the female body as site and vehicle of feminist visual pleasure is necessary. CORP (Canadian Organization for the Rights of Prostitutes), addressing what they considered feminists' condescending and patronizing attitude toward prostitutes, wondered in a 1987 publication, "How can they [feminists] hear us talk, how can they hear us when they can't even hear their own bodies? They are continually shaping it with their minds. . . . Whatever their bodies are telling them somehow comes up through their minds, and then they shape what's comfortable."^[20] I would rather have a shapely soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-the-body, disciplined, determined, and liberated by inevitable discomforts of thinking and feeling, than be shaped by intellectual prudence bordering on a prudery that disjoints mind from soul from body and sex from intellect.

For better or worse, we are wed in utero to our bodies, and as my friend Helen says about the body, "It's all we have." This is more realistic than fatalistic. The body is radical, is, in tandem with mind, root and heart of knowing. A woman's sexual organs do not define her root-heart, for that would mean the rest of her is aphasic. Beauty Aroused is erotic art(ist), fighter, speaker, and seer militating against continuing Cartesian escapism into presence through mind. Beauty Aroused minds the body and embodies thought—she is an activist—and she reifies the fact that woman is an erotic territory yet to be explored by herself. That exploration is necessary and revolutionary. If you think it is utopian, consider that eros is reality rather than perfection, and always within reach.

Bailey Doogan

Doogan says, "Female pleasure is a Pandora's box. So much goes against your realizing what female pleasure is, but something about female pleasure is connected with a freedom and acceptance of myself. I find that I often can't talk about the things I care about and the passion for what I care about is reserved for my work.

"I feel more of a going inward as I get older," and perhaps this is associated with a positively narcissistic scrutiny: "The older I get the more I stare at myself." This desire to know one's soul-inseparable-from-the-

body through observation is Doogan-the-artist's pleasure, and she duplicates her visual self-fascination in her paintings of the old(er) female nude. She says, "I feel as if I'm crawling over the bodies inch by inch" as she paints.^[21]

Doogan wants to "define the body in relation to culture." As a painter of the female nude/herself seen in her model's flesh, Doogan uses male visual language to shatter it while simultaneously creating what male visual language has made absent. Feminists have continually reiterated the problem of producing changed meanings while speaking male language, which has been the only one available. Don't vocabulary—the female body—and syntax—youth and beauty—wrest change from the female and feminist painter's hands? Mightn't an aging body simply be perceived or interpreted as a facile mockery of the standard? No, for the old(er) body, in contemporary American culture, is never a gloss. The old(er) body, within the conventions of Western art and its vampiric relative, contemporary advertising, represents chaos, because it does not submit to the strictures of domination that have pictured the female body for man's eyes. While the standard female nude or nearly nude in advertising is a sweet that pains a woman's mind-and-soul-in-separable-from-the-body, Doogan's figures in works such as Mea Corpa (1992) and Mass (1991) are sights for women's sore eyes.

Whereas the conventional female nude is an icon of womb-worship, Doogan's nudes retheorize the canonical female body.^[22] Her iconoclasm goes beyond resistance or rejection because she invents a difference from the norm that does not transcend the significance of liminal experience. Although Western culture has construed the female body to be more liminal than the male, because the former manifests blood mysteries and has culturally been defined more cruelly than the male body as exemplar of time's ravaging passage, Western art has denied that liminality by shunning age (as well as pregnancy, menstruation, and menopause).^[23] Western art's use of the female body to control time—aging and death—contributes to our fear of flesh that moves, wrinkling, even shrinking, with age in a dephallicizing process.^[24] As I said earlier, the old(er) female body is the tomb of man's desire. To picture the old(er) female nude is to represent the ultimate patriarchal taboo, the end of patriarchy. Doogan's female nudes, then, are models of feminist and female pleasure. They are made by a woman who questions to death the premises of erotic argument (only the young(er) body is desirable, and patriarchy decides that), and the subject who questions experiences pleasure.

The liminal body, Sleeping Beauty, represents desire.

[Frueh says, "Lights down, please. Projector on." A slide of Mea Corpa appears. As the discussion of the painting progresses, Frueh shows details so that the audience cannot ignore its departures from conventional nude beauty. ]

She is Mea Corpa, my body, standing in the posture of the resurrected Christ, and her flesh moves with the energy of eros. Veins protrude along her calves and feet, skin creases at her ankles and waist and both clings to and bulges at her knees. Light does not caress her, it illuminates her new seductions: heavy eyelids and undereye pouches, bony shoulders, muscled arms and legs worked out in the gym and worked on by the force of gravity over time. Doogan's crawling over every inch results in a body that feels like fluids, flesh, and organs and that recalls Monique Wittig's resuscitation of the female body in The Lesbian Body:

THE PLEXUS THE GLANDS THE
GANGLIA THE LOBES THE
MUCOSAE THE TISSUES THE
CALLOSITIES THE BONES THE
CARTILAGE THE OSTEOID THE
CARIES THE MATTER THE MARROW
THE FAT THE PHOSPHOROUS THE

MERCURY THE CALCIUM THE
GLUCOSES THE IODINE THE
ORGANS THE BRAIN THE HEART
THE LIVER THE VISCERA THE
VULVA THE MYCOSES THE
FERMENTATIONS THE VILLOSITIES
THE DECAY THE NAILS THE TEETH
THE HAIRS THE HAIR THE SKIN
THE PORES THE SQUAMES THE
PELLICULES THE SCURF THE SPOTS^[25]

It is not that Doogan shows everything, and Wittig's words are certainly neither enumeration nor description. Like Wittig, Doogan expresses flux and inseparability by using erotic syntax and creating a body—a word that feels too categorical in Doogan's and Wittig's usages—that deserves the name "m/y radiant one."^[26]

Naked splendor in Mea Corpa offers itself to female eyes and recovers itself from the guilt, mea culpa, of not being beautiful or correct enough to be seen. This female figure steps out of the (literal) darkness (of guilt) deaccessorized of conventional erotic props such as bed, fan, drapery, fruit, flowers. She displays appetite for herself, my body , not the one Western art invented and permuted for Woman, so my body has risen, flown from the dystopian eros developed by patriarchy. Doogan puts an end to anorexia of the spirit.

In 1987, at forty-six, Doogan painted Femaelstrom ,

[slide appears ]

in which a female St. Sebastian, haloed in gold leaf and pierced by arrows—actual sticks of wood dipped in red paint—gazes towards a bevy of bean pods, upon each of which Doogan has painted a young bikinied woman. The femaelstrom is women's confusion over Western culture's splitting of woman into saint and sinner. The next year Doogan produced a monumental triptych, RIB (Angry Aging Bitch) ,

[slide appears ]

a mixed-media drawing that rails against woman's creation from the body-mind of man. In each of the piece's panels Doogan depicts an old(er) female nude. Femaelstrom and RIB are characteristic of Doogan's late 1980s female nude—suffering, melancholy, aging in monumental resoluteness and inspirational rage. The nude in Mea Corpa , Mass ,

[slide appears ]

and Hairledge (1993), all completed after Doogan turned fifty, suggests reconciliation, the balance in one body of sensuousness and spirituality, a redirection of displeasures from injuries sustained from the fathers to pleasures maintained in service to oneself.

Pleasure, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, who is me and you and who may wish to remake the meaning of Pandora's box. Remember Doogan's "Female pleasure is a Pandora's box." Female pleasure curses only misogynists, and we need not believe Hesiod's story that Pandora's box held evils and afflictions, that, though warned not to open it, she did out of curiosity, and consequently made humankind accursed. The "curse" of the old(er) female body is chaos. The culture that has perceived and mythicized the old(er) female body's terrific disorderliness has also made it unsightly and invisible in order to shore up the young(er) female body as an object and idea of phallic security. When the old(er) woman, Doogan in this case, releases her polymorphously perverse libido, she releases chaos, which is Pandora's gift.^[27]

Doogan's female nude is vessel, locus, and outpouring of curiosity and subjectivity. The name Pandora means All-giver, from the Greek pan , all, and doron , gift. Barbara Walker writes, "Pandora's vessel was . . . a honey-vase, pithos , from which she poured out blessings: a womb-symbol like the Cornucopia."^[28] So that we do not continue the womb-worship that is detrimental to old(er) women's erotic social security, let us simply say that Pandoras, such as Doogan, dying for a look into what man has warned them in visual and popular images not to see, release self-knowledge, which is a blessing.

Pandora's box holds erotic sweets, which patriarchy withholds from old(er) women, whose defiance is auto-expression, without which transformation, social or personal, cannot occur. To turn Doogan's phrase, Pandora's box is female pleasure gone wild, the pandemonium feared by some viewers of Doogan's paintings and blessed by others. I've heard several people compare her figures to Ivan Albright's. Both artists do present unforgiving scrutinies, but Albright's most-remembered paintings depict pathetic specimens of decay. Their flesh mocks them with the futility not only of vanity but of living itself, so the figures, which are rarely nudes, become emblems of dying and death. Their skin looks iridescent, diseased, and worn, and they seem predisposed to growing tumors. If Doogan's bodies seem like sore sights that frighten women's eyes, that is only because they are unaccustomed to chaos, which is

Doogan's assertion of corporeal specificity and individuality as beautiful. Doogan is friendly to the female body, and Mea Corpa, in Doogan's language, reads most significantly as destigmatization, a transformation from guilt to self-possession that is responsible to women's real bodies. This happens because Doogan has made a spectacle out of the old(er) female body.^[29]

[blank slide ]

Claire Prussian

Claire Prussian writes to me, "I remembered when I was in art school how much more I loved drawing fat old models. Young ones were not interesting. Funny, I haven't thought about that in years . I love clothes so much more now, and jewelry. Beautiful things have assumed a different dimension, it's not just material. And I feel more comfortable in my body, spiritually—not physically—too many aches, pains, but I'd rather feel this way."^[30]

In her studio Prussian talks with me about clothes and apologizes several times for her interest in them. Later, after having lunch at a restaurant in Chicago's Neiman Marcus Building, we look at clothes. She points out a Mary MacFadden gown that falls in rippling pleats from a densely sequined and embroidered bodice. Floor-length and long-sleeved, the dress would entirely cover a body. Prussian speaks of such dresses as armor. They would conceal a wearer in power. She says too that many old(er) women's hairdos are helmets. "If I have to be old," said Prussian at lunch, "I'll be the most elegant old woman you've ever seen." She adds, "Style doesn't take lots of money."

Prussian's interest in clothing and style must not be misconstrued as simplistically materialist. Although feminists heatedly critique the dogma of beauty, they have written very little about beauty itself.^[31] Patriarchally instituted beauty doctrine—look young-sexy-beautiful so men can better worship your womb—garners so much feminist attention that feminist theories and practices of female beauty, especially regarding old(er) women, do not arise.

The feminist critical gaze has eyed Joan Collins and Madonna, professional beauties skilled in professional seductiveness.^[32] Madonna and Alexis Carrington, an old(er) sexpot played by Collins in the nighttime

soap opera Dynasty , function for some feminists as women who are self-consciously desiring and desirable: they are sexual agents as much as objects, and they enjoy both roles. Like Madonna and Alexis, Prussian can afford to buy glamor, but, unlike them, she does not adhere to the erotic orthodoxies of slenderness clothed in absolute fashionableness, skin made up into a doll-like dream, and signs of aging entirely eradicated by hair coloring or surgical and photographic means. Prussian underwent cosmetic surgery but directed her physician to leave certain lines because "I wanted to look my age but more rested." Prussian's love is not youth but style, which can be the creation of self, whereas fashion necessitates the bending of taste to currency.

Wherever possible, women must reinterpret beauty in their personal style, in their work and workplaces, so as to make beauty nongenerational. Women must control the images of their desire, which means making them anew. I don't expect absolute authenticity, images from the origin of female desire—can we know or believe in such a location?—But I do demand complexity in the symbolic representation of women. Beauty in old(er) women requires creative visual expression that burrows and flies with Naomi Wolf's idea in The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women that old(er) women are "darker, stronger, looser, tougher, sexier. The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold."^[33] But women must soar and dig much farther. Though Wolf's assertion is easy for young(er) women such as herself to pronounce, it is exceedingly difficult to practice from an old(er) body. Patriarchy's horror of the old(er) female body stems from attraction to the vision and then to embodiments of old(er) beauty, from fear of men's damnation by new desires that would mean oblivion, an end to the psychic perpetuation of control over women and to the actual perpetuation of the human race. Man would forget his duties.

Prussian's images of beauty for women sometimes rawly confront aging, but more often they displace it. The beauty of armor and helmet—the screen, to use Prussian's word, of style—appears repeatedly in her drawings, prints, and paintings. Screen should not be confused with fashion, for fashion shifts, it is a personality that flutters, while style holds, like a barrier invested with self.

Born in 1930, Prussian says that "growing old is a real loss of self, a narcissistic injury" that may result in "a dedication to screen." In her art

the screen, which includes luxurious fabrics and settings, proliferation of pattern, reveling in flowers and plants, and sensuous detailing of aging skin, is the psychic body. Her images depart radically from cosmetic surgery, the au courant, posthuman way to screen, or mask, female aging. In contrast, Prussian's works are screens that let down a guard against aging. They both comfort the viewer and set her on edge.

Vanitas (1981)

[slide appears ]

is a triptych whose rich lithographic tones describe the face of a woman about Prussian's age who was a friend. In the right panel she faces left, almost profiled; the central panel features her larger, head-on, and framed so that no hair shows; and in the left panel she is in three-quarters view, facing in. All the portraits are insistent closeups of a goddess of aging whose nonchalant sophistication—the way she holds a drink as if toasting or caresses one finger with another—speaks self-awareness. Prussian delineates her subject's fine and deep lines, eye pouches, and nose-to-lip folds. They are as lovingly and sensuously determined as are the hollows of her cheeks as she eyes the viewer from the central panel.

Vanitas treats the end of female vanity based in conventional femininity. Unlike Renaissance paintings whose theme is vanity, Prussian's print does not feature a young naked woman gazing in a mirror, nor does Prussian critique female "narcissism." Her composition recalls a three-part mirror, before which a woman makes up while looking at herself closely and at different angles. Here the making up is not cosmetic but, rather, a reconciliation with one's face by examining it.

In Latin vanitas means emptiness, and vanitas paintings in seventeenth-century Flanders and Holland were allegorical still lives. Prussian does not use any traditional objects from such paintings, which are meditations on transience and the emptiness of worldly possessions: an overturned bowl or cup refers literally to emptiness. Here the old(er) subject is herself the symbol of vanitas , for she represents the end of herself as (man's) worldly possession, the emptiness of that status. The emotion conveyed, however, is not emptiness, for Vanitas is starkly full, visually and otherwise. The woman's face fills each frame with determined resonance, and her glass isn't empty. In fact, she seems to toast herself and the viewer. She is Still Life, alive, visibly unavoidable.

In Vanitas-Tas-Tas (1988),

[slide appears ]

Prussian photocopied the earlier piece in four multiples that descend from ten and one-half inches to a little more than five inches high and that stand behind one another, as if in embrace. She hinged each triptych like an altarpiece and decorated the outer altarpiece panels with brilliantly colored fake jewels glued onto patterned Japanese papers. Replication adds a funhouse dimension, an Alice in Wonderland perceptual distortion, which relates to women's conceptual self-distortions as they age: intimate knowledge of one's appearance becomes magnified and looms in one's mind, beauty seems false, only a layer of glitter. Prussian seems to take herself/the old(er) woman to task for her vanity—tas, tas sounds like tsk, tsk—but also delights in the adornment of the altarpieces. Each one is a gem of private and sacred scale, a dedication to the possibility of beauty-in-realism.

[blank slide ]

Prussian loves her subjects and their environs, belongings, and gestures. Her fastidious, explicit way of looking, whether in photorealist drawings and prints or later faux-naïf paintings, reminds me of Chantal Akerman's words in a 1977 interview about her film Jeanne Dielman (1975):

If you choose to show a woman's gestures so precisely, it is because you love them. In some way you recognize those gestures that have always been denied and ignored. I think the real problem with women's films has nothing to do with content. It's that hardly any women really have confidence enough to carry through on their feelings. Instead the content is the most simple and obvious thing. They deal with that and forget to look for formal ways to express what they are and what they want, their own rhythms, their own way of looking at things.^[34]

Prussian sees and wants fullness, eros, age. She finds and plants her women in the midst of flowers. In the prismacolor drawings Woman in Blue and Woman in Blue with Flowers (both 1980),

[slide appears ]

a gray-haired woman with crimson lips and nails and diamond heart pendant sits in front of a mass of flowers. Male poets and artists have equated women erotically with fruits and flowers: women blossom and wither; are succulent, then dry up. Flowers' aesthetic and sensual beauty, epitomized in the nineteenth century by Dante Gabriel Rossetti's

visually and symbolically seductive use of them in relation to young(er) women, in Prussian's work calls into question the oppositional duality of youth and age, life and death. The subject in Woman in Blue with Flowers cocks her head, opens her voluptuous mouth in a near-sneer, moves her hands with the studied poise of a feminine smoker—her Tiparillo is caught in the breath of her conversation, in a pose that can no longer be read as flirtatious, for she is an uncanny queen of hearts. She covers her soul with sunglasses, but her body is soul nonetheless, a flower that shouts vitality. So does the body in Still Life I ,

[slide appears ]

a 1981–82 lithograph of an unclothed woman lying in an abundance of blooms—roses, irises, birds of paradise, and many more—that are her analog.

[blank slide ]

The body becomes less relevant in a series of portraits from the early 1980s. Or perhaps I should say that the psychic body is obviously paramount in the material world that covers and surrounds the flesh. In such compositions the sitter is defined by a

[slide of Portrait of Grace Hokin (1982) appears ]

deep-rose lace dress and a dusty pink and gray abstract floral patterned drape, or by her

[slide of Woman from New Jersey (1983) appears ]

fluffy white cat, blond helmet hair, multicolored sweater, and literal screen of vegetation, or by her

[slide of Portrait of Shirley Cooper (1982) appears ]

fur jacket and sofa of similarly delicate hues, or by a

[slide of Portrait of Ruth Nath (1982) appears ]

soft apricot wing chair, butter-colored curtains, and forsythia sprays in a large rust-orange vase.

[blank slide ]

In paintings from the mid-1980s to the present, each thing —flowers, fish, potted plants, wallpaper, mirrors reflecting the artist—possesses uncanny vitality. Often the mirrors and long, distorted perspectives push and open space into the super real—past, future, mythic, and strangely present times and places which are the psychic body. There the human face and figure are usually wistfully pathetic and undemanding of the eye. They are simply a visible part of the universe, and the psychic body shows its age in this displacement replete with complexity, timelessness, and beauty.

Kathleen Woodward theorizes a mirror stage of old age in Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions , and one section, based on Freud's writings, treats the uncanny, which may be an effect of looking into a mirror and recognizing, with shock and fright, that one is old. The familiar turns unfamiliar, for, according to Freud, the familiar has been repressed. He also relates the uncanny to castration anxiety, which may recall Prussian's belief that "growing old is a real loss of self, a narcissistic injury." The phallus dies and the double rises. Woodward says Freud follows Otto Rank in stating that in an early era of human history the double assured immortality and armed a person against death, but it came later to be seen as a messenger of death.^[35]

Prussian sees herself over and over. In Untitled (1991),

[slide appears ]

a triptych whose panels she displays diagonally, Prussian appears in a magnifying mirror in the uppermost section, like a sad, decapitated head, and in the center panel we see her in the magnifying mirror and in a horizontal bathroom glass that reflects a younger Prussian opening a door to the room behind. We also see her as the entering figure would, from the rear. The Beauty Shop (1991)

[slide appears ]

is a Land-O-Lakes butter-carton illusion in which an image retreats seemingly ad infinitum. The beauty-shop mirror reflects Prussian, as does a mirror held by the hairdresser, and her image appears too in another mirror to the right of his station. An uncanny pattern—a wilderness of large, reaching, blue fern fronds—decorates the wall and chair. The latter is empty, for Prussian exists only in the mirrors and in the extreme patterning that is the psychic body or the presence of the repressed. She keeps the eye so busy with her array of fronds, rippling-grained floorboards, bricks in the buildings outside the window, and a plant whose serpentine stalks inch along the floor toward both the chair and the viewer that she staves off the death-harbinger double.

Pattern displaces anxiety; it creates much where there may all too soon be nothing and puts order into the unpredictability of life. Pattern is beautiful. One's double may mean death, but Prussian actually multiplies herself and opens psychic and physical space far beyond the confines of any particular room she depicts. Perhaps the multiple image is self-protection, like the statues of Egyptian pharaohs that housed the ka, the spirit/double after death, so that he or she would continue in the afterlife.

Prussian has used explicit ancient Egyptian imagery in her work. One example is Three Frozen Images: Beginning, Middle, End (1984),

[slide appears ]

where she stands, elegantly gowned in green—color of the generative, the everlasting—in an interior that resembles an Egyptian tomb. For the ancient Egyptians death was not the end, and for Prussian this tomb may be a house of life. Her back to us, she faces an altarpiece-like mirror and views herself in triple deity. Prussian says of daily life, "I want to see something gorgeous when I look in the mirror," so she cares about jewelry, beautiful makeup, the coordination of colors and fabrics. Rather than seeing Prussian's self-mirroring in her body of work as the fascination of "adaptive repulsion," in which the mirror distances one from oneself, we should understand Prussian's self-observation as amatory. The mirror in Three Frozen Images reflects the gorgeous self from more than one side, and the mirror can also be seen as a painting that, like a ka statue, keeps alive, provides nourishment for, the gorgeous spirit/double in the present.

[blank slide ]

In the infant mirror stage the subject falls in love with herself, but if in the old(er) age mirror stage the observer identifies with her image, she is differently transformed, supposedly because she does not, cannot desire what she sees.^[36] So she is set reeling away from herself. Prussian says there are things she does not enjoy about growing old—the loss of friends and family, "too many aches, pains." But her spiritual comfort leads her to say, "I'd rather feel this way" than young(er). In her art Prussian looks into, not at, the mirror. She does not deflect aging, for she desires the looking into herself, which is the look of love. Prussian loves the time spent in her studio more than any other: "It's the only place where time feels right, not too fast or too slow." The pleasures met and created in that kind of time appear in Prussian's libidinally invested representations.

Carolee Schneemann

Schneemann talks about "the ecstatic body and the power of the ecstatic. Sexual pleasure is a capacity and gift of the organism." Eros has consistently been both source and content of Schneemann's art. Probing, ex-

posing, and loving a "hand-touch sensibility" while believing that "tactility is suspect" in Western culture, she continues to divest the female body of iconicity and to create "a jouissance beyond the phallus." This is a courageous project, for, as Schneemann says, androcentric culture has a "terror of the nonerect self"; it is age- and vulva-phobic. "The old woman is the ultimate betrayal of masculine imagination, the imagined ideal of the feminine," she says.^[37] The old(er) body's tactility is especially threatening, for it is flesh that has moved by virtue of having been around so long; it is sliding, sinking, ever more earthbound. Testicles and penises move, but they belong to a reproductive program of male creation/creativity, and a penis can defy gravity. Young(er) breasts and labia move, but they are part of the reproductive plan and the heterosexual plot. Culture conceives of them as plush organs that time destroys: breasts sag, vaginas atrophy, and both dry up.^[38] The realities of some men's impotence and some women's moist vaginas do not conform to cultural myth. At fifty-two one postmenopausal artist says, "I'm as horny as ever, and when I make love I'm as wet as ever."^[39] Schneemann speaks of the possibility that "in the ancient goddess-worshipping cultures—Minoan, Sumerian, Celtic—there was a full female erotics, older women had respect, and men were their acolytes."^[40]

Schneemann has certainly been interested in flesh, but as a vehicle rather than an end point of eros. Her classic performance Meat Joy (1964)

[slide appears ]

was flesh that moves, an orgiastic

[another slide of Meat Joy appears ]

dance of semi-clothed bodies and animal parts, an Aphroditean ritual. (She says that Dionysus stole orgiastic pleasures from Aphrodite.) While Schneemann has used her own classically beautiful body

[slide of Eye Body (1963) appears ]

in her art—one artist says, "Carolee, she personifies the goddess each time she steps out in performance"—the intention has not been to make herself into an icon.^[41] Carolee-as-goddess is not Womb-Worshipped One, patriarchy's docile deity, for she celebrates the female body for the pleasure of women. "In some sense I made a gift of my body to other women: giving our bodies back to ourselves."^[42]

[blank slide ]

In order to divest the female body of the iconicity that adheres to it through womb-worship and to counter, psychoanalytically speaking, its

conversion into a phallic stand-in for (its lack of) male organs, Schneemann proves the existence of female organs. In Interior Scroll (1975)

[slide appears showing sequential action ]

she stood naked and delicately unraveled from her vagina a ten-foot-long paper scroll folded in a "strange origami,"

[blank slide ]

and in Cycladic Imprints (1988–92) she uses vulval images.^[43] Like Meat Joy , Cycladic Imprints celebrates eros. For an artist of any age and sex this is a victory over cultural erotophobia, for an artist to continue such work over thirty years is a tribute to her faith and fortitude, and when a woman of fifty creates such work, it is a triumph over ageist assumptions about the pleasures and desires of old(er) women, and it diverges from the only archetype as yet provided for postmenopausal women, that of the Crone. I don't object to the Crone, for she is a figure of useful power and self-esteem for some women, but as one artist, who is a grandmother, said to me, "I'll never be the grandmother, I'll never be the Crone."^[44]

Cycladic Imprints

[slide appears ]

is an installation that embraces the viewer, who, upon entering, immediately absorbs and penetrates

[another slide of Cycladic Imprints]

a heady and sensual atmosphere of images, objects, sound, and dusky light. As she sits or walks

[another slide of Cycladic Imprints]

within a tangibility of eros, the viewer becomes the ecstatic body. Schneemann envelops the visitor in

[another slide of Cycladic Imprints]

a love potion, a tender orgy of slide projections—such as Cycladic statuettes, female nudes from art history, and

[another slide of Cycladic Imprints]

Schneemann's own vulva and torso, all beamed in dissolving relays from four positions—

[another slide of Cycladic Imprints]

sound, by Malcolm Goldstein, that flutters and hums into one's body like a wordless love song;

[another slide of Cycladic Imprints]

fifteen motorized violins, hung on and out from the walls, whose rhythmic movements suggest rhythms of sexual intercourse; and voluptuous,

[another slide of Cycladic Imprints]

linear abstractions of an hourglass or female form painted on the walls.

[another slide of Cycladic Imprints]

One's soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-the-body resonates to the overlay and transformation of images from historical, mythic, and (Schneemann's) personal memory, for Cycladic Imprints makes love.

[another slide of Cycladic Imprints]

In this installation the female body and its abstract figuration are everywhere, but they are not aestheticized in phallic terms and therefore are not conventional erotic models that say, "Look at me." Schneemann performs a feminist deaestheticization that recreates the female body in an intersubjective, in contrast to voyeuristic-phallic, mode. This is a restructuring of desire in which relationship is paramount. Such an artist/viewer interaction is mutuality, a subject to subject relationship that replaces the standard subject to art object one. This kind of interpenetration and embrace is mental and sensuous and, while it claims an individual's participation, it also permits her a singular though not separate presence within the spatial arena that is physical and psychic. The hand-touch sensibility reaches, caresses, and still leaves/makes room for the distance self-integrity requires.

Schneemann's visual and aural terms establish reciprocal space, where viewer and audience become absurd designations, for the gallerygoer is receptor, full of self, connections, and connectedness, but not receptacle, the feminine passive. Receptivity is Cycladic Imprints 's mode of communication. Images dissolve, music never forces entry, violins appear and disappear depending on light level and direction, so the piece is nondirective as to where a person might ground desire—except that grounding is clearly felt to be one's mind-and-soul-inseparable-from-the-body, both the organic and invisible sites of self and receptivity, onto and into which tones and images play.^[45]

Schneemann does not create womb-space. She does focus on the female body, often as metonymic vulval form—the wall abstractions, violins and their cases, and, of course, her own organs. Historical repetition is the point, to which Schneemann has brought her partner in art and pleasure, the gallerygoer, as if through steady, continual orgasm, the kind a woman can undeliberately experience simply by sitting legs

crossed and not moving, upper thighs slightly pressing at an unconscious angle. This is a leisurely route to pleasure which never has to peak. To read Cycladic Imprints as essentialist—vulva is woman's center, the transhistorical and cultural mark of Woman that marks her fate; Anatomy is Destiny—is to gloss over Cycladic Imprints 's intersubjectivity as theoretical proposition.^[46] Here the vulva functions neither as a simplistic reversal of phallus as symbolic representation of desire nor as a facile glorification of the female body and its anatomical difference. Cycladic Imprints is not about woman's capacity to attract or to be fertile or to bear children. It is (about) female pleasure as historical resonance and present reality.

In Cycladic Imprints the (grand)mothers come.

[blank slide. Frueh says, "Lights up, please." ]

Angela Carter writes in The Sadeian Woman that "Mother must never be allowed to come, and so to come alive." The (grand)mothers' pleasure is taboo. The expletive motherfucker identifies its object as pariah, curses him into place outside socialized sexual behavior. Schneemann dares and entices the participant lovingly to know the (grand)mothers' genitals, despised when not altogether obliterated.^[47]

Taboo intimidates—and excites.

Schneemann's love opens a largely unmodeled articulation of female pleasure. In Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible," Linda Williams argues that porn films have looked for the truth—and difference—of women's pleasure, visually investigating the female body and probing it for confessions of pleasure, visible signs.^[48] This is far more difficult to accomplish with the female than with the male body, which—reductive and often silly though the images are—can be shown with an erect or ejaculating penis as a sign of pleasure. Just as the conventional female nude is to a great degree a sign of male pleasure and thus of the invisibility of female pleasure—in terms of actively showing female pleasure or showing active female pleasure—porn, still a male-dominant field in regard to decision-making, has not made visible the anatomically hidden location of female pleasure. A shot of a clitoris, for instance, does not convey the sensation felt there. Porn can show the effects of female sexual pleasure in facial expressions and body gestures, but picturing cannot frame and measure female orgasm as it can—however inadequately—male orgasm. Visual examination of naked pleasure, the (idealized) female body—the skin, hair, and contours of the nude,

the sex parts of the porn model or actress—cannot reveal the immeasurable. That model of pleasure-proof does not work. Cycladic Imprints, however, offers a different model, as explicit as porn when understood.

Barbara Hepworth, speaking as a sculptor who is a woman relating to form, says the relationship is a kind "of being rather than observing."^[49] Observation can be a mode of surveillance and supremacy, the eye pinning and strutting over a sight. Being-in-relation treats the sight unseen. We move from I've got you in my sights, under the fascist control of one model of pleasure, to I've got you under my skin, where the irritant that is pleasure allows me room to move.

Without Love There Is No Revolution

Love is not a romance novel, and, contrary to Diana Vreeland's remark, neither is it a beauty that only men have created. Romance can be risk, adventure, and vision, in real terms that develop new narratives, which are old(er) women's love stories. The myth of the artist as risktaker, adventurer, and visionary is embedded in art history's and criticism's language of war and language of miracles, which are metaphors of spiritual and heroic prowess. Postmodern critiques have challenged that myth. But it doesn't die. Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz live on in contemporary art lore as heroes whose art and lives held erotic value, and the art press has lionized Matthew Barney, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, and David Salle, still living exemplars of a masculine ethos, enforcers in their art of the patriarchal plot. Art history's and criticism's romance with them all is a nostalgic replay of Western cultural legends in current and easy incarnations of Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces.

When love is a large hunger for flesh that moves, the terms of romance transform. The art hero with the same old face turns into an actual old(er) woman whose art is known to provide erotic sustenance and activate ever more polymorphous perversities.

Has the Body Lost its Mind?

"Has the Body Lost Its Mind?" is a revision of a paper delivered on the "Theory" panel at "The Way We Look, The Way We See. Art Criticism for Women in the '90s," a conference organized by the Woman's Building in Los Angeles, in January 1988.

A version of this chapter originally appeared in High Performance 12 (Summer 1989). That material is reprinted by permission of High Performance.

[Frueh steps from a table of panelists to a podium. As she stands up, she takes off her white tailored jacket to reveal a spare peach-pink camisole. The audience gasps, and Frueh is amazed at how small a gesture can be disruptive in an academic setting. Her linen miniskirt is a similar pink, but has a lavender cast. Her stockings are white, her shoes deep rose. ]

I called my mother. I was writing a novel and wanted to confirm the details of an incident at the beginning, an accident of blood, based on her experience. She said I had conflated elements from three events, a doctor-induced abortion, a miscarriage, a sudden hemorrhaging when she walked a city sidewalk on a summer day.

[Frueh's voice catches as if she is about to cry. ]

She told me more about each happening than I had heard before, and she said too that years later, when maybe she had not needed a hysterectomy, she had been enraged at the doctor. The intensity of memory, current emotion, and understanding brought us close to tears.

[Frueh's voice gains force through volume in the next three paragraphs. ]

Maybe I am bleeding now. And maybe you are bleeding too. Maybe all of us are bleeding in more ways than one. Maybe we are hurting for

ways to love our bodies, to talk about our blood and hair, our fat and wrinkles, our sexual sensations, our treatment under the hands of lovers and the medical profession, our many changes of life.

Maybe we are searching for erotic ways of living, which express the joy, depth, richness, and responsibility of being human. The erotic is the source and sustenance of wisdom, but Western culture does not understand the erotic—that it can exist in spiritual and political activity and activism, that it can be dead or alive during sex, that it is present in prosaic as well as ecstatic moments. The erotic is expansive, but it has become shrunken due to misunderstandings of it and accommodations to dullness.

Maybe we seek an equilibrium between spiritual and political, a rejection of fear and ignorance of the female body, a state of comfort, which is the lost homeland of the body. For we are not at home in our bodies. We are not sufficiently body-conscious.

Body-consciousness comes from thinking about the body as a base of knowledge and using it as such. Mind is inherent throughout the body.^[1] To perceive blood, hair, flesh, senses and their existence in a network of information—social, political, and ecological structures that are the world—is to know that the body is not dumb.

Artists and critics who deal with the voice and intelligence of the female body, especially issues or themes of blood, sex, myth, cunt, womb, breasts, goddesses, and spirituality, are sometimes called essentialist.

Before I define and discuss essentialism, I want you to know that I consider it a misnomer. This is because it is a name given by those who do not engage in what they see as its practice. Essentialism, like Impressionism, is a name given by the opposition. Many feminists, such as Mary Daly, an essentialist par excellence if we were to take the term as true, have addressed the significance of naming. On the negative side, those who are named can not only be labeled but, worse, branded and then dismissed through the name.

According to the namers, essentialism is biological determinism, glorification of a female essence, belief that such an essence is transhistorical and transcultural. Essentialists may deal with goddess myths and focus on female deity as idea and presence, as a source of empowerment. Theorists who believe in the term essentialist say that because sexuality is socially and culturally constructed, there is no female essence. They say too that female sexuality so constructed is the male-dominant culture's delimiting of women into the bondage of Woman, who is the

Other, marginalized and discounted, not permitted to be a serious shaper of culture. Essentialists, by seeing Woman as Other—sexual, natural, spiritual—maintain women's Otherness and continue women's absence from the cultural dialog.

Artist Judith Barry and film critic Sandy Flitterman-Lewis critique women's art that

can be seen as the glorification of an essential female power. . . . This is an essentialist position because it is based on the belief in a female essence residing somewhere in the body of woman. . . . Feminist essentialism in art simply reverses the terms of dominance and subordination. Instead of the male supremacy of patriarchal culture, the female (the essential female) is elevated to primary status.^[2]

Essentialism is seen as simplistic, a monolithic treatment of the female body, a restereotyping. Appropriation and deconstruction, which are anti-essentialist positions, reject the idea of innate femaleness and the authenticity of women's experiences, which, because they are culturally and socially constructed, cannot be trusted. Essentialism is an artistic affirmation of what film critic Jane Weinstock, writing about Nancy Spero's handmade paper scrolls of women heroes, calls "an Other-worldliness which reinscribes the traditional male/female opposition."^[3]

Mary Daly writes about metapatriarchal journeying, away from patriarchy's necrophilic lusts and into a biophilic participation in the reality that human beings are as much earth-substance as are trees, winds, oceans, and animals. Daly's belief that this journeying is "Astral/Archaic" would probably be seen by Weinstock as extremely Other-worldly rather than as bio-logically substantial.^[4] (Bio means life.)

Certainly sexuality is socially constructed, but it is also bio-logically determined, grounded in the facts that there is a logic to life and that if we avoid this logic, which includes love and knowledge of our bodies, we will suffer in them.

Spero responded to Weinstock's comments. Spero says Weinstock "tries to gag me by her legislating" against myth and the body. Weinstock replies that she intended "to articulate a perspective which would bypass the biological."^[5] To bypass the bio-logical is to condemn the female body to absenteeism, not to allow it to speak through the language of its owner. Granted, we all speak through the damage of male dominance, but this does not mean that we must mute the female body until a new vocabulary has been created. For we create the change, and

not through bio-logical rejection. We alter reality by asserting our presence, as body, soul, and mind. We combat absence with presence.

Weinstock says that "the Body, . . . exalted by a number of feminist artists, ha[s] become [a] victim of the capital letter."^[6] This may be true, but the female body, proscribed by the namers, has also become the victim of fear that anatomy, based on past, patriarchal experience, is an ugly destiny because women's genitals, which, read by patriarchy and by many individual men, appear to provide entry into women's bodies, seem to be the source of women's passiveness, receptivity, and vulnerability. So cunt is the source of inferior human status, and, in essence, a woman is a cunt.

Anti-essentialists believe that artists who represent the female body and critics who applaud this art and deal with the female body as source and site of experience are retrograde. Eleanor Heartney writes in reference to feminism and the '80s, "Suddenly nothing seems more passé than . . . vaginal imagery, body art . . . and all the other forms pioneered by women in response to their particular experience."^[7] In the so-called postfeminist '80s, it is fine, even lucrative, to deconstruct man-made images, cultural and media representations of women. But it is retrograde to be a woman who, like Spero or Hannah Wilke, uses the female body as a vehicle for exploring the lost homeland, what has been territory uncharted by women through their own images.

Spero and Wilke, among others, are interested in universalizing the female body as form and metaphor, not through a simplistic reversal of male-as-universal, but, rather, as a declaration of reality: women are present and can create their own meanings. Such work asserts that the body is not simply nature, and these artists do not assume that nature as our culture understands it is natural. In Spero's and Wilke's work, the female body speaks as culture, for its representation realizes the interconnections of art, idea, meaning, history, and bio-logic.

Anti-essentialists seem to think that the body is mind-less, but the body is intelligent and articulate. The body and the unconscious are one, unconscious and tacit knowing are closely related, and body knowledge is a part of all cognition. The opposition, armed with theory from the current voices of authority, who are mostly French and male, armor themselves against the body. They treat the body as ideology and cultural artifact, not as lived-in reality. Anti-essentialism is a technique for management of anatomy as reality.

Reality can be seen as culturally constructed, but it can also be seen as what inescapably is. Experience, accruing different meanings in different

eras and cultures, cannot be negated. Yet, like it or not, women menstruate, swell in pregnancy, give birth, go through menopause. Women artists and critics who represent and write (about and from) the body are engaged in a reconstruction of reality, so that the body, loosened from the constraint of an absolutist cultural determination, can speak as an origin of experience, knowledge, and possibility.

The female body can speak from a standpoint of unworkable cliché and self-exploitation, but it can also speak with a terrifying and truthful presence that is anything but Other. Otherness may be the divorce of mind from body, Logos from Eros, escape into the Otherworld of hyperintellectualism.

Feminism is suffering in the '80s from this Otherworldliness, a critical and artistic retreat from the body into a theoretical stratosphere from which the artist or critic observes or analyzes but is not the body. Art is an intellectual endeavor, as is criticism, but the foregrounding of theory incarcerates the mind, so that it is out of touch with the body, isolating the brain from the body. In actuality brain and body are mutually necessary: they are alert to and in love with one another. Body is all mind and mind is all body, they permeate one another, and together they originate information that can initiate erotic wisdom.

After the heat of early '70s feminism, with its angers, militancy, and cunt art, its lack of theory—a retrospective and hyperintellectualist assessment—and its academic unacceptability, we have seen in the past decade, especially in the "postfeminist" '80s, the appropriation of existing images of women for a cool art, disembarrassed of particular experience, disembodied, and we have witnessed the phenomenon of feminism grown frigid through the legitimation of gender studies as practiced by feminists and nonfeminists alike. We have seen feminists proving they are intellectuals. Perhaps this has been necessary, to know, I hope for ourselves, that we are neither simply bodies nor simple bodies. To some degree, however, I see this intellectual production, so much of it ultrasubtle in the employment and elaboration of semiotic, psychoanalytic, and deconstructionist theories, its embracing of Franco-male fashions, as forced labor. Alice Neel said, "Women in this culture often become male chauvinists, thinking that if they combine with men, they may be pardoned for being a hole rather than a club."^[8] Fear of the female body separates Logos from Eros. Cunt, and all its derisive connotations, scares us. Cunt is dangerous to professional well-being.

Theory is important. But it need not be written in a dry prose filled with jargon. And scholarship is not by definition compliance with intellectual trends. Theory, stylish and elegant, can become an adornment, a luxurious covering (up) of the body.

Apparently the female body is too bald an issue, but we must find ways to be naked, to uncover whatever it is that we may be.

Hyperintellectual criticism is very much unlike the new art writing, both polemical and poetic, that art historian and critic Moira Roth saw emerging in the '70s.^[9] The importance of developing such a language, one rooted in an erotics of the intellect, seems to have fallen by the wayside on the tough road to the lost homeland. If we only think —narrowly defined—about the body, our prose will be dispassionate, will close into an academic mold instead of opening into the lushness that grows from mental sensuality and experiential lust.

Knowledge, we believe, is gained through distance from the body. A choice has been made for us: we think with a narrowly defined mind and come up with austere, dis-embodied solutions to problems of living. We (try to) stand outside ourselves, so to merge mind and body consciously, to be erotic about ourselves, is misunderstood as a kind of idolatry, as if women who love the female body in their art and writing will now and forever practice the woman worship that men have promulgated.

Learning and knowing are process, the flow of information—which is emotional, intellectual, and sensuous—throughout a world of political and social structures, of rivers, woods, and deserts, and of human relationships, all of which are alive, which means nonstatic. Women who represent and write (about and from) the body may only be inching away from centuries of outworn myths about women, but measurement is not the point. Movement is.

To participate in the process of living, to be alive, we must act, and we cannot act without our bodies. If we are to take action on our own behalf, to be activists, we need an erotics of the intellect to give ideas body. The wordplay enjoyed by Weinstock in the exhibition review that cites Spero as Other-worldly is erotic to a degree. For example, it is pleasurable to hear and think about Weinstock's question, "Could there be a better way to punish the pundits than with a pun?"^[10] Linguistic play and French theories are seductive, but they often serve as stimulations for a certain kind of autoeroticism, which is pleasure on the part of the thinker and initiated readers. Now, autoeroticism is important, for it affirms the subject's knowledge of herself. An erotics of the intellect

originates in autoeroticism. However, autoeroticism is insular if its practice does not include outreach, action, interaction, intercourse. Autoeroticism becomes dystopian, as Spero calls Weinstock's view.^[11] Autoerotic dystopia is a difficult and ineffective place, a depressing refuge for the homeless, unless the practitioner is moved to speak, write, and act beyond the world of theory.

A better way to punish a pundit than with a pun is to kick her ass, to make her know she has a body and that sensation is real. Disrupting a pundit's linguistic security is good, for language constructs reality, but the body, constructed of blood, bone, hair, flesh, and water, is reality.

Essentialists are accused of being unreal, of being actresses playing man-made roles, posing as goddesses, acting as if they are in touch with nature unadulterated by ideology. Women who represent the female body, however, can be activators, of sexual and spiritual potential. They are activists who know that to speak with the body, for themselves, is to speak politically.

At its best, body politics is an erotic practice. So the issue of the female body in art and criticism is not necessarily one of female essence but, rather, one of epistemology, action, and love. Love is distant in theoretical autoerotics because love is action, aliveness in the soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-the-body. The kiss of love is a mouth away. Theory does not kiss us, and we as daughters, mothers, sisters, and even lovers have hardly learned to kiss each other.

My mother kissed me, with her words and heart, when she told me about her accidents of blood, and she said of women, "We're an immense club." I said, "Yes, but we need to know more about each other, to talk about our bodies."

We need to speak about and with our bodies, to make art and writing that kiss us, to know our own wiseblood.

Duel/Duet

Written and Performed by Joanna Frueh and Christine Tamblyn

"Duel/Duet" has been performed at:

Name Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, November 1989
Women's Caucus for Art Conference, New York, New York, February 1990
Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco, California, December 1990
Yolanda Lopez performed with Christine Tamblyn and myself at Southern Exposure.

[Frueh and Tamblyn, who, respectively, have sometimes been identified in the art world as a believer in body consciousness and lived experience and as a believer in the social construction of identity, stage a mock debate. The podiums at which they stand form a forty-five-degree angle. Tamblyn wears austere black garments, Frueh a red, leopard-print unitard. Using two slide projectors, first one, then the other speaker shows an image of a female archetype or stereotype and reads a text written by the speaker herself. Each image-and-text combination is a response to the previous combination chosen/produced by the other performer.

Tamblyn often speaks wryly and once or twice caresses her torso. Frueh's tone is sincere, and she never touches herself. Whether speaking or listening, each performer often looks at her partner.]

Christine

Image: Goddess images from Lucy Lippard's Overlay, page 40

I've always had problems with the goddess as an icon for woman. She seems uncomfortably close to Mr. God—Mr. God in drag, perhaps. During my Catholic childhood, I endured more than enough of Mr.

God with His prohibitions and punishments. I know she is supposed to be different, loving and nurturing. Nevertheless, she still must signify authority; by nurturing or not, she has power over life and death, and to give birth is also to bestow mortality.

But it isn't just the goddess's associations with maternal authority that trouble me. It's also the atavistic nostalgia that contextualizes her—her role in crystallizing the desire to regress to a prepatriarchal, precapitalistic state of wholeness. Our visions of this era are surely mythical, suffused with ideological presumptions that are more valid as projections of repressed aspects of the present than as representations of past milieus. In any case, the truth value of the pseudo-anthropological narrative of the patriarchal usurpation of an original matriarchal culture is not particularly relevant.

What does matter is that the myth itself has no resonance for me. I want to find out what will happen next, not to get stuck in a repetitive groove of the always already known. It's not that I subscribe to Western culture's delusions about progress. I don't presume that everything is improving or that we should proceed along our current course. But neither would I assert that the solution is to revert to past values, even if this were possible. Innocence is not the highest state of consciousness, and flashbacks always resolve into the narrative frame. Perhaps we can devise a time machine so that those who feel more at home in the past may visit it occasionally. I would like to fashion models that bridge dichotomies the way a time machine can, encompassing both the past and the future rather than mandating a choice between them.

Joanna

Image: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Astarte Syriaca, 1877

You begin with an entrapment. Acknowledging this, I don't mind being caught, for I have no captor. An idea, myth, and archetype captivate me, and deep attraction can be a catalyst for change, in this case, the bridging of perhaps fictional pasts and radical futures.

A former student recently asked me what archetypes engage me. I said, "Certain goddesses," paused, and added, "Love and sex goddesses." Like you, the truth value of the pseudo-anthropological narrative doesn't seem relevant to me, but I find the potency of a she-deity provocative.

I titled my dissertation "The Rossetti Woman." From my childhood, when, seeing a couple of Rossetti pieces in a book my parents had I

drew the women in them, up through my twenties, his images of women fascinated me. The dissertation was a way for me to explore the goddess image intellectually.

I identified with the Rossetti Woman, who, as his work developed, came to have large, sensuous features and luxuriant hair. Astarte Syriaca: goddess of love and sex, she is a monster here, disproportionate and anything but innocent. I'd always felt that she'd seen it all, been bruised and haunted by love and sex, as had Rossetti. I see her as an erotic icon. I'd like her stance and gaze to be confrontational. She is dreamy, not a dreamer. However, through her I have been an active dreamer, perhaps a monster.

Some find a woman monstrous—shockingly improper or absurd—when she clearly loves her intellect and her sexuality. They may call her self-indulgent and self-absorbed, as though narcissism were negative by definition. Ironically, the projection of self-love generates hate. But we all must dare to be monstrous, to be deviants from the "naturalness" of self-hate and self-erasure.

Astarte's fingers at breast and crotch touch me—the sexual gesture is for me, as well as for male eyes. She is a power, of flesh and thoughtfulness and, paradoxically but necessarily, vulnerability. (Maybe she does dream.) She is a romantic lie, what Rossetti in his sonnet "Astarte Syriaca" mystifies as "betwixt the sun and moon a mystery."^[1]

Yet in that position she is the unknown, and I can read the unknown as potentiality. I like the idea of female authority, not to the exclusion of male and not as some kind of universal absolute, but as an unknown quantity that can change the construction of erotic postures, both mental and physical.

For all the mothers daughters song and fathers say
Jesus Christ and God
We call the deities
In hours of unspeakable grace
No one asks for a woman
Venus with her many names
Yours and mine included.

Christine

Image: Mother's Day Card

The Rossetti woman enthralls me, too, but I am suspicious of her. It would be easy to let her beguile me into a reverie of midnight raptures,

but the problem for me is that this is still his image of her. What is she thinking? We can only conjecture, since she is mute, her rosebud lips pursed provocatively. You observe that her fingers at her breast and crotch are there for you as well as for him. But who marked those erogenous zones on her body?

Feminist semiotician Kaja Silverman has characterized the female body as already written by patriarchal discursive formations: "The female body is charted, zoned and made to bear meaning, a meaning which proceeds entirely from external relationships, but which is always subsequently apprehended both by the female subject and her 'commentators' as an internal condition of essence."^[2]

I fear that his romantic inscriptions construct a different identity for her than she suspects. They lead to her servitude as his slave girl, enchained not by wreaths of flowers but by lines of laundry hung out to dry. When I went to the store to select a Mother's Day card for my mother, I found this image. Its blatantly misogynistic humor was reinforced by the message inside, which reads, "You discover the washer is already full! Happy Mother's Day, anyway!" And this card was not atypical; many of the "funny" cards focused on guilty jokes about mothers' unceasing domestic labors.

So the image of the goddess is an entrapment: the male persuades us to see ourselves in her image and likeness, and soon we are barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, bearing his children and mopping his floors. As you say, the Rossetti woman is a romantic lie, a sweet nothing. But I don't believe that the truth masked by the lie is an unknown potentiality. Rather, it is revealed in this picture of the endlessly beleaguered housewife.

Joanna

Image: Models in Azzedine Alaïa dresses,1987

All images are silent. It is the viewer who gives them voice, creating a romance, moral tale, case history, or horror story.

A woman who wears an Azzedine Alaïa dress can tell different stories. One could be a prelude to beleaguered housewife: sex goddess, clothed in masculine thought, wins a man and is lost, as goddess of the hearth. Maybe the Alaïa women are dressed in the beginning picture of that story. But Alaïa's and Jean-Paul Gaultier's fashions can be proclamations of pleasure that redefine the erotic woman.

Of course the female body has been marked by a patriarchal hand and eye. I appreciate feminist theorists' perceptive and sometimes brilliant analyses of Woman as fetishized image, beautiful object meant for the touch through the gaze, and women, then, intellectually and emotionally grasped as visibly different and sexuality defined as sexual difference established by the fathers.

This has become dominant feminist thinking in academia and the art press, and there it presents dangers. Feminist analyses and interpretations are meant to change our readings of ideologies and realities and thus to empower women in particular. However, such discussions have become overpowering: the eroticized and sexualized woman is object-victim of the male gaze. Consequently, for a woman to think or act otherwise—to use her body in her art in a "seductive" manner, to get herself up in an arousing way—may cause some feminists to perceive her as reactionary.

Reaction need not be backward-looking or dependent. To react is to be alive. Women need to react, in thought and action, to feminist theories, to use theoretical investigations in order to play—in collaboration or contradiction—with dominant masculinist and feminist ideologies.

Using men's fantasies for ourselves can be useful. At the same time, we risk being used. But for the diseases of socially constructed identity a variety of healing treatments are possible. Surgery—cutting out the parts that seem traumatized, limiting the images, fashions, and fantasies that women can entertain—is unhealthy. Such a measure keeps sexuality in crisis, for removing the bad, the patriarchal markings, maintains a schism between the sexes and between gendered looks and gazes.

Edward Abbey, hardly a feminist, but a fascinating thinker about nature and "the wild," equated appearance with reality, for, according to him, a forty-year-old person must assume responsibility for her face. Individual experience marks human beings. We choose our destinies to some extent, inscribe ourselves. Feminism is about inscribing, de-scribing, and re-scribing the self, choices based on new information.

Feminism tells us that anatomy need not be destiny. Therefore breasts, crotch, hips, and ass do not have to lead women into fucking, motherhood, and domestic labor—heterosexuality as a mess. (As an aside, no one, man or woman, with whom I've lived, except my parents, has been as assiduous about housekeeping as I.) At any rate, a woman in a formfitting dress asserts her anatomy, and not necessarily

in the anatomy/destiny equation. That equation assumes female passivity. A woman who chooses, with informed self-consciousness, to call attention to her erogenous zones, to her whole body as erogenous, may be asserting her sexuality in ways that confront and counter his image of her.

First, the Alaïa look is at once minimal and maximal, studied. It goes against notions of female sexuality as natural. Second, provocation and submission do not absolutely go hand-in-hand. Third, while society demands that women eroticize themselves, it just as strongly stomps on and stamps out women's sexuality. People may admire a sexually intense woman, part of whose presence derives from a sexy look, but people may also call her whore and narcissist or more subtle terms that originate in fear and jealousy. The public expression of female sexuality remains a threat, especially when a woman who enjoys the tools of fashion knows that as a parodistic stereotype she need not be a cartoon, which I sometimes think Madonna is, but, rather, a saboteur. (Maybe cartoons, humor, are sabotage, too.) She can play, and she can demand her own pleasure.

On that note, if a woman's patriarchally marked erogenous zones give her pleasure, should feminism remove them? Mightn't additions be more fun, and more revolutionary?

Christine

Image: Marionette Lilith from zone 3: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part I, page 413

The question I keep asking is, Who's pulling the strings? The marionette, Lilith, was made by W. A. Dwiggins, an American who designed books and puppets, among other things. Lilith seems to be grieving or hiding her face in shame, but why? As you have remarked, it is the viewer who animates the image, so the viewer as much as the image-maker jerks the doll into action. Yet the dance steps the doll is capable of performing are a function of her articulated limbs, an aspect of the way she is made.

Like you, I maintain that sensual pleasure is of value, even though our puritanical culture continually subsumes it under the empty imperatives of fame and fortune. Like you, I have taken pleasure in exhibiting my body in performance. My first performances in the mid-seventies featured a persona named Flaming Rose, a fading, inept, decadent,

screwball stripper. I was campier than a drag queen, but the ironies were compounded because I was an attractive young woman in my twenties impersonating a blowsy middle-aged one. The masochism in my portrayal dismays me now, but the criticality still seems astute: I was satirizing the mechanisms of seduction by simultaneously employing and sabotaging them in full view of my audience.

I wish I could believe it would be possible merely to turn the tables on men—to assert my sexual desires blatantly and actively, to demand that I receive pleasure along with taking pleasure in bestowing it. But I wonder how much we can shape our destinies by flying in the face of convention. Yesterday I watched A Winter Tan , a film based on Maryse Holder's letters from Mexico. An American woman in her fifties, Maryse proclaimed that she was going on vacation from feminism as she embarked on a neocolonial bohemian adventure. Like Malcolm Lowry, Arthur Craven, Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, and countless others, she exploited the exoticized otherness of a different country as a preserve for licentiousness and transgression. She danced, drank, took drugs, and fucked the natives indiscriminately, writing about it all the while to secure her redemption via assumption into the pantheon of poètes maudits .

But try as she might, she couldn't emulate the tawdry glamor of the macho literary lush. Rather, she looked pathetic, lonely, desperate, vulnerable, and ungracefully aged. Maybe it was just a bad movie, but above all she was implausible. Women still aren't free to live as she intended to live, even in countries where their economic hegemony apes the advantages of patriarchal privilege. And in the end the tenuousness of her position was confirmed when she was murdered, presumably another victim of sexual violence.

Who pulls the strings? It is to the advantage of the manipulators to remain invisible, like the black-robed puppeteer disappearing into the shadows. As I said before, I am wary of my own masochism; I do not wish to opt for a fatalistic viewpoint that preempts the potential for change. I realize that the images you have chosen thus far were predominantly positive, whereas mine have been negative. However, I don't believe that the strings cease to be operated when they are not noticed. For our next round, I'd like to suggest an experiment in role reversal. Can you select an image to react against this time? I promise to select one I can affirm.

Joanna

Image: Unknown artist , Martyrdom of St. Barbara, 1447

Here we have the typical female Christian martyr. She is a figure in legend, not history. She is a virgin. She refuses to recant her beliefs and often rejects a pagan suitor because she is devoted to her heavenly bride-groom. The suitor's father or the virgin's own father turns her over to the Roman authorities, who torture and execute her. The fathers, familial and patriarchal, pull the strings.

In Barbara's story, her father, at her own request, slashes off her head. Then lightning strikes him.

The strings in this picture are the ropes that bind Barbara, so that a man can slice her breast off. This was one of the common tortures inflicted upon virgins who would not renounce their beliefs.

I think about patriarchy's creation of female martyrs, bottoms in the many sadomasochistic rituals of culture, from wife-beating and rape to Holder's flagrant, lush yet destructive sexuality, to the self-undermining giggles that signal some women's fear of their own seriousness and agency. I think of Western medicine's mastectomies and of electrodes to the genitals of political prisoners, of agonizing trash—snuff movies—and cult classics—Blue Velvet —of women made submissive, ripened for murder. I wonder about the relationship between forced and chosen mutilation. I re-read a poem by Karen Finley:

And when the last man said his violence—
I knew I couldn't do anything to them so I'd do something to me—
I went and took a knife and cut out my hole
But it just became a bigger hole—^[3]

The cutting is resistance and desperation, but must women violate ourselves for our beliefs, in order to preserve virginity in its ancient meaning of independence?

(St. Lucy gouged out her eyes, sent them to her suitor.)

How can we keep soul and body intact?

Physical mutilation as image or metaphor is powerful, for it rings with integrity: the subject does not disavow her beliefs. But the martyr is to some degree a failure. She may become a hero in death, and thus an inspiration, but I would like leaders rather than martyrs, women who, through living in conviction and conflict, are whole enough to help others get through the big and little tragedies of living with ever less self-violation.

Otherwise, women are bound, like Barbara as S/M bottom.

Sadomasochists believe that S/M is consensual and that the bottom can say No.

Pain and pleasure vary for any individual depending on psychic state and external conditions. Sometimes when my lover and I are fucking with me on my stomach and him on top, I love my hair yanked back then held taut. Sometimes I like him biting my shoulder hard. I read that pronged, intense pain can cause spiritual ecstasy through transcendence of the body. But, again, I wonder about keeping soul and body intact.

I don't want to legislate the morality of sexual pleasures, demand recanting. But I do not see S/M, any more than Barbara's submission to torture, as simply role-playing. Psychological forces and a history of women being forced to submit to tortures great and small, to bondage of mind and body, make the superficial gamesmanship of role-playing impossible. S/M enforces the lesson: women say Yes even when they mean No.

Women in bondage is a stereotype. S/M images of black women position them as slaves, and those of Asian women help a would-be master believe in their pliancy and obedience. The martyr and the masochist are compliant and defiant, good girls and bad. They act on their beliefs, which go against patriarchal authority—don't be a Christian, don't be sexual—yet end up in bondage anyway.

Maryse's story is similar. A woman who loves sex ends up dead because of it. In her book Give Sorrow Words , Maryse's voice is one of the most compellingly smart, sensual, graphic, sad, and romantic I've come across.^[4] In the book she is crazed, but her frenzy differs from that onscreen because her words move through a reader like a wild and sexy, dirty, luscious fuck. In the film she seems ungracefully aging, not because of her miniskirts and bikinis in tandem with a worn, lined face, but because she lacks grace of presence. In the letters, too, I sense this, that she felt no grace within herself. The actress looks older than Maryse was—thirty-six—when she was killed by her own desire.

Sex slaves become martyrs of love
Our Maryse
Barbara Martyr
  For the love of Christ
  She gave a breast
  donation to the holy order
Barbara means barbarian

Not Amazon
  warring with one bosom
Not Star Bright
  stripping down to sex
  Appealing night after night
Barbara the Barbarian
Just another sideshow
Christ on dead wood still the main attraction
Barbara the Barbarian
Stranger than the fictions of flagellant salvation
Born of barbed wire brains
Bluer than velvet were her eyes
Redder than roseblood
As she prayed
  I wish I may I wish I might
Deader than a doornail
Barbara Ann Barbarian
  Have this wish come true tonight
Holier than thou
You got me rockin' and reelin'
Rockin' with the feelin'
Barbara Ann Barb Barb Barbarian
  May wild fire   Father
  Lightning strike
  Your barbed wire brain^[5]

Christine

Image: Pornographic photograph from Caught Looking, page 13

My sense of complementarity suggested that I ought to find an image of a man giving pleasure to a woman to respond to your image of men torturing a woman. I did promise to provide a positive image this time. I decided that the best place to look for such an image would be in Caught Looking, a book of pornographic photographs recontextualized for women by the F.A.C.T. Collective. The F.A.C.T. Collective is a feminist group that was formed to combat censorship, particularly the censorship mandated by other feminist factions. Caught Looking is a book of commercial photographic pictures selected by the collective from all periods of photographic history. Most of them were not shot

by women, since women have never participated in the production of pornography (except as models) until very recently.

In the introduction to Caught Looking the authors articulate their intentions:

In putting out this booklet, we are expressing our belief that the feminist movement must not be drawn, in the name of protecting women, into the practice of censoring 'deviant' sexual representation or expression. . . . Part of becoming sexual subjects involves distinguishing between images of bizarre, forbidden, or even degrading actions, which we may conjure up to excite ourselves sexually from reading, pictures, or memory, and non-fantasized or coerced situations (such as actual rape) over which we have no control.^[6]

It seemed appropriate to select a photograph of a man performing cunnilingus on a woman, since this is an activity from which the woman would derive direct clitoral stimulation (no vaginal orgasms here), whereas the man would not be receiving any genital pleasure except through the indirect mode of his own fantasies. I was immediately drawn to this photograph because of the bemused look on the woman's face. What it took me awhile to notice was that the man's index finger was inserted into the woman's anus. At first I was unwilling to acknowledge my fascination with this tabooed erogenous zone. But then I decided that it signified solidarity with male homosexual practices, as well as being a celebration of sexuality divorced from the patriarchal imperatives of procreation and perpetuation of the Name of the Father. It also seemed appropriate that it was his finger, rather than his penis, in her anus, because—as I noted in regard to the oral/genital contact—he was concentrating on her pleasure rather than his own.

The problem I have with positive images is that they tend to be projective; they construct the ideal as an Other, logically positing our own deficiency in comparison. They work in the same way that advertising does, presenting its avatars of wholeness who fill us with anxiety about our own lack, an anxiety that must be assuaged by purchasing a compensatory fetish object. It interests me that you chose a picture that signifies castration anxiety when I requested a negative image. Pardon me if my psychoanalytical interpretation seems too heavy-handed, but the image of a bloody breast being sliced off is so close to castration that any other explanation seems untenable. Not that I would discount my own motive

in counteracting the anxiety your picture generates in me by symbolically plugging not one but two holes with a tongue and a finger.

I don't think I can summon the requisite lyricism to write a poem (although I did mentally review the words of the "Hickory Dickory Dock, the mouse ran up the clock" nursery rhyme). I also feel compelled to reply to your description of the "self-undermining giggles that signal some women's fear of their own seriousness and agency." My interpretation of the significance of humor is quite different. Hélène Cixous has referred to "the revolutionary power of women's laughter."^[7] Comedy may be a successful subversive strategy for those who are still cast in the role of the oppressed and hence weak. I am reminded of Mary Russo's excellent article about the "female grotesque," in which she applied to the female body Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas about carnivals as festivals of temporary role reversal.^[8] In your criticism of Karen Finley for internalizing male violence against women, I think you are missing the efficacy of her humor. Her satirical disruptions allow us to look outside the consensual framework of culture, momentarily obstructing business as usual. Of course, these glimpses of freedom may partially defuse tension, thereby helping to reconcile us to our lot. But when comics become daring enough in their violation of taboos, they are inevitably censored for taking us far enough outside social reality for us to be able to strategize about how we might stay there longer.

Joanna

Image: Women bodybuilders, FLEX (March 1989): 62–63

"Huge and Hard." That's the title of the featured training story in the March 1989 FLEX , a bodybuilding magazine that contains these pictures of women who are top heavyweight competitors in the 1988 Women's World Amateur Championships. Competitive bodybuilder Gary Strydom wrote the article, which is about his own training. Yet huge and hard are words that can describe female as well as male bodybuilders, for in the short history of women's bodybuilding, since the late 1970s, the winners have exhibited ever greater mass and leanness.

I can think of the woman bodybuilder as displaying disruptive excess: she is grotesquely gorgeous. As FLEX writer Laura Dayton says, "It was like watching the Biblical waters part when Hannie Van Aken, with her explosion of blond hair and that mind-boggling upper body encased in a bright red mini-top, sauntered through the [hotel] crowd seemingly

oblivious to the shockwave she left in her wake."^[9] Holland's Van Aken placed second.

The hyperbolic prose describes the effect of a hyperbolic body, which is a joke. The heavyweight especially twists the terms of femininity, power, and strength, and the so-called sculptor of such a body can laugh at the onlooker's shock. The viewer may laugh too, believing that Van Aken and her like are ridiculous. But such a laugh comes from discomfort, for the heavyweights are terrors, phallic women who have displaced the hyperbolically masculine desire to be hard.

Strydom writes, "As for my tendency to get big and stay hard, it's just a genetic thing." ("Genetics" is a cliché in the mythos of bodybuilding.) More Strydom: "You constantly have to think in terms of maintaining both size and hardness." Dayton describes Van Aken as "harder" than her Argentine competitor, who placed fourth.^[10]

The heavyweights may be jokers in the deck of femininity, but they may not be wild cards at all, for in their exhibition of size and hardness they may be woman as glorious representation of the phallus, woman literally embodying man's fantasy of himself at his most masculine, the ithyphallic woman. Also, the bodybuilder may say she feels animal, suggesting natural wildness, but she cultivates her physique through diet, training in a gym, and steroids. Drug testing took place at the Women's World, but the owner of my favorite gym, in Tucson, says there's no way to win a major competition without drugs.

I think of another "heavyweight" body, one our society calls overweight. I sat in Savannah, oak trees dripping Spanish moss in the mugginess of deep June. A large woman crossed the square, high heels emphasizing her saunter, which was part of the sensuous confidence she projected. A stylish outfit—black skirt to midcalf and a black blouse with long sleeves—bared little of her dark brown skin. What a contrast this picture is to Laura Creavalle, who won first place in the Women's World and represented her native Guyana while maintaining Canadian citizenship. Creavalle said, regarding strategy for her next and more prestigious competition, "I feel I still need more mass in my quads. And maybe a little more abs," which Dayton describes as already "razor-edged."^[11]

I see both Creavalle and the woman in Savannah as intriguing in their departures from Jane Fonda and Cher as feminine standards. Perhaps neither of the first two is healthy: I do not advocate either training or

eating to excess, though they fascinate me. For excess implies a normative ideal, and Creavalle and the large woman disrupt that ideal. Their bodies are too much, examples of the immoderate, like the clitoris.

The clitoris is unnecessary for reproduction but essential to pleasure, necessary to biology defined as life-(bio ) wisdom (logy ). In conventional terms, the female body that is large is biologically unnecessary, but in life-wisdom, largeness is presentness, a bald statement of living in a body and of pleasure, askew perhaps but active, pleasure in the flesh and pleasuring the flesh.

Combinations of psyche and circumstance design the shape of a body as they do the catalysts of a person's laughter. I concede humor in Finley, but that image, cutting out the hole, remains isolated for me in a vivid, horrifying, and humorless way.

My statement to which you responded has to do with particular women I've known, two who smiled almost constantly and one who giggled during serious conversations in which I and others needed to conduct business. Such expressions and behavior I see as the self-erasure of ingratiation or an unconscious and inordinate desire to please.

Laughter, I agree, is powerful and subversive. A while back, I did say that humor is probably sabotage. Laughter is good for oneself and as a tool with enemies. I hope to use laughter in the future when I run into recently made enemies. I don't want to laugh in their faces, but, rather, greet them with honest good cheer, which I see as derailing nastiness and absorbing the enemy. The technique requires emotional fluidity, not the control that comes from anxiety.

I love the uncontrollable and unpredictable elements of laughter, which can be at once lightweight and heavyweight.

Christine

Image: Marcel Duchamp's LHOOQ, 1919

So—phallic women. Is Marcel Duchamp's Mona Lisa with a moustache a phallic woman? Certainly she has hot pants. In a way she is defaced, like the woman the Joker threw acid at in Batman , or like Cindy Sherman's recent disfigured self-portraits. Body art, bodybuilding, plastic surgery, and tattooing are all indexical practices that leave their mark on the body. Marcel Duchamp added a signifier of maleness to the image of a woman, thereby producing a contradictory sign. He also symbolically wrecked a canonical masterpiece of Western art, just as the Joker

did during his destructive rampage in the art museum. The Mona Lisa as the enigmatic, fascinating epitome of womanliness is demystified by Duchamp's sarcastic gesture. She's removed from her high art pedestal by the irreverence of Duchamp's populist graffito. No longer the artist's muse, she becomes a hermaphroditic monster in Angela Carter's sense: "A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster."^[12]

Artistic creativity is narcissistic activity, a separation from the mother that nevertheless maintains formal, symbolic, and libidinal connections to the maternal body. By adding a moustache to the Mona Lisa Duchamp recreates her in his own image and likeness. Mona Lisa fetishized, the fetish object always a substitute for the impossible female phallus. The interdependence of masculine and feminine functions unified in the mythical figure of the androgyne.

The fundamental rhetorical trope of surrealism is Lautréamont's juxtaposition of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table. The umbrella phallic and the sewing machine female/domesticized. The dissecting table the theater of operations. Duchamp's art, like Lautréamont's, utilizes readymade objects and radical juxtapositions.

The Mona Lisa recently made the news. Some art historian discovered that her face was Leonardo da Vinci's own, and, furthermore, that he was a homosexual who was rendering his self-portrait in drag. That Gioconda smile! Duchamp had prefigured this shocking disclosure by restoring the evidence of the model's real sex. Somehow he had known all along. Laura Mulvey writes, in "Film, Feminism, and the Avant-Garde," "Thus the image of woman in patriarchal representation refers primarily to connotations within the male unconscious, to its fears and fantasies."^[13] Mona Lisa's moustache is overdetermined, a phallic substitute on top of a phallic substitute.

But enough of psychoanalytic theory and avant-garde gestures of negation. Like you, I often get fed up with the totalizing rigor of theory. How dare it presume to explain everything! Ever since I repudiated the Catholicism I was indoctrinated into as a child, I have been suspicious of systematic principles and didactic prescriptions. But my refuge against theory is not body knowledge or body language. Rather, it is an appreciation of the quotidian and the aleatory. The complex exigencies of daily life never cease to astonish me. Experience is an inexhaustible gift—more than we can ever perceive or analyze happens to us. Although I would not deny that experience is always ideologically inflected, a sur-

plus residue of randomness or noise remains. Because feminism is itself a theory, its explanatory power sometimes seems oppressive. As Daniel Schreber asserts in Memoirs of My Nervous Illness , perhaps the most pleasant form of liberation is the freedom to think about nothing.^[14]

Joanna

Image: Salvador Dali , The Phenomenon of Ecstasy, 1933 The freedom to think about nothing is the smile of ecstasy, of knowing something without thinking, though maybe it has been thought through countless ways, thousands of years, by mind upon mind.

The freedom to think about nothing stops when I must ask, Is this, theHanging"> phenomenon of ecstasy, a fantasy produced within the male unconscious? Is female ecstasy a joke?

The freedom to think about nothing feels like love, and love is not a joke.

Theory can make love a joke—a romantic trap, a betrayal of woman's desire, a ridiculous impossibility. But love remains recognizable, even when it has been twisted by sniggers, theory, and broken hearts. Love can be cruel, can be deconstructed, but it is central—the amazements of everyday intricacies, rockbottom beneath the unpredictable.

[Joanna projects an image of Christine sitting at her desk. Christine asks questions and Joanna responds. ]

How Can Women Gain Access to the Status of a Fully Empowered Speaking Subject Without Appropriating the Male Authoritarian Voice?

For two days I've felt nauseous and have had diarrhea. Something must come out. Something needs release. My voice is speaking, in shit, unwanted food—too much fat and sugar, I think, not my usual diet last week. I am speaking, in mind-and-soul-inseparable-from-the-body. I don't think this is the male authoritarian voice.

I speak in bits and dribbles, as I'm thinking about many things—mortality and marriage, making money, demoralizing institutions, isolation, friends who are too far away, having a child. Your question is part of my litany of everyday crises. Christine, all I can offer you now are fragments.

But the mind-and-soul-inseparable-from-the-body is whole.

How Can Women Discover Their Own Authenticity Through Representations of Themselves When All Representations are Imbued with Falsity and Simulation?

The mind-and-soul-inseparable-from-the-body has its poetics, its authenticity, and I am listening as best I can. I have no choice if I want to learn from my own sickness, let go of it, and gain new health.

I look at the picture of you, the representation of a writer, I see you here with me, I could be driven crazy by your questions, you are a muse to me.

I think of a picture of me, as the lover, and I would love to come up with answers we could all put in practice as soon as they were spoken. But I am not The Word. And thus I disobey it. Everyone does, to some degree. Yet they fear their disobedience or cannot even acknowledge it.

I must disobey the imperative, implicit in your language, to answer your questions in as intellectual a way as they are asked. For I desire our engagement in ways that argued answers will not satisfy. This desire is success, for you and I together, mind-and-soul-inseparable-from-the-body, are answers.

Our being here, both of us posing as sex and intellect, feminist and skeptic, observer and observed, could be negatively dangerous, keeping energy within the same old two-term circuit. But being both terms breaks the circuit, for if one can be two, then one can be multiple, can take many positions, embody many possibilities.

This does make me want to puke. I fear the possibilities are simply fragments without integrity. I'm afraid that in being many, I am none.

How Can Women Avoid Being Reduced to or Conflated with Their Bodies, Mere Procreative Wombs and Nurturing Breasts, Desiring-Machines to Perpetuate the Name of the Father?

For comfort, with your question and with my love and terror of living in, with, and because of my body, I remember times of acute learning, which are times of integrity. During one, I was rock-climbing, failing after several attempts at a move my partner was coaching me to do. "Squeeze the rock and stand on your left leg. Use your strength," he said. It's hard to explain how terrifying standing up can be, how strange an embrace with rock can feel—a pushing and pulling that moves the climber into deeper intimacy with it—how pleasurable is the success

that comes from balance, power, commitment, and grace, from listening to the mind-and-soul-inseparable-from-the-body.

I squeezed, stood, and reached with the poetics of the mind-and-soul-inseparable-from-the-body. Obeying that beauty is disobedience, for the mind and soul and body separated are subject to The Word, The Naming, the simulations and representations we know too well to know them at all. Mind-and-soul-inseparable-from-the-body is integrity, as is love—balance, power, commitment, and grace—which can hold together the seeming fragments of a body politic.

How Can We As Feminists Fashion a Movement That Does Not Reduplicate the Power Structure and Strictures of Male Hierarchies with Their Emphasis on Correct Behavior and Rigid Adherence to the Party Line?

Love is disobedience in a hate-filled world.

Love is the answer to your questions.

[Christine projects an image of Joanna kissing her lover open-mouthed. Joanna asks questions and Christine responds. ]

What Is a Kiss?

A kiss is the sign of a contract, as in the phrase "sealed with a kiss." A more intimate form than a handshake, it signifies women as property to be exchanged, possessions to be owned. At the culmination of the wedding ceremony, the kiss ratifies the marriage contract, according to which, by the Law of the Father, a woman promises to "love, honor, and obey" her husband, servicing only his sexual needs and bearing only his children.

Am I a Woman?

According to Freud, the hysteric asks, "Am I a woman?" Unable to speak, the hysteric produces symptoms instead. Her body remembers and expresses the pain she has repressed and cannot name. It is through pain, the pain of separation from the mother, that we each come to know ourselves, assuming male or female identities. Never firmly fixed, these identities are hypothetical and therefore shifting and unstable.

Is This the Tongue of Love? What are its Theory and Practice?

The tongue of love may be a euphemism for the phallus as signifier or linguistic marker. Its theory and practice entail division and conquest.

The theory is the division into opposites, with male/female serving as the pattern for the parallel divisions of culture/nature and mind/body. Once the division is made in theory, the conquest occurs in practice, so that one term is privileged over the other: male over female, culture over nature, and mind over body.

How Does One Become a Practiced Lover, Practiced in Love?

We cannot practice love (synthesis) without analysis, because love is not all we need to cross the great divide. As women, we can love ourselves, each other, and men, but we must also learn to give voice to our oppression as part of the struggle against it. Both love and struggle involve negotiation; our lives are comprised of duels and duets. We can affirm our differences, not in the spirit of liberal tolerance or uncommitted relativism, but in acknowledgment of the provisionality of resolution.

Hannah Wilke:
The Assertion of Erotic Will

Parts of this chapter were presented at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, March 1989.

Parts of this chapter appear in Joanna Frueh, Hannah Wilke, ed. Thomas H. Kochheiser (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 51–61; in Joanna Frueh, "Aesthetic and Postmenopausal Pleasures," M/E/A/N/I/N/G 14 (November 1993); and in Joanna Frueh, "The Erotic as Social Security," Art Journal 53 (Spring 1994). Material from M/E/A/N/I/N/G is reprinted by permission of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues, and material from Art Journal is reprinted by permission of the College Art Association.

The divinity Venus occupied Hannah Wilke for twenty-five years. She pictured herself as a contemporary goddess of love, sex, and beauty, and she also presented herself as a worshipper. Wilke's continual remodeling of Venus from a sex object into a healer of social ills and of Wilke's cancer, from which she died on 28 January 1993 at the age of fifty-two, is an assertion of erotic will.

Wilke's Venus Envy (1980) recalls Gustave Courbet's Woman with a Parrot (1863). In both works a female nude with luxuriant tousled hair lies on the floor voluptuously displaying her beautiful body. Courbet's woman exemplifies the phenomenon in Western art of male artists creating The Beauty with whom they become identified, an individualized Venus. Other obvious examples include the women painted by Boucher, Titian, Rossetti, Renoir, and Modigliani. The Beauty has verified male "genius," and art history names men as geniuses of feminine beauty, inventors through the centuries of a variety of types who, in their own time and perhaps later, can be perceived as models of female attractiveness and desirability.

Although women such as Marie-Louise Elizabeth Vigée-Le Brun, Marie Laurencin, Romaine Brooks, Frida Kahlo, and Léonor Fini have represented female beauty, their work in this area has not often been given equal status with even second-rank depictions by men. In this light, a woman's choice to deal directly with female beauty in her art does seem inspired, both as a blunt recognition of the significance of female beauty in Western art and as an indication of willingness to risk proclaiming the pleasures of beauty for the self. That is an erotic choice. The risk entails excoriation, for society still wants a woman to perform its desires and excitements, not her own. Granted, to isolate a woman's pleasures from society's is impossible, but we must be careful not to attack a woman's declaration of self-pleasure as simply an expression of a negatively feminine narcissism. No woman is that easily categorizable.

Wilke deals with Venus as a metaphor for the beautiful woman. Titles of several of her works—Venus Envy , Venus Basin , Venus Cushion , and Venus Pareve among them—indicate concern with ideal beauty, and this involvement extends into Wilke's use of herself as the model woman. The nude works she made in her thirties exhibit Wilke's body to advantage. She is whole-limbed and white-skinned, slender and well-proportioned—her breasts are neither "too" large nor "too" small, and her hips are not "too" wide. Her abundant dark hair echoes the traditional symbolism in which lush hair signifies sexual power and dark hair indicates a femme fatale. Wilke enhances her delicately attractive facial features with makeup but never overdoes it. Unshaved armpit hair emphasizes the sexy reality of her.

Wilke's beauty provides her entry into an ideal whose oppressiveness for women threatens to make her work a continuation of the "tyranny of Venus," which Susan Brownmiller says a woman feels whenever she criticizes her appearance for not conforming to prevailing erotic standards.^[1] However, Wilke as usual twists language, in this case the grammar of Venus, the perfect woman. She parses the "sentence" of the female body into a statement of pleasure as well as pain. While "modeling" her beauty in S.O.S. —Starification Object Series (1974–1975), she "scars" herself with chewing-gum sculptures, suggesting that being beautiful is not all ease, fun, or glamor. Twisting chewed gum in one gesture into a shape that reads as vulva, womb, and tiny wounds, she marks her face, back, chest, breasts, and fingernails with the gum-shapes before she assumes high-fashion poses. Her "scarification" is symboli-

cally related to African women's admired keloided designs on their bodies. The Africans endure hundreds of cuts without anesthesia, and Wilke alludes to the suffering that Western women undergo in rituals of beautification.

From Una Stannard in 1971 to Naomi Wolf in 1991, feminists have analyzed the pain women "choose" in order to meet beauty standards.^[2] The beautiful woman suffers, for to be a star as a woman is to bear "starification," being observed by others as a process of criticism and misunderstanding. To be "starified" is, in some measure, to be ill-starred, and the "ornaments" decorating Wilke in S.O.S. are not only scars but also stigmata. They make the model woman into a martyr.

Western culture fearfully reveres Venus in the bodies of women, and she must be crucified. Freudian theory kills the mother, not the father, despite the privileged status of the oedipal stage; artist Carolee Schneemann says Dionysus stole ecstasy from Aphrodite; and Wilke believes that Venus envy, not penis envy, has caused misery between women and men. If Venus were a contemporary divine ideal for women, rather than a clichéd sex goddess, then women would not have to struggle to invent the meaning and practice of erotic-for-women.^[3]

Erotic-for-women—for women meaning that women are producers and consumers—is erotic for oneself, autoerotic autonomy whose power is both self-pleasuring and relational. Autoeroticism is apparent in self-exhibition and in women's gaze at other women unclothed. Erotic-for-women loves the female body without discriminating against its old(er) manifestations. Self-exhibition may demonstrate the positive narcissism—self-love—that masculinist eros has all but erased, and self-exhibition is a commanding statement, "Here I am. See my body," an attitude apparent throughout Wilke's work.

The beautiful resemble other groups that are feared, envied, and hated for their marks of difference. As Wilke says, "Starification-scarification/Jew, black, Christian, Moslem. . . . Labeling people instead of listening to them. . . . Judging according to primitive prejudices. 'Marks-ism' and art. Fascistic feelings, internal wounds, made from external situations."^[4]

Wilke remembers that as a girl she "was made to feel like shit for looking at myself in the mirror" and that as a young woman she felt she "was observed, objectified by beauty." Her looks made her uncomfortable, and she believes she is "the victim of my own beauty," for "beauty

does make people mistrust you." A woman is "unfeminine," wrong, when she is not beautiful, yet if she is beautiful, she is still wrong. Wilke employs the peculiar inappropriateness of beauty in order to confront its wrongness. By being "improper," publicly displaying her beauty, she has used her art "to create a body-consciousness for myself," a positive assertion of her beauty, which is erotic-for-women.

"Why not be an object?" she asks, one who is aware of her I-ness, who is an "I Object."^[5] Wilke's I Object (1977–78) critiques Marcel Duchamp's Etant donnés , one of his two most mythicized works. I Object is a fake book jacket, and its subtitle is Memoirs of a Sugargiver . On the front and back Wilke lies nude, legs apart, like the naked girl lying corpselike on twigs in Etant donnés . The photographs are what Wilke calls "performalist self-portraits," with artist Richard Hamilton, taken on coastal rocks at Cadaques, Spain, Duchamp's home in Europe during his later years. Two art historians see Duchamp's girl as "locked into a world of her own, like Sleeping Beauty."^[6] "I object," as a declaration, protests the girl's inertness. Wilke seems to respond to the girl's deadness when she says, "I find Etant donnés repulsive, which is perhaps its message. She has a distorted vagina. The voyeuristic vulgarity justifies impotence."^[7]

Etant donnés is a voyeur's dream: viewers can see the naked body only one at a time through a peephole, they look directly at the girl's genitals, and she is eerily passive. Wilke activates her image, reproducing it upside-down on the front cover. On the back cover, the image is right side up. She suggests a turning around of meaning that is a revolt against Duchamp's misshapen, desexed woman. Wilke and Duchamp both love puns and the erotic, and "I object" as a double noun—"eye object" as well as the personal pronoun—acknowledges Wilke's participation as sex object, focus of the voyeuristic gaze, and gives her piece a more explicitly erotic significance than Etant donnés . For "I object" is a statement of presence and self-knowledge, and of pride in the delight of receiving a sexually scrutinizing and admiring look and of being able to give pleasure. The subtitle Memoirs of a Sugargiver reinforces this interpretation, for Wilke sees herself as a "sugargiver instead of a salt cellar." She offers the sweets of eroticism and beauty. ("Salt cellar" is the anagrammatic play on Marcel Duchamp's name that is the subtitle of Michel Sanouillet's and Elmer Peterson's The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp: Salt Seller = Marchand du Sel. )

Wilke does not sell out or submit to Duchamp's genius for cool, allusive eroticism. He says that eroticism in his art has been "always disguised, more or less." Not so with Wilke, and, ironically, Duchamp's understanding of the purpose of eroticism in art better describes Wilke's work than it does his. He says that eroticism is "really a way to bring out in the daylight things that are constantly hidden. . . . To be able to reveal them, and to place them at everyone's disposal—I think this is important because it's the basis of everything, and no one talks about it."^[8]

The I Object is the object of her own gaze; she knows the body through eyeing as well as aying it, assenting to its beauty. The I Object is her own voyeur and seer, who comes to realize that to seduce is to lead astray, to lure herself and others away from their habitual negations of the erotic. Wilke calls the gaze "a sparkle." The gaze is sparkling eyes, the spark of desire, an "assertion of life," she says, then continues: "To be or not to be. To look or not to look."^[9] Erotic looking and sparking are not only sexual desire but also love, life force and instinct, and lust for living.

Feminism has looked at female beauty, but insufficiently. Although the popular success of Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (1991) demonstrates the magnitude of women's preoccupation and problems with beauty, beauty as an issue has embarrassed feminists and been low on the feminist agenda. In 1983, almost twenty years after the beginning of the second wave and ten years after Wilke created S.O.S. , scholars Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr admitted that they had talked about beauty "often enough. . . ,but informally and personally. We hadn't thought of beauty as a problem or a Problem—not a feminist issue, not at all something you brought up as a serious thought in public." Why? Because Lakoff and Scherr and their serious, feminist, intellectual friends had told themselves that thinking about beauty was vain, self-indulgent and self-absorbed. Lakoff and Scherr discovered, however, that beauty might be "the last great taboo, the anguish that separates women from themselves, men, and each other."^[10] Susan Brownmiller earlier came to a similar conclusion in Femininity , naming "the struggle to approach the feminine ideal" as "the chief competitive arena . . . in which the American woman is wholeheartedly encouraged to contend."^[11] Historian Lois Banner offers a different perspective on the situation in American Beauty . "The

pursuit of beauty," she says, "has more than any other factor bound together women of different classes, regions, and ethnic groups and constituted a key element in women's separate experience of life."^[12] Wilke points to this common cause in S.O.S. by presenting photos of herself in playful yet bleakly comic poses and costumes denoting social positions and modes of glamor: a maid's apron, hair curlers, cowboy hat, sunglasses, Arab headdress, Indian caste mark, and, finally, the gum sculptures that resemble African cicatrization wounds.

Because the demand for beauty divides women and yet binds them to each other, Wilke's focus on beauty is a significant public discourse that sees everyday matters as the important concerns they are. When she says that to many people "the traditionally beautiful woman is the stereotype. . . . But nobody says there is a prejudice against beautiful people," she is stating her situation, her own separateness, which is as real for the beautiful woman as for the plain woman.^[13]

Wilke's seemingly privileged position has sometimes caused misunderstanding of her art. In 1976 Lucy Lippard wrote that Wilke's "confusion of her roles as beautiful woman and artist, as flirt and feminist, has resulted at times in politically ambiguous manifestations that have exposed her to criticism on a personal as well as on an artistic level."^[14] In a misogynist society the beautiful woman enjoys a kind of admiration and respect not given to many women, and such good fortune turns other women against the beautiful woman, snares them in "Venus envy," a phrase first used by Wilke in a 1980 series of Polaroid photographs.

Wilke destabilizes Venus envy, the devaluation of beauty and the erotic practiced by both women and men, by reworking myths and stereotypes about the beautiful woman. People often link beauty and femininity and regard the latter as a set of limitations. Femininity requires artifice, self-control, and perfection in bodily and gestural details, and culture constructs feminine women as needy. The beauty, then, lacks spirit and independence.

Hannah Wilke Can (1974–78) scrambles the terms of femininity. Each can, slotted to accept coins and decorated with three images of a Christlike Wilke in a loincloth, is a complex handling of the issue of neediness. The cans are for giving to a charity. They were exhibited at a 1978 performance at the Susan Caldwell Gallery in New York called Hannah Wilke Can: A Living Sculpture Needs to Make a Living . The Christ-Venus image on the can is one of twenty photographs of her 1974 performance

Hannah Wilke Super-T-Art . Venus is a Western superstar and supertart, a sugargiver par excellence . Christ is an ultimate "pinup"—pinned to a cross with nails—as is Venus, whom I referred to above as a crucifixion victim. Christ was a poor man, needy, yet a bestower of charity, caritas , Christian love. Wilke the sugargiver is also a giver of charity, even though she requests money for her Venus-Christ. With self-conscious absurdity she asks for professional support as a woman/artist. The slot/slit is a symbolic cunt, and Wilke-Venus is a sacred whore, for caritas actually means grace, specifically the grace of the

Triple Goddess, embodied in the boon-bestowing Three Graces who dispensed caritas (Latin) or charis (Greek) and were called the Charities. . . .

Romans sometimes called grace venia , the divine correlative of Venus. . . . Grace meant the same as Sanskrit karuna , dispensed by the heavenly nymphs and their earthly copies, the sacred harlots of Hindu temples. . . . Their "grace" was a combination of beauty, kindness, mother-love, tenderness, sensual delight, compassion, and care. . . .

Christians took the pagan concept of charis and struggled to divest it of sexual meanings. . . . The cognate word charisma meant Mothergiven grace.^[15]

In Hannah Wilke Can the beautiful woman, the charismatic, speaks of the need for love and couples it with the self-assertions "I can support myself" and "I can support Venus, love, and beauty."

Wilke counters the "femininity" of control and perfection because she does not use beauty as a trick to cover up emotion. The beauty's face in art and the media is often bland in order to divest her of character or feeling, so that viewers can project their own desire onto the woman. Many of the So Help Me Hannah photographs (1978–81), in which Wilke, dressed only in high heels and brandishing a gun, poses in a gritty environment, show her face in strain, as a sign of alertness or fatigue, pain or expectancy. The videotape Gestures (1974) most extremely combats the stereotypical beauty's necessary inexpressiveness. Here Wilke manipulates her face with her hands, using her skin as sculptural material. She pinches, pulls, slaps, smooths, and caresses her face, shaping it into grotesque and ridiculous gestures that externalize and exorcise inner crisis.So Help Me Hannah Series: Portrait of the Artist with Her Mother Selma Butter (1978–81) is a blunt and poignant handling of women's

"perfection" and "imperfection." Wilke appears in the diptych's left segment with her breasts and chest displaying found objects that resemble "raygun" shapes she had collected as gifts for her lover, Claes Oldenburg, in the early 1970s. She scrutinizes the viewer wearing an expression that suggests that pain and sadness underlie her flawless complexion. On the right Wilke's mother has turned her face from the camera, and her body, exposed from shoulders to waist, shows not only an old woman's fragility but also the ravages of disease. Selma Butter has had a mastectomy, and the scars of her cancer surgery cover the area where her breast once was.

Wilke's "guns" and her youthfulness and beauty in the photograph allude to cover-girl shots, a phrase that reads as a pun: the beautiful, young, model woman "shot" by a camera, murdered into a still, an ideal picture of femininity, the cover girl who covers up her imperfections with emotional and actual makeup. Wilke's indication of trouble in the paradise of beauty—the guns as emotional scars of lost love—becomes real scarification in the portrait of her mother. Wilke uncovers truth—that life is also loss, that beauty changes, that age and illness must not be hidden. We see a deteriorated body that the photographer, Wilke, clearly loves, for it is very much alive with the presence of Selma Butter. Here perhaps is the necessary correlate of Wilke's erotic joy—the reality of death.

Wilke faced both of these in 1987 when she was diagnosed with cancer-lymphomas in her neck, shoulders, and abdomen—and from then till her death, in the art she made during her illness. The Intra-Venus Series (1992–93) is an astounding assertion of erotic will, which proves that erotic-for-women is courageous and radical. Intra-Venus is a rite of passage for illness and aging.

Germaine Greer says in The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause that society provides no rite of passage for menopausal women, and she writes, too, about the pleasures of becoming a matron, which include tending to spiritual well-being and to one's garden and becoming invisible.^[16] Many women say that at around fifty they did begin to feel invisible, but that, contrary to Greer's assessment, the experience is frustrating, demeaning, and shocking. (Greer advises that once a woman gets used to invisibility and understands its value, which is the pleasure of being left alone, she will be satisfied.) I read and hear about Croning rituals, in which women name and celebrate their entry into elderhood. Croning makes old(er) women visible—respected and power-

ful—to themselves, but croning is not every old(er) woman's answer to the changes that aging brings her. Croning seems like a New Age escape to some women, a romantically spiritual exercise.

Intra-Venus records Wilke's rite of passage and provides a terrifying enlightenment for the initiate-viewer. Wilke continued her autoerotic self-portrait focus in an attempt to "treat" herself with love during what she called her "beauty to beast" transformation.^[17] In an erotophobic society Wilke, along with such other artists as Carolee Schneemann and Joan Semmel, originated a feminist visual erotics, and she continued into her early fifties to liberate women from the male gaze as theoretical orthodoxy and as actual hatred and misunderstanding of women's sensual and visual pleasures. These, Wilke understood, might differ from male-dominant erotic dogma if women explored and released them.

Numerous feminist writings mothered by Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," first published in 1975, have denied women the authenticity of their own visual and bodily experiences and have imprisoned women in the accepted reductiveness of the male gaze.^[18] But the female gaze, in its genuineness and legitimacy and its relation to women's erotic pleasure, is a radical agent of change. The erotic provides the means for reinventing oneself, which Wilke does in INTRA-VENUS . She also reinvents the female nude more aggressively and poignantly than before, and her reinvention damns the patriarchal eye that fears and despises bodies of the diseased and of old(er) women.

Old(er) women suffer differently from old(er) men because female aging remains in American society what Susan Sontag called it in 1972, "a process of becoming obscene. . . . That old women are repulsive is one of the most profound esthetic and erotic feelings in our culture."^[19] These "erotic feelings" are really thanatic, a kind of femicide or broadly sexual violence that, in regard to visual representation, absents old(er) women from the erotic arena and kills people's ability to imagine, let alone physically image, old(er) women with love. Although menopause is becoming a popular subject—Gail Sheehy's The Silent Passage: Menopause (1992) was a bestseller, and I've heard ads on rock radio in my gym about menopause therapy—fitness authoritarianism, cosmetic surgery, and hormone usage to "correct" dryness of skin and vagina loom as female imperatives, and menopause, which for Western women occurs at the median age of fifty, remains a powerful marker of aging.

While the onset of menstruation is an erotic passage, and American culture deems women erotically appealing for the next thirty-five to forty years of their lives, the process of menopause may initiate a woman into invisibility and extreme subhumanity. Menopause would become an erotic passage if people used their capacity to eroticize everything—and I see this as a gift, not a gratuitous banality—in order to overcome their fear of flesh that moves. To give eros is to give social security, for the erotic is necessary to psychic and spiritual survival.

Wilke provides erotic security in INTRA-VENUS by confronting and embracing flesh that has moved in an aging illness. A reclining nude in the series presents Wilke as erotic agent and object. She is a damaged Venus as in S.O.S., this time damaged by cancer and its therapies. Intravenous tubes pierce her, and bandages cover the sites, above her buttocks, of a failed bone-marrow transplant. Her stomach is loose, and she is no longer the feminine ideal. "My body has gotten old," she said a little less than a month before the bone-marrow transplant, "up to 188 pounds, prednisone-swelled, striations, dark lines, marks from bone-marrow harvesting." While an art historian could cite Renaissance martyr paintings as sources, she could also understand Wilke's vulnerable Venus, twenty years ago as well as recently, as a warrior displaying wounds and as the dark goddess, Hecate at the crossroads of life and death. Wilke has called her work "curative" and "medicinal," and she has said that "focusing on the self gives me the fighting spirit that I need" and that "my art is about loving myself."^[20] The INTRA-VENUS nude shows Wilke within—intra—the veins of Venus, a lust for living in the artist's blood.

Wilke maintained that lust in a hospital, an institution that incarcerates and disciplines bodies. Informed consent is not really informed, for patients do not know or understand all the procedures they will undergo when they sign themselves into a hospital. They give their consent in a stressed if not desperate situation, which is the hope that the institution can return them to health. Hospitals turn patients into the powerless in a space and time that are not erotic, for they cut off the patient from the pleasure of relationships, intimacy, and work. Wilke eroticized her circumstances and shot INTRA-VENUS in the hospital, so she became an activist rather than a victim.^[21]

In the INTRA-VENUS reclining nude Wilke resuscitates the boneless look developed by Giorgione and Titian, so she makes herself, as usual,

into a classical nude. But she is not female body as erotic trophy. This is because she—characteristically—proves that the body's boundaries are liminal and insecure—in INTRA-VENUS, through vivid and explicit pathos—and because, more than ever, she affirms, I am who I am. Bodily insecurity paradoxically becomes erotic social security, as does the ruin of the classical nude and of conventional femininity.

The erotic is not necessarily pretty. In INTRA-VENUS scars, bandages, baldness and unnaturally thin hair, and intravenous tubes signify pain. Wilke screams and stares. She crosses her arms over her stomach in self-protection, which feels sacred, a gesture of blessing, and she covers her head with a blue hospital blanket and closes her eyes in agonized and prayerful grace. As in Hannah Wilke Super-T-Art , where she poses as Mary and Christ, Wilke represents divine being in human being. Hail, Hannah, full of grace.

The erotic is beautiful rather than pretty. Femininity as a set of prettinesses, which are a set of limitations, reduces beauty to a weakness. Lakoff and Scherr say that society to some degree sees beautiful women's power as the power of the weak, because a beautiful woman's potency depends on others' perception of her appearance. She is captive to her beauty. A puritanical and simplistic feminism also sees women's beauty as a weakness. By concentrating on attacking the fashion,

cosmetics, and plastic-surgery industries as exploitative and misogynist rather than developing transformative expansions of beauty, ascetic feminism keeps beauty's reductive definition: the beautiful woman is young—at the least, youthful—thin, and managed by "beauty" products and "beauty" services. It is that definition and not beauty itself that has oppressed women. Beauty is transformable because it is erotic, and the erotic refuses to be pinned down, for it is not a specimen. In human beings the erotic can be used to radicalize the human condition and to give pleasure that enriches and enlivens the world, often in unexpected ways.

One myth about feminine beauty is that it is dangerous. A beautiful woman is stunning, striking, a knockout, and a dangerous person is powerful. That power can be radically beneficial. Throughout her career Wilke performed the indispensable power of beauty and the soundness of danger. Beauty attracts, sometimes to such a degree that the viewer feels out of control, overcome by fear or sexual desire, by wonder and sheer enjoyment, or by a magic that disturbs her peace of mind. Beauty is departure from the ordinary, provoking and luring the viewer into uncommon thoughts and feelings. Wilke seduces her audience into terror and pain, the inescapability of death, the suffering behind the mask of lovely flesh, the "exotic" grace of change. To grow old gracefully is to go into erotic decline, to be the passive beauty who is losing her looks, while to be full of grace is to be at once dangerous and comforting.

Beauty can be dangerous to the status quo, especially when women deal with it, like Wilke, in both grave and playful ways. Society does not encourage women to "play with themselves," for sexual, political, intellectual, or creative pleasure. Obeying fashion's decrees is conformist and therefore highly restricted play, but making a spectacle of oneself may well be an assertion of erotic will. For spectacles do not have to follow orthodoxies. Woman-as-spectacle fascinates and disquiets many feminists, but Georgia O'Keeffe's nun- and monk-like "habits" and Louise Nevelson's ethnic butch/femme drag were a far cry from professional sex queens' regalia whose formulaic eroticism, for some feminists, calls into question the sex icon's erotic inventiveness. Wilke's self-display, which is erotic play, has always been an affront to proper femininity, which is patriarchy's containment of female possibility. Wilke as erotic spectacle verifies female genius.