Feminist Disavowal or Return to Immanence? The Problem of Poststructuralism and the Naked Female Form in Nic Green's Trilogy and Ursula Martinez’ My Stories,Your Emails

Winter season 2010 saw a welcome influx of work by female artists on to the London stage. During December and January, Ursula Martinez and Nic Green played to full houses at Barbican's Pit Theatre and Battersea Arts Centre respectively. While excited by the proposition of new pro-female work, I was somewhat taken aback to find the work so preoccupied by female nudity. Schooled in what Amelia Jones has identified as a British strain of ‘ “antiessentialist” feminist postmodernism [of the] 70s and 80s’, I was alarmed by what I initially took to be a return to an essentialist equivocation between the ‘feminine’ and embodied experience. Although the two artists undress for different reasons, they each choose to make crucial observations about contemporary female experience with close reference to the naked female form. Green and ensemble dance naked for a substantial part of Trilogy and Martinez uses the story of footage of her Hanky Panky striptease being posted online (without her permission) to inform the central premise of My Stories, Your Emails.

In the early 1990s, as a young feminist fired by righteous indignation, I poured over feminist theories of spectatorship and came to the conclusion that the most empowering images of women were those in which female artists referred to events that were external to a bodily experience (Mulvey, 1975; de Lauretis, 1984; Case, 1988; Dolan, 1991; Diamond, 1997; Phelan, 1993; Jones, 1998). I was particularly inspired by the work of Bobby Baker, Pina Bausch and Deborah Levy, artists who set out to explore the tensions and contradictions between femininity, class and ethnicity and who kept their characters’ clothes (albeit evening gowns and domestic science aprons) firmly on.

In this essay I excavate the cause of my nervousness about female disrobing and proffer a reading of both Green and Martinez’ work that considers how they embrace, or avoid, the problem of female immanence; that is, the problem of female identity being inextricably associated with the body. As Jones (1998: 157) has argued in Body Art: Performing the Subject, ‘selves … are strategically dichotomised in Western patriarchy (dominated by Cartesianism) as a means of situating women always already on the side of immanence’. From Jones I take the idea that male performers enjoy greater success when attempting to represent transcendence beyond an embodied subjectivity and have heightened potential to create the illusion of a spiritual, cognitive self. In contrast, female performers struggle to distance themselves from conventional understandings of women's experience being fundamentally anchored to a bodily experience. My reading, in keeping with conventional strategies of textual analysis, and influenced by Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’, will look for signs of critical intervention into conventional understandings of subjectivity and claim them as feminist even when the artists distance themselves from this position. In this respect, I am reserving the right to read, as Culler (1982: 43) has proposed, ‘as a woman’.

I will consider the legacy of the poststructuralist or anti-humanist turn in feminism and question the enduring popularity of ‘radical negativity’ or ‘radical alterity’ as a theoretical tool and a form of performance praxis that appeared, in the early 1990s, to offer a potent way of demystifying the construction of the idealised humanist subject. I want to argue that Green and Martinez appear unaffected by the discourse of radical negativity and, instead, appear to believe in and be driven by a recognisably humanist sense of self-determination and agency. The importance of the illusion of agency for these artists throws into relief some of the problems of attempting to identify as a poststructuralist feminist. A number of feminist scholars have voiced concerns that poststructuralism, while providing feminists with valuable deconstructive tools, also made impossible the illusion of a stable subject position from which to speak. At the 2012 Performance Studies International Conference, Dee Heddon shared an anecdote about a fellow scholar who asked her, ‘But Dee, aren't you essentializing women?’ in response to her feminist reading of performance. Reflecting on this proposition she stated:

I have come to think of that accusation (of essentializing women) as a weapon or a gag, that's been turned back upon us. It's difficult to talk about women, it's difficult to focus research on women. Can I ask a question? We know, maybe, what we have gained by the poststructuralist turn in feminism but do we know what was lost? Is it controversial to say women do exist in all of their differences across time and space? What would it mean to talk about different experiences as if they are real, as if they are matter, as if they do matter? (Heddon, 2012)

Heddon's position may be familiar to many feminists attempting to negotiate ‘feminist futures’. Clare Hemmings has set out to chart what she figures as the ‘narratives of progress, loss and return’ characteristic of dominant versions of Western feminist history of the past forty years. She shares a useful warning by reminding readers that ‘[i]n loss narratives, we are not only subject to feminism's demise, we are also responsible for it’ (Hemmings, 2011: 26). Perhaps, for feminists in particular, it is not particularly useful to dwell upon ‘the past’. Aston and Harris (2006: 10) have warned against ‘the dangers of postfeminist mythologies that, as Susan Faludi and other feminists argue, would have us believe in a here and now future in which all oppressions have been deconstructed’. Neither Green nor Martinez is haunted by the past to the same extent as the feminist thinkers cited, but nevertheless their performances did provide a catalyst in motivating me to consider my own perception of female performance and potential ‘feminist futures’.

Although neither fits neatly into the category ‘performance artist’, Green and Martinez both appear to use deconstructive strategies borrowed from now-canonical figures such as Karen Finley and Carolee Schneemann. The epistemological frame of ‘performance’ has provided an invaluable tool for expanding existing constructions of theatre and theatricality. ‘Performance’ now enables scholars in the field of performance studies to analyse everyday behaviour as anthropological performance, as well as provide an opportunity for audiences to witness the ‘parodic repetition’ of codified gestures made explicit for all to see (Butler, 1990: 139). According to Aston and Harris, Butler's groundbreaking Gender Trouble has had the unfortunate effect in theatre and performance studies of creating a troublesome slippage between performance and performativity. They argue that ‘performativity’ is now ‘interchangeable with the terms performance and/or theatrical’, a phenomenon that fosters the illusion that all ‘repetitions’ of gender roles in these (theatrical) sites are equally ‘resistant’ (Aston and Harris, 2006:11). I want to mark this note of caution while embracing the opportunities that the analysis of a ‘performed’ or deliberately self-conscious construction of female identity on stage allows. I share Aston and Harris's suspicion of theorists who claim performance and/or performance art to be inherently deconstructive; however, I am fascinated by Green and Martinez’ conscious decision to identify as artists and (re)introduce the naked female form to the stage in order to articulate their experience of contemporary Western subjectivity.

Green's piece, as its title suggests, comprises three different performances of varying lengths. The first features readings from Germaine Greer's treatise The Female Eunuch (1970), a discussion of female body shapes, and introduces a number of precisely choreographed movement sequences performed in unison by Laura Bradshaw, Green and other company members. Towards the end of the section, as if in response to Bradshaw and Green's rally, ‘start your own fucking movement, start your own fucking movement!’ a group of approximately fifteen naked women invade the stage to perform a frenetic movement sequence to The Pixies’ Into the White (Thompson, 1989). The second, longer section revolves around a company of five figures dancing—four female performers joined by one male. Using Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker's 1979 documentary of Town Bloody Hall (the infamous feminist ‘Dialogue on Women's Liberation’ held in New York's Town Hall, chaired by Norman Mailer) the ensemble recite, enact and dance a response. The company compose an imagined letter to Jill Johnston, one of the debate's more voluble participants, in which the male performer both takes responsibility for and attempts to distance himself from Mailer's misogyny by confessing: ‘I am not that man you know—but I recognise him in me’. Towards the close of this section, audience members are invited to join the company on stage to repeat a series of slow, deliberate gestures suggestive of a passing on of legacy or body of knowledge. During Trilogy's final section, the bulk of activity is again generated by Bradshaw and Green, who introduce the audience to their web-based project ‘Make Your Own Herstory’. ¹ Their jovial tone and deliberately clumsy delivery of a PowerPoint presentation is punctuated by more serious meditations on what they perceive to be casual incitements of misogynistic violence across Western and Middle-Eastern cultures. Finally, Bradshaw gives her mother the opportunity to share her ‘womanifesto’ via a live telephone link before extending an invitation to women in the audience to join them on stage (naked) to sing the Suffragette anthem Jerusalem (Hastings-Parry, 1916).

My Stories, Your Emails features Martinez as the sole performer. Akin to Trilogy, its content is precisely delineated; the performance once again comprises three deliberately differentiated sections. However, in other respects the content and tone of address are markedly different. The first section features Martinez reading personal anecdotes from a paper diary mounted on a lectern, clad in the smart suit worn for her Hanky Panky striptease act. Her hair is scraped away from her face and she wears red lipstick. The second section features a showing of the offending piece of footage. The third features Martinez reading from a selection of emails she received after her striptease had been made widely available on the Internet. The activity associated with the first part of the show is positioned stage right, the activity of the third part stage left, with the introduction, video-projection and conclusion positioned centre stage. At the outset, Martinez warns the audience that she will be sharing an image of a 19 cm erect penis, and having issued a warning goes on to exhort the audience to confess that they are in search of titillation and have come to see ‘a bit of minge’. She goes on to reassure the audience that she will disrobe before the close of the show. The first half of the performance features, as stated above, Martinez reading from a selection of anecdotes, some of which have been used as material in previous shows. The anecdotes have been typed onto A4 sheets, and Martinez makes a show of deliberately turning each page before moving on. As part of one anecdote, she recalls her dismay when realising, mid-performance, that she had a piece of toilet paper stuck between her cheeks. Central to the premise of the show is Martinez’ consternation about footage of her comic striptease act (Hanky Panky) ‘going viral’ after being uploaded onto the video-sharing platform YouTube. The global dissemination of her performance prompted a sudden influx of sexually predatory and suggestive emails. ²

Martinez deliberately positions herself stage right while sharing her personal stories and then absents herself while the footage of her striptease is projected centre stage. She re-enters at the close of the clip, this time clad in casual clothing. Her hair has been released from its slicked-back ponytail and hangs loose about her face; her trousers resemble loose-fitting harem pants with ankle-ties, her t-shirt is loose fitting and her lipstick has been removed. Assuring the audience she has secured consent from the correspondents, Martinez positions herself stage left, this time behind a table and a laptop computer. Images of her suitors are projected centre stage. Prior to each recital, Martinez provides a brief introduction, citing each correspondent's nationality, and providing some context for the excerpt she is about to share. She goes on to read from the offending emails employing an imagined approximation of each suitor's accent. She begins with comparatively polite, mundane emails before moving onto exchanges that became disproportionately intense and that demonstrate initial declarations of love transmuting into something more threatening and insistent as the suitors realise their affections are not reciprocated. Towards the close of the performance, Martinez takes centre stage to honour her ‘promise’ to strip (to ‘show her minge’). At this point in the performance her act of undressing is deliberately mundane and awkward as if to give the impression of being unrehearsed. During this final act of disrobing, Martinez’ demeanour is markedly different from that of her Hanky Panky persona, as if to signal that this is the ‘real’ Ursula Martinez and the previous incarnation a fictional persona. The piece ends on a comic note: as Martinez turns to leave the stage, the audience is treated to the sight of a piece of toilet paper stuck to her naked bottom.

In promotional material, Green and Martinez have been candid about their very different sets of concerns. Martinez cites that in addition to wanting to share the ‘amazing insight into the world of the Internet and virtual relationships’, she also wanted to incorporate the email material into a show as a way of regaining control over her naked image. ³ She felt that:

Whilst I was performing [Hanky Panky] live I was always in control of the context in which I performed it, so if someone asked me to do a strip club I could say no, or if someone asked me to do a men-only event, I can say no. But once it's gone on the Internet I have no control over the context in which it is viewed. ⁴

4

ibid.

Although Martinez’ dissatisfaction about the dissemination of her naked image is relevant to a feminist poetics, it is important to reiterate that Martinez has an ambivalent relationship to feminism. For example, she notably participated in a series of art events entitled I am Not a Feminist. I am Normal in 2004. ⁵ She is open about her solipsism, stating that ‘all the work does come out of my self-obsession’. ⁶ Her decision to create My Stories, Your Emails came out of a sense of anger that a performance she saw to be ‘the complete opposite of a traditional striptease’ became co-opted into an erotic spectacle by a wider viewing public. ⁷ Her sense of outrage that her naked image was lifted from what appears to be a televised performance at the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival (‘Juste Pour Rire Montreal’ is visible in the background) is perhaps naïve. However, the audacity of her response to the predatory emails she received is uplifting for anyone who has experienced sexual harassment first hand, and her performance raises interesting questions about theatre's commercial (rather than artistic) economy relying on spectators paying for ‘spectacle’.

Green, by contrast, does identify as a feminist, and her concern about the representation of feminist history is clearly at the heart of Trilogy. Contextualising her decision, Green cites the experience of working with 11-year-old girls on Cloud Piece, a project about cloud formations and childhood, as formative. She describes how taken aback she was by the young performers’ preoccupation with body image. She states, ‘… they were already feeling self-conscious about their bodies. They would talk about their eating habits, and I'd think, “You're eight! Where's the freedom in your life?” ‘. ⁸ In addition, she confides that she wanted to create a piece of work to de-stigmatise feminism. She observes, ‘the attitude to feminism today is so negative. There's still stigma. It's scorned, it's ridiculed, it's thought of as outdated’. ⁹

Martinez’ piece is unashamedly about her own individual experience, while Green's piece develops ideas about collectives and group solidarity. Martinez focuses on popular culture and ‘viral’ Internet videos while Green explores the legacy of feminist history and political activism. Despite their differences, I discern a sense of wanting to ‘reclaim’ something lost, to put right a misunderstanding; to celebrate the potential for the naked female form to signify in ways that force a paradigm shift away from the passive, sexualised mainstream perception.

Although the London runs of Green and Martinez’ performances were commercially successful and critically well received, the pieces did receive some criticism for being ‘naïve’ and ‘lack[ing] analysis’ and having ‘bogus’ intentions. ¹⁰ Hermione Hoby reported that after one of Green's performances she heard an audience member ask, ‘aren't we past all that?’, a question she felt inclined to respond to in the negative, but which, I have to admit, tallies with some of my own initial misgivings about the work. ¹¹ When confronted with the image of so many naked female bodies gyrating on stage before me (and in such close proximity), I felt anxious that I was about to be sold the biological essentialist argument that women, in essence, were ‘closer to nature’ and that I would enjoy new freedom from this perspective if only I could throw off my own self-conscious desire to hide my naked body from the world. Returning to study the performance on video some months after viewing the original (safe in a British Library viewing booth and away from the naked bodies), I came to appreciate the uplifting solidarity of the feminist message and the originality of the company's physical response to Town Bloody Hall. I agree that the correlation between nakedness and abandon explored in Green's trilogy could be regarded as ‘naïve’, but ultimately chose to prioritise and celebrate her renewed call for action as the more important message to take from the piece.

It is clear that both artists are keen to stave off the initial hostility commonly associated with representations of strong single women. Both Green and Martinez deliberately offer a likeable, disarming persona on stage. In interview, Martinez identifies first and foremost as an artist, whose job it is to create ‘stimulating work’ that has ‘honesty and integrity’. ¹² As mentioned above, she avoids the term ‘feminist’ when describing her work, and references to her lesbian sexuality are underplayed in this particular performance. Green, by contrast, does employ the term ‘feminist’ when talking about her work and states that she wants Trilogy to work as a piece of social activism to encourage audiences of today to recall the significant achievements in the struggle towards gender equality accomplished in feminism's name. ¹³ Trilogy is the only determinedly feminist piece that Green has produced, and subsequent work has explored similar themes ‘through the lens of environmentalism’, suggesting that her focus has perhaps shifted elsewhere as new projects have come to light. ¹⁴ In contrast to work by artists such as Split Britches or Curious, there is a sense that these performances emanate from Green and Martinez’ personal encounters with the experience of sexual inequality rather than a deliberate contribution to the oeuvre of feminist performance. Although Willson (2008: 3) has claimed Martinez as an artist who is ‘conscious of the implications and history of feminism within performance’, the artist's tendency to draw upon a private, inner psychology to inform her work gives it an individualistic strain customarily eschewed by feminist work. Martinez admits that ‘all the work does come out of my self-obsession, but … exploring myself has also been a way of exploring the universal’. ¹⁵ I proffer this qualification about the artists’ likeability in order to acknowledge that I understand the importance of the tone of address in this work and appreciate that the artists are not setting out to re-interrogate what Aston (2006) has termed (after Angela McRobbie) the ‘Es and anti-Es: the essentialist and anti-essentialist debates that arose as feminists attempted to [move beyond] identity-based politics into a more deconstructive postmodern feminist mode of theorizing’. Despite what felt like a very welcome return of feminist aesthetics and the beguiling sense of bonhomie, I felt frustrated that this material appeared to side-step the ongoing dialogue about essentialism in existing feminist culture. Rather than represent advancement in the discussion about the representation of the female body, these performances felt like a return to pre-1970s culture, to an age before the controversy over the naked female form, an age prior to what Laura Mulvey has called ‘the era in which the female body had become, if not quite unrepresentable, only representable if refracted through theory’ (Mulvey, 2006: 285).

I recognise that it is grossly unfair to expect female artists to set their agenda in accordance with viewpoints explored by a comparatively small set of Western feminist scholars. The feminist agenda of this essay is led by my own identification as a feminist and my belief in the use-value of feminist epistemologies to frame my reading of theatre and performance. I will go on to foreground the ways in which Green and Martinez make clear their own positions in relation to feminism, but want to emphasise that I claim the importance of a sense of humanist agency on behalf of the artists. This reading does not emanate from the artists themselves. Indeed, the prospect of Green and Martinez’ return to the issue of nudity and feminist politics represented an opportunity for me, as a feminist theatre scholar, to address the materialist feminist ‘turn away from the corporeal’ (Jones, 1998:24) in order to address what feminist scholars might now see as an overly determined reaction against essentialism. Anti-essentialist postmodernism has been heavily influenced by theories of ‘radical negativity’, an approach proffered by Felman (2002: 105) in the early 1980s, which attempts to harness the ‘unclassifiable radicality’ of negativity, so that ‘it splinters the very structure of the negative/positive alternative that history cannot assimilate’. Although theories of radical negativity have enabled feminists to experiment with deconstructive practice and theory, it seems that this particular strain of feminist theory has done little to alter the material conditions of women's lives.

The impulse to embrace radical negativity, a process encouraging the subaltern to continue to occupy the margins, rather than attempting to gain centre ground (or centre stage), characterised much poststructuralist feminist theory of the 1990s. Radical negativity has been enormously influential in the field of performance studies, where performance, live art and body art have been constructed as transient, contingent forms capable of capitalising on the potential to negate the assimilating drive of market forces. For instance, Jones (1998: 254) has written: ‘I am interested in the failure to ensure presence that body art represents’. This position has been influential in the early work of Phelan (1993: 165), who wrote:

I think radical negativity is valuable, in part, because it resists reproduction. […] As an act, the performance of negativity does not make a claim to truth or accuracy. Performance seeks a kind of psychic and political efficacy, which is to say, performance makes a claim about the Real-impossible. As such, the performative utterances of negativity cannot be absorbed by history because their affects/effects […] are always changing, varied and resolutely unstatic objects.

Phelan has argued against the (then) dominant strain of identity politics of the 1990s, which held that subaltern subjectivities could gain political agency by becoming more visible in society and wider cultural activity. For Phelan (1993), the more enlightened position remained ‘unmarked’ at the margin, away from the assimilating mechanics of mainstream ideology. Theories of radical negativity imply that it is possible to venerate and transform the subaltern's traditional otherness to subversive or transformative ends. In practice, radical negativity has inspired work that withdrew images of women from the stage or screen and performances that set out to deliberately obfuscate the phallocentric circulation of desire and gaze between performance artist and spectator. For example, Jones (1998: 152–158) discusses the work of Mary Kelly (1984–1985) and Ana Medieta (1978) as examples of female artists removing the female body from view as a ‘turn away from the corporeal … the absolute need to remove the female body from representation; any presentation or representation of the female body was seen as necessarily participating in the phallocentric dynamic of fetishism’.

Although I can appreciate how radical negativity offered, and continues to offer, a liberating move away from the immanentist view of an embodied female subjectivity, these days I find I am reluctant to embrace it so enthusiastically. The current championing of radical negativity in performative writing and critical theory and the celebration of art forms that ‘fail to ensure presence’ represents an alarming dilemma because I fear they risk repeating the gender blindness and ontological asymmetry Braidotti and Irigaray have identified in classical philosophy (Phelan, 1993; Pollock, 1997; Ridout, 2006; Bailes, 2011). Phallocentric culture venerates gravitas and as a result many women find themselves compelled to be serious in order to stymie the association of femininity with the trivial. I agree that women, as Jones (1998: 171) has stated, ‘have both a greater stake in challenging the myth of (male) subjective transcendence and a greater capacity to negotiate openly the inevitable incoherence of subjectivity’. But I fear that to celebrate incoherence when coherence is such a key requisite for success in Western liberal humanist society represents something of an own-goal for feminism and runs the risk of being counter-productive.

Theorists such as Patricia Waugh and Rosi Braidotti share my hesitancy about radical negativity. They have warned against theories of ‘radical alterity’, pointing to this as feminism's fundamental problem with poststructuralist poetics and theories of the posthuman. In the late 1990s, Waugh (1998: 178) observed that:

… feminist theory has come to manifest a number of overt postmodern symptoms: an infatuation with such concepts as the sublime, with the idea of radical alterity (otherness) or the possibility of a feminine ‘space’ outside of rationality and patriarchal hierarchies.

Waugh (1998: 184) identified alterity's radical potential as ‘dangerous’ and noted how the space of alterity was ‘often designated feminine’ in a way that ‘rarely had very much to do with actual women and even threatened, in continuing to identify femininity … with “otherness” to keep real women locked in a prison house of language’. For Braidotti, a celebration of alterity also implies a renouncing of the forward drive to achieve the illusion of unity traditionally thought to be the preserve of the White, middle-class male subject. As she (1994: 141) puts it:

Well may the high priests of postmodernism preach the deconstruction and fragmentation of the subject […]. The truth of the matter is: one cannot deconstruct a subjectivity one has never been fully granted, one cannot diffuse a sexuality that has historically been defined as dark and mysterious. In order to announce the death of the subject one must first have gained the right to speak as one.

I have stated that I wanted the nudity in Green and Martinez’ work to engage with anti-essentialist debates because it seems that the incursion of postmodernism into feminist theory has brought feminist performance to something of a self-defeating detente. The return of the naked female body to the feminist stage represents a return to the corporeal, an insistence upon the immanence of female experience, but also, in the case of Green and Martinez, a determined move away from an identification with the body as a site of lack. In the self-determination of these artists, I see an individualistic insistence upon self-realisation and a developed sense of agency. For me, these artists work to explore the possibility of ‘control’ and in doing so confirm their belief in the possibility of full subject-hood while proudly occupying a female body. They insist upon the importance of intention and context in shaping the perception of the female body and call for women to internalise a sense of security that they can negotiate and set the terms of semiotic exchange. Some sense of how the female body ‘signifies’ in a broader cultural arena, perhaps influenced to some extent by an intertexual awareness of semiotics, demonstrates how these artists are redefining what it means to ‘take control’. The dilemma this work presents for a feminist spectator is that it acknowledges immanence, the imbrication of female experience with the body (leaving classical theories of ontology unchallenged), and embraces the conservative humanist ideology of individualism. Green and Martinez are examples of women who are, as Betterton (1996: 165) has suggested, reluctant to ‘renounce mastery before having attained it’. By embracing the subject position of ‘artist’ Green and Martinez identify as humanist subjects replete with agency and a sense of self-determination. Wrangling with the contradictions humanism throws up for feminists, Braidotti (1994: 107) asks: ‘Are feminists closet humanists, wanting to rescue what is left of rationality, needing some realist theory of discourse, or an alternative female religion?’. Braidotti is influenced by Irigaray's insistence that sexual difference is ‘constitutive of the human experience’ and that classical philosophy, which denies or overlooks sexual difference, is guilty of ontological asymmetry. She claims that for Irigaray:

The essentialist belief in ontological difference is a political strategy aimed at stating the specificity of female subjectivity, sexuality and experience while also denouncing the logic of sexual indifferentiation of phallogocentric discourse. (Braidotti, 1994: 131)

I do not want to claim that either Green or Martinez consciously set out to ‘denounce the logic of … phallocentric discourse’. Instead, I want to argue that their different contemplations upon the circulation of images of female nudity suggest ways of acknowledging that women may influence the reception of images by intervening in the context of reception.

Martinez’ demeanour in her interview with Kelly suggests that she risks being chastened by her critics’ objections to her use of unsolicited emails, but there is an uplifting sense of joy to be found in her determination to stand her ground and in her determination to mark the misogyny of the responses. Kelly reads from Ian Shuttleworth's review of My Stories, Your Emails, which criticises Martinez for ‘implicitly direct[ing] us to a response of derision of these men’. Shuttleworth has queried Martinez’ assurance that she secured her correspondents’ consent to being presented as ‘pervs’ and intimates that she has a responsibility to rein in the power her possession of their emails implies. In response, Martinez reminds Kelly that the tone of the emails was ‘inappropriate’ and a direct result of her material having been posted on YouTube without her consent. She states that she had never received inappropriate advances or correspondence from spectators watching Hanky Panky in a theatre or club environment, where she had ‘control’ over the context in which she was being provocative. The exaggerated winks and quasi-macho pelvic thrusts Martinez executes while performing this striptease work to consolidate the sense that the performer has elected to strip to undermine or ridicule the form, rather than to titillate.

Although I am not completely persuaded by ‘the transgressive potential’ of burlesque performers, I think that Martinez has made an important contribution by introducing the importance of the context of reception into the debate (Willson, 2008: 163). Her striptease could be seen to be an example of what Butler (1990: 31) has termed a ‘parodic’ repetition of a heteronormative practice, a parody that ‘reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and original’. In comparison to conventional female striptease, her movements are so exaggeratedly ‘unfeminine'—far from normative feminine behaviour—that it is difficult to understand how these signs of subversion can be overlooked or ignored by online or theatre spectators. Martinez is clearly sympathetic to Willson's (2008: 164) understanding of this particular type of striptease as ‘burlesque’, as a subversive form in which ‘the burlesque performer uses her script-less, free-running commentary to challenge the viewer's control over her and the complicated power dynamic at play’. In interview, Martinez repeatedly re-asserts her right to respond as an artist, as a cabaret performer, as a comedienne. She admits that ‘the act was funny, cheeky and entertaining and yeah, provocative, but primarily cheeky, funny and entertaining. I had never associated it with eroticism and I don't feel erotic when I'm performing it, I feel funny’. ¹⁶ Martinez also reserves the right to choose the audience she performs for, presumably so that she can ensure that the ironic nature of her striptease is legible to her audience. By insisting upon the importance of her intention and her experience of performing the striptease, Martinez is asserting her right to occupy a position of ‘mastery’, to claim the authority of the artist. Interestingly, Jones (2012: 20) has observed that ‘the artist is the paradigmatic figure of how the modern subject comes to formation’. By stating her belief in her ability to make her audience laugh, she demonstrates that she is endowed with an especially developed sense of agency: not only does she feel she can control how she is perceived, she also believes in her ability to move others. She is resisting anti-humanist arguments to construct the identity of an autonomous self-governing subject as illusory.

Although some of the representations of racial stereotypes in My Stories, Your Emails do risk reiterating conservative racial stereotypes, with regard to her experience of sexual predation as a feminist I am happy to go along with Martinez’ assertion that she need make no apology for her appropriation of the ‘pervs’ emails or her decision to ridicule as retaliation to their sexual objectification. For female audience members who have been intimidated and harassed by unwanted sexual attention, the ridicule provides a welcome opportunity to recognise a supposedly innocuous practice as a form of abuse. Her co-option of assailants’ missives is akin to Laurie Anderson's 1973 photographic project Fully Automated Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity). Aggravated by the unwanted sexual attention she attracted on the streets of New York, Anderson took to photographing her assailants and recording their responses in captions beneath each photograph. Anderson describes her intentions thus:

I decided to shoot pictures of men who made comments to me on the street. I had always hated this invasion of my privacy and now I had the means of my revenge. As I walked along Houston Street with my fully automated Nikon, I felt armed, ready. I passed a man who muttered ‘Wanna fuck?’ This was standard technique: the female passes and the male strikes at the last possible moment forcing the woman to backtrack if she should dare to object. I wheeled around, furious. ‘Did you say that?’ He looked around surprised, then defiant. ‘Yeah, so what the fuck if I did?’ I raised my Nikon, took aim, began to focus. His eyes darted back and forth, an undercover cop? CLICK. ¹⁷

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Perform Feminism blog (2009) http://bodytracks.org/2009/06/laurie-anderson-fully-automated-nikon-objectobjectionobjectivity/, last accessed 5 February 2011.

Anderson's acknowledged acceptance as an internationally renowned ‘pioneer’ lends her work gravitas and status that perhaps Martinez has yet to acquire, but the two artists share an intention to use their artistic practice to retaliate and to deliberately remind the assailants of their responsibility to resist the objectification of women. The success of both Martinez’ and Anderson's work relies upon an acceptance of their right to identify as artists (and thus coherent self-governing subjects) and respect for what they have to say in this role. Poststructuralist theory demystifies the authority of the artist and denies the possibility of a stable position from which to speak. This position is ultimately untenable for women setting out to participate in the wider public arena. Although feminists should be invested in undermining the illusion of the phallocentric, it should not be at the cost of remaining silent or occupying the margins of cultural production. By insisting upon their right to occupy a traditionally male role, and by articulating the experience of sexual difference while in role, they are resisting what Irigaray (1985: 70) would see as the power of the ‘philosophic logos’ to reduce all others to the economy of the same and refusing to ‘eradicate the difference between the sexes in systems that are self-representative of a “masculine subject”’ (original emphasis).

Green's piece works in a different way to Martinez’ in so far as she uses Greer's words from The Female Eunuch to put forward her own misgivings about women's struggle with body image. She also employs a multi-perspectival approach, speaking from a number of different positions—as artist, as social activist, as a feminist surveying the present and as a feminist looking back over past achievements. She identifies as part of a collective—in partnership with Bradshaw, as part of a small ensemble of performers and as part of a larger cohort of women (recruited by each theatre venue on the tour) from the local community. Green's identity as an artist or as the author of the piece is not as pronounced as Martinez, but her intentions to find a stable speaking position as a feminist and her belief that collectively women are capable of forging change suggest that she invests in a sense of agency. In interview, Green articulates her regret about the negative connotations ‘feminism’ has in the popular cultural arena and situates her work as an act of social engagement, a deliberate attempt to challenge and undermine the values attached to this suspicion. ¹⁸

Green's concern with nudity appears primarily concerned with undermining dominant constructions of an idealised female form. According to Green, the idealised body is functional and does not ‘wobble’ when it moves. Her project took shape when she shared her idea with Bradshaw about ‘making a choreography that is all about wobbling different parts of (our) bodies, presenting them as practical objects instead of statuesque objects d'art’ (Costa, 2010). In addition to Green and Bradshaw's nudity, the audience also witnesses Louise Brodie, Murray Wason and Jodie Wilkinson perform naked. Furthermore, approximately thirty volunteers recruited from the local area join the cast each evening. For the majority of the piece, the performers are participating in an energetic and precisely choreographed score, which sees performers transition repeatedly from horizontal to vertical using movement borrowed from contemporary dance as well as more popular forms of street dance. For the most part, the performers dance in unison without touching. At times they are accompanied, at others they dance to the accompaniment of their own laboured breathing and the thud of flesh on the vinyl dance floor. The majority of bodies onstage in Trilogy do not replicate the slim, idealised bodies disseminated throughout popular culture. Although the performances I saw included mostly white, able-bodied women, the collection of performers rendered the idea of venerating a singular body type ridiculous: these women were all radically different in appearance. Many had rounded stomachs, protruding buttocks and low-slung breasts. Several performers were angular and bony, several pierced, tattooed or scarred.

Early sections of choreography were honed to maximise the ‘wobble’ potential of the dancers. Prior to the entry of the local performers, Green and Bradshaw stood in a fixed spot centre stage and gyrated backwards and forwards so that their breasts and the flesh under their arms and on their thighs bounced violently. Images were projected behind the performers showing a peach being sliced, a lone apple, a lone pear and a wobbling jelly. Over the PA system came I Fought the Law by the Clash played at high volume (Curtis, 1959). Green and Bradshaw removed their bikini tops and deliberately jiggled their breasts before laughing and then began to jump and flail in time to the music. They performed forward rolls and leap-frogs, vigorous activities rendering ‘modesty’ impossible. This choreography of the ‘wobble’ was repeated towards the end of this section as Bradshaw and Green were joined by twelve local performers who executed a complex series of vigorous movements to music composed by The Pixies.

It appeared to me that the proliferation of naked bodies, and the repetition of movement by those bodies, worked to empty the female form of any potential sexual signification. The dance sequences were lengthy and hypnotic. The repetition of movement and the duration of the activity encouraged a subtle shift in my way of thinking about the body. I began to ignore the idiosyncrasies of each body and instead began to admire the technique of the dance, take pleasure in the well-rehearsed unity of the movement and think of the body as a muscular, energetic form. Butler (1990: 33) has stated her task within Gender Trouble as being to show how ‘the very notion of the subject, intelligible only through its appearance as gendered, admits of possibilities that have been forcibly foreclosed by the various reifications of gender that have constituted its contingent ontologies’. For me, this collection of bodies, by inviting comparison with an idealised form, demonstrates how women's sense of agency is ‘forcibly foreclosed’. The ‘deviant’ display of wobbling body fat represents a subversive challenge to the normalisation of this ideal, and enables female spectators to glimpse the potential joy to be had in collective resistance.

My reading of Green and Martinez, and my inclination to embrace aspects of their work as positive, marks me as, to my surprise, if not a card-carrying humanist, then one who is nostalgic for the sense of agency instilled by the illusion of the humanist subject. Given my decision to immerse myself in deconstructive theory and alternative theatre, this recognition of the use-value of the humanist illusion of agency comes as something of a surprise: I realise that I must be one of Braidotti's (1994: 107) ‘closet humanists’. Regardless of the decision to identify it as humanist, or otherwise, what is visible in Green and Martinez’ work is a determined disavowal of alterity, a refusal to frame women's experience and women's work as marginal, and a refusal to remove the female form from centre stage. Although the artists may not be taking up my own preoccupations about the shortcomings of radical negativity, there is real potential here to re-address assumptions about a female embodied experience, and to move away from ‘the assumption that essentialism is inherently conservative’ (Ahmed, Kilby, Lury, McNeil and Skeggs, 2000: 20). This work moves away from what Braidotti recognises as the ‘gender blindness’ of the postmodern position (and arguably postmodern performance) and suggests that it is time to look for alternative models of female subjectivity in a way that actively improves the material conditions of women's lives. Braidotti has reminded us that ‘feminist emphasis on embodiment goes hand-in-hand with a radical rejection of essentialism’ (1994: 25). I want to argue that by framing their (postfeminist) experience through the body Martinez and Green deliver a message appropriate for contemporary individualist times: to identify with the female body does not mean identifying with it as the site of the wound, or as the womb; to identify with the body means to be at peace with one's imperfections and to internalise a sense of control over how one wishes to be perceived. I read the nudity in Green and Martinez’ work as presenting an opportunity for women to resist the internalisation of potential harm caused by the sexualised patriarchal gaze. By variously stating their intention to forge change (to regain control over one's image; to initiate collective enterprise; to celebrate the past) both Martinez and Green are performing a belief in the possibility of female agency, in the possibility of attaining the illusion of unity and self-governing subject-hood. Such values are problematic under poststructuralism, but in this incarnation they are refreshing for never having been cowed by such doctrine.

To conclude, what I see in this work is neither a return to immanence nor a disavowal of the female body. I see a celebration of individualism, an ideology perhaps dangerously aligned with humanism, but for the moment this position appears to present a welcome opportunity to side-step the problems that poststructuralism, and in particular, theories of radical alterity presented for feminist artists and scholars. To return to Heddon's proposition that the accusation of essentialising has ‘gagged’ recent generations of feminists: by ignoring the posthumanist drive to anti-essentialise while still insisting upon a plurality of individual experience, I want to claim that Green and Martinez have been able to gain traction and find a voice to articulate the complex and contradictory experiences associated with being a woman. This work provides a way out of the deadlock offered by theories of radical negativity by foregrounding the importance of controlling the context in which female artists’ work is viewed. By identifying as artists rather than feminists, Green and Martinez successfully co-opt the illusion of a stable subject position and use the accompanying sense of agency to describe a positive vision for the future.