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Broken Boundaries What is the Abject Body? The abject in Performance Art? The abject body is where the boundaries of the body are transgressed. When the internal becomes external. Mouth, nose, ears, eyes, anus and vagina are all sites where the outside and inside merge. Bodily fluids – blood, urine, tears, saliva, faeces, when they cross the boundary of the skin become repellent to us. These bodily fluids inside the body, becomes problematic to us once they cross the boundary of the skin. Outside of the body, bodily fluids become divorced from their owners body. It is symptomatic particularly of Western culture that the basic functions of the body are denied, hidden, we are almost removed or separated from them, which is in itself impossible, for it is a fact of being ‘alive’. Bodily Margins Mary Douglas reminds us, are dangerous. “Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolise its specially vulnerable points… Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body. So also have bodily parings, skin, nail and hair clippings, and sweat” (Douglas, 1979, p.121). Paul Broks refers to a lecture he attended that vividly elucidates the abject. “He asked us to consider how often we swallow our own saliva. We do it all the time, of course, without thinking. Then he invited us to imagine that, instead of swallowing, we spat into a tumbler. How would we now feel about sipping from a tumbler full of our own spit?” (Broks, 2003, p.108). Do you feel disgusted and repelled by the thought of this? Julia Kristeva (1982) also refers to the boundaries of the abject body as not only bodily margins but also places the abject within the relationship of the maternal and paternal as the foundation of questioning of sexual identity. Kristeva according to Anne-Marie Smith’s analysis places the abject within a wider social context. “As such, the abject is closely bound up with questions of identity, boundary crossing, exile and displacement” (Smith, 1998, p.29). Thus implicating the abject body within a social and possibly political discourse as well. How is sexual identity designated within Western society? David Harradine places the definitions of sexual gender/identity within Freud’s essay ‘Civilised’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness (1908) in which he examines Sexual Morality in relation to “the suppression of instincts” and that the development of this suppression can be distinguished over three stages. “A first one in which the sexual instinct may be freely exorcised without regard to the aims of reproduction; a second, in which all of the sexual instinct is repressed except what serves the aims of reproduction; and a third, in which only legitimate reproduction is allowed as a sexual aim”(Freud quoted in Harradine, 2000, p.71). Harradine concludes that within this analysis which legitimates “normal” sexuality and which excludes as defined by Freud “different varieties of perverts” (Freud, 1991, p.41) that it is against the perverse that civilised society establishes the heterosexual hierarchy that is normality. Foucault further explores the ‘normal’ in relationship to society in his discourse on power and normality. Fillingham (1993) interprets Foucault’s writings on power and normality, that it is only when those that are abnormal described as being for example criminals and the ill are identified (usually minority groups) can the normal in society be defined and the abnormal (the excluded) becomes a constant subject for examination in order to reiterate the normal. In effect the abnormal are spoken about by experts (normal) their voices (of the abnormal) are deemed irrelevant because they have no knowledge (power). Within this hierarchy those defined as normal (the majority) will always exert their authority over the excluded (abnormal) minority. The abject is often associated with the ‘other’ and the ‘other’ as already discussed is closely associated with matters of sexuality and gender. Franko B openly acknowledges that he is homosexual1. Judith Butler refers to the regulatory norms of heterosexual hegemony in her discourse on the viable body. “If the materiality of sex is demarcated in discourse, then this demarcation will produce a domain of excluded and delegitimated ‘sex’” and by doing so “produce a domain of abjected bodies” and she concludes “What challenge does that excluded and abjected realm produce to a symbolic hegemony that might force a radical rearticulation of what qualifies as bodies that matter, ways of living that count as ‘life’, lives worth protecting, lives worth saving, lives worth grieving”(Warr and Jones, 2000, p.264). The result is a correlation between the abject and the ‘other’ which has entered an interdependent discourse, in which the abject defines ‘otherness’ and vice versa. Hal Foster refers to the abject as “crucial as it is to the construction of subjectivity, racist, homophobic, and otherwise” (Foster, 1996, p.153). This can be interpreted to signify that those excluded, those that do not conform to these norms, the homosexual, disabled, socially degenerate all qualify as the ‘other’ the alienated, and that in Franko B’s work it is possibly this ‘underdog’ in/of society that his body represents. Can the breaking of the boundaries in the abject body symbolise the breaking down and confrontation of social prejudice? This association relies very heavily on the context in which Franko B’s work is presented and which is so vital to his performance. For example, images of B in marginalised public places with graffiti walls with existing established associations with the homeless and poverty are re-emphasised by B’s standing naked body clutching a hot water bottle. Franko B confronts our prejudices by using marginalised places used by marginalised people within society.
1 See Campbell and Spackman, 1998, p.60. Franko B’s work in relation to his homosexuality and its association with ‘gay’/queer performance is discussed. next >> |
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Copyright © Franko B 2007
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