Touch in Irish performance art: Haptic encounters in Becoming Beloved (1995) and The Touching Contract (2016)

Scene ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 159-174
Author(s):  
Kate Antosik-Parsons
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Health ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Sexual Health Information ◽  
Women’S Sexual Health ◽  
Maternity Hospitals ◽  
Cultural Climate ◽  
A Site

Over the last 50 years, Irish feminists have campaigned for women’s sexual health and reproductive rights, including access to contraception, legal abortion and choice in maternity care and childbirth. Recent cases like Ms. Y (2014), P. P. v. HSE (2014) and Ms. B (2016) invite a close scrutiny of the power dynamics relating to women’s reproductive bodies in Ireland. This article examines Becoming Beloved (1995) and The Touching Contract (2016), two performance-based artworks located in Dublin maternity hospitals. Both artworks centred the body as a site of production to interrogate these power dynamics while engaging with specifics of each location. This article charts the management of childbearing bodies in Ireland, looking specifically at issues concerning reproductive and sexual health, information and consent. It details how Irish performance art has responded to the political, social and cultural climate of restrictions on women’s bodies. Becoming Beloved and The Touching Contract both employed haptic encounters, multisensory perceptions composed of tactile, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive sensations that extended beyond a visual aesthetic. These haptic encounters contributed to a dimension of viewer engagement, integral in performance art to activating meaning. This article examines how these two artworks utilized haptic encounters to produce a situated, corporeal knowledge that critiqued the authority wielded over reproductive bodies by political, religious and medical establishments in Ireland.

Gendered Secularization and the Body Policing of Muslim Women

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raissa Killoran
Keyword(s):  
Muslim Women ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Cultural Symbols ◽  
Religious Symbols ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Many ◽  
A Site

The many usages of the term ‘secularism’ have generated an ambiguity in the word; as a political guise, it may be used to engender anti-religious fervor. Particularly in regards to veiling among female Muslim adherents, the attainment of a secular state and touting of the necessity of dismantling religious symbols have functioned as linguistic shields. By calling a “burka ban” necessary or even egalitarian secularization, legislators employ ‘secularization’ as jargon for political ends, enacting a stance of supremacy under the semblance of progress. Secularization has come to function as a political tool - in the name of it, governments may prescribe which cultural symbols are normative and which are of ‘other’ cultures or religious origins. As such, the identification of some religious symbols as foreign and others as normative is a usage of secularization for normalization of dominant religious expression. In this, there is an implicit neocolonialism; by imposing standards of cultural normalcy which are definitively nonMuslim, such policies attempt to divorce Muslims from Islam.  Further, I intend to investigate the gendered aspect of secularization politics. By critiquing clothing and body policing of women, I will demonstrate how secularization projects use the female body and dress as a site for display. By rendering the female physically emblematic of the honor and virtue of an ‘other’ culture, those enacting secularization norms target women’s bodies to act as visual exhibitions of the dominant culture’s hegemony. Here, we see gendered secularization at work - female bodies become controlled by the antireligious zeal of the state, while the state carries out this control on the predicate that it is the religious group enacting unjust control. As such, the policing of female Muslim bodies is symbolic of the policing of Islam as a whole; it acts as an illustration of an imposed, gendered secularization project.

Lexicography, discourse and power

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 601-629
Author(s):  
Wenge Chen
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Power And Resistance ◽  
Ideological Struggle ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
A Site ◽  
International English

Abstract This paper conceptualizes dictionary bilingualization as a recontextualizing practice and explores how ideology and power play out in the recontextualization of lexicographic discourse across languages and cultures to result in the transformation of meaning. It first proposes viewing the (bilingualized) dictionary as discourse and emphasizes bilingual lexicography as a site of an asymmetrical linguistic and cultural power dynamics. The paper then argues that a synergy of critical discourse analysis and postcolonial studies can reveal the inter-cultural ideological struggle implicit in the bilingualizing lexicographic practice. The body of the study is devoted to the analysis of those shifts taking place in the entries, definition, illustrative examples and pragmatic labels in a bilingualized English-Chinese dictionary, which, when viewed cumulatively, significantly reshape the ideological positioning of the dictionary. The paper discusses the implications for critical lexicographic studies and for research into the interplay between power and resistance between dominating and dominated cultures. It concludes that Periphery English dictionary compilers are able to negotiate the different subjectivities and ideologies inherent in dictionary making and to adopt a subject position favorable to their empowerment in the international English lexicography, although such resistance is far from capable of restructuring the order of lexicography.

Sexuality as a Site of Memory and the Metaphysical Dilemma of Being a Colored Girl

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. H. Stallings
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
The Body ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Black Aesthetics ◽  
National Ideology ◽  
A Site

This chapter discusses partying as an alternative model of intimacy, black aesthetics, and art inclusive of nonhuman being. It studies eroticism and representations of sex work through the plays of Lynn Nottage and the films of feminist pornographer Shine Louise Houston as cultural recognitions of sex that is mediated through “demonic grounds.” Nottage and Houston devise fictional plots and women characters that confirm how and why sexuality exists as a site of memory for some black women. Women's bodies and sexualities are their canvases and creative tools. Although the end result may become representations for national ideology or products to be consumed, the process of creating out of the body and sexuality is in and of itself evidence of power that exceeds the human.

scholarly journals La représentation du corps féminin : ostracisme, stéréotypes et concupiscence dans David’s Story de Zoë Wicomb

2015 ◽  
pp. 31-41
Author(s):  
Férial Khella
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Black Female ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Women Warriors ◽  
Zoe Wicomb ◽  
Work Tasks ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
A Site

This article explores Zoë Wicomb’s complex representation of the Black female body in her first novel David’s Story, which deals mainly with the condition of the female guerrilla fighter during and after the struggle for liberation. These women warriors have served the nation and have contribu-ted to its liberation through their bodies, but have also been silenced and ignored in the post-apartheid era. In addition, they have been subjected to multiple forms of physical and sexual violence by their own comrades within the Anti-apartheid Movement. The Black female body, as it appears in the novel, is a site of power, oppression, violence, and even complicity. The pre-sent work tasks itself, firstly, with analyzing not only how the author deconstructs the stereotypical images of the strong female guerrilla but also those concerning Coloured women’s bodies which have been marked by racial and sexual differences, focusing here especially on the question of concupiscence. Then, I will concentrate on the way the female body is represented and inscribed in language. Finally, I will analyze Zoë Wicomb’s narrative techniques by considering the impossibility of representing the body in the absence of discourse.

Aging, Gender, and the Body

2019 ◽  
pp. 181-198
Author(s):  
Laura Hurd
Keyword(s):  
Life Experiences ◽  
Personal Responsibility ◽  
Later Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Aging Body ◽  
A Site ◽  
Study Participants ◽  
Cultural Constructions

In this chapter, the author considers some of the theoretical and methodological conundrums that she encountered in her qualitative research that has focused on later life experiences of the aging body as a site of inequality. Western culture is replete with deeply entrenched ageist stereotypes, which position old bodies as inherently asexual, dependent, frail, obsolete, senile, unproductive, and undesirable. Negative cultural constructions of old bodies are further reflected in and buttressed by masculinity and femininity ideals as well as societal assumptions concerning personal responsibility for health. Collectively, these cultural norms shape research in powerful ways as they lead to the avoidance of certain topics, taken-for-granted assumptions that are difficult to elicit or interrogate, and complex power dynamics between researchers and study participants. Reflecting on the intricacies of researching later life body image and embodiment, I offer some suggestions about how the challenges might be reframed as opportunities.

‘Man Is Ill Because He Is Badly Constructed’: Artaud, Klossowski and Deleuze in Search for the Earth Inside

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Dolphijn
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
The Body ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
And Performance

Starting with Antonin Artaud's radio play To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, this article analyses the ways in which Artaud's idea of the body without organs links up with various of his writings on the body and bodily theatre and with Deleuze and Guattari's later development of his ideas. Using Klossowski (or Klossowski's Nietzsche) to explain how the dominance of dialogue equals the dominance of God, I go on to examine how the Son (the facialised body), the Father (Language) and the Holy Spirit (Subjectification), need to be warded off in order to revitalize the body, reuniting it with ‘the earth’ it has been separated from. Artaud's writings on Balinese dancing and the Tarahumaran people pave the way for the new body to appear. Reconstructing the body through bodily practices, through religion and above all through art, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, we are introduced not only to new ways of thinking theatre and performance art, but to life itself.

The Space of Difference in Law: Inquests into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody

Somatechnics ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherene H. Razack
Keyword(s):  
Aboriginal People ◽  
The Body ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Canadian Society ◽  
Aboriginal Community ◽  
Police Custody ◽  
Homo Sacer ◽  
Clear Sign ◽  
A Site ◽  
Deaths In Custody

Paul Alphonse, a 67 year-old Aboriginal died in hospital while in police custody. A significant contributing factor to his death was that he was stomped on so hard that there was a boot print on his chest and several ribs were broken. His family alleged police brutality. The inquest into the death of Paul Alphonse offers an opportunity to explore the contemporary relationship between Aboriginal people and Canadian society and, significantly, how law operates as a site for managing that relationship. I suggest that we consider the boot print on Alphonse's chest and its significance at the inquest in these two different ways. First, although it cannot be traced to the boot of the arresting officer, we can examine the boot print as an event around which swirls Aboriginal/police relations in Williams Lake, both the specific relation between the arresting officer and Alphonse, and the wider relations between the Aboriginal community and the police. Second, the response to the boot print at the inquest sheds light on how law is a site for obscuring the violence in Aboriginal people's lives. A boot print on the chest of an Aboriginal man, a clear sign of violence, comes to mean little because Aboriginal bodies are considered violable – both prone to violence, and bodies that can be violated with impunity. Law, in this instance in the form of an inquest, stages Aboriginal abjection, installing Aboriginal bodies as too damaged to be helped and, simultaneously to harm. In this sense, the Aboriginal body is homo sacer, the body that maybe killed but not murdered. I propose that the construction of the Aboriginal body as inherently violable is required in order for settlers to become owners of the land.

Re-imagining Reproduction: Unsettling Metaphors in the History of Imperial Science and Commercial Surrogacy in India

Somatechnics ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalindi Vora
Keyword(s):  
Assisted Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Reproductive Technologies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Commercial Surrogacy ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
Travel Industry

This paper provides an analysis of how cultural notions of the body and kinship conveyed through Western medical technologies and practices in Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) bring together India's colonial history and its economic development through outsourcing, globalisation and instrumentalised notions of the reproductive body in transnational commercial surrogacy. Essential to this industry is the concept of the disembodied uterus that has arisen in scientific and medical practice, which allows for the logic of the ‘gestational carrier’ as a functional role in ART practices, and therefore in transnational medical fertility travel to India. Highlighting the instrumentalisation of the uterus as an alienable component of a body and subject – and therefore of women's bodies in surrogacy – helps elucidate some of the material and political stakes that accompany the growth of the fertility travel industry in India, where histories of privilege and difference converge. I conclude that the metaphors we use to structure our understanding of bodies and body parts impact how we imagine appropriate roles for people and their bodies in ways that are still deeply entangled with imperial histories of science, and these histories shape the contemporary disparities found in access to medical and legal protections among participants in transnational surrogacy arrangements.

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