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e-zine Issue #1: THE VAGINA AS AUTONOMOUS ZONE BLUD ZER0 Collective actively investigate socio-cultural debates within art & politics from a feminist perspective. Through live performance and online publications they challenge negative representations of women in society, particularly within the mainstream media in the UK. Their projects focus specifically on ways in which Live Art and performance art can reinforce positive feminist perspectives on the body, particularly the politics of the female body in the public domain. They launch online zines centered around these themes, each edition coinciding with a site-specific performance event. This E-Zine will be launched at BLUD ZER0 Collective's performance event 'The Vagina as Autonomous Zone' on 01/03/2013 at CAZ (Cornwall Autonomous Zone) BLUD ZER0 consider this zine a collection of research Materials, a gathering of the thoughts & processes of others surrounding, responding and engaging with the notion of the vagina as an autonomous zone. The document has been composed with image & text resting autonomously besides one another. This queering of format reflects the fluidity of the content and breadth of research included. www.bludzerocollective.tumblr.com CONTENTS 2 - WORKS 43 - BIBLIOGRAPHY 44 - CONTACT E-Zine compiled & curated by Poppy Jackson ANNA SADLER The Other Foreign Body Camera As Probe Video Still 2011 http://annasadler.com/ NOEMI BARRIOS Re-Action Pants Athens School of Fine Art 2009 http://aphrodite-project.eu/en/artists/barrios-104 'This is a personal remake of VALIE EXPORT Action Pants (Genital Panic). The previous moment, the instant where she cuts her trousers: I go into the porn cinema, with a gun on my hand, like her. I move forward through the central corridor until the screen. Leaving the gun next to me and looking into their eyes I start to cut out a hole in my pants with scissors. The practice is over, I leave the piece of trousers on the floor, I pick up the gun and pacing up and down through the aisles I leave the room.' ‘On probing one finds in liminality both positive and active qualities, especially where that “threshold” is protracted and becomes a “tunnel,” when the “liminal” becomes the “cunicular.” VICTOR TURNER ‘Active muscle, a moist channel of paradoxical qualities’ CAROLEE SCHNEEMAN Carolee Schneeman, Imaging Her Erotics; Essays, Interviews, Projects Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre; The Human Seriousness of Play, ROCIO BOLIVER Dando a Luz Bone Festival, Switzerland 2003 https://www.rocioboliver.com/ ALICE KEMP / GERMSEED Angels Of The North Woods Series 2012 www.germseed.lazaruscorporation.co.uk AMAE MYBODYISYOURBODYPROJECT - 'I will jump first' Live performed and broadcasted from the Birmingham City University, School of Art 2012 Backstage Performance stills Backstage http://www.mybodyisyourbodyproject.wordpress.com/ Male to Female Sexual Reassignment Operation. Since 2001 Amae has been investigating, through their art practice, the representation of the psychological tension that is created in the body that results from the influence of society. Their work also explores the theory of the Self, the perception of sexuality and the therapeutic influence of art in the construction of identity. For many artists their muses were the source of their inspiration and even the object of their desire and dreams. For Amae the muse is a woman in a man's body. Gaia grew up in a male body never thinking about herself as a man. As soon as she took her first step into the retail business, she was rejected by the company she worked for. Gaia is now 37 and she is still contemplating a sex change. Gaia is one person of many in this situation. Amae spotted her and felt close to her feelings to the extent that it developed an aesthetic which represents a merger between the artist and the muse. Many questions arise from this artistic coupling. Where will these identities lead in their support of each other? How can art be therapeutic in solving the challenges of the construction of an identity lived at the edge of social norms? ANNIE SPRINKLE Masturbating Onstage The Legend of the Ancient Sacred Prostitute Of all the things I’ve ever done in my life, this “performance” was the most important and enlightening. Here is some text about my infamous masturbation ritual, from my book Post Porn Modernist. I invite and encourage you to try doing this “performance” as well. Let me know how it goes. 1 Theater ushers go down the isles and offer each member of the audience a rattle made from plastic cups with rice and seeds inside them. They are invited to shake their rattles to the hypnotic sounds of Andrew McKenzie’s Hafler Trio. (Andrew made high-tech recordings of the sex sounds of my body, sampled them, and made them into an unusual piece of ‘music’ for the ritual, which are now available on a CD called Masturbatorium.) Most audience members shake their rattles vigorously, which can create a lot of energy and be very intense. Because I am wearing a wireless headset microphone, my breathing and other sounds are amplified. I proceed to awaken my body, to create pathways for sexual energy to flow through me by stretching, undulating, shaking, and breathing. I slather myself with scented massage oil, anoint my third eye with my menstrual blood (when available) which helps inspire psychic visions. With the vibrator I stimulate my lips, tongue, the back of my neck, my hara, the base of my spine, my anus and heart. Using deep, conscious, rhythmic breathing, I gather energy from the audience and the universe in general, inhale it up into my pussy, pull it up through my heart, and exhale it out the top of my head, giving it back to the audience and universe, continuously orbiting energy, giving and receiving alternately. When the time is right, I press the vibrator (on high) to my trusty clitoris, stimulate my Goddess spot (g-spot) with my magic dildo, and gradually lift off into another dimension. I am not in Kansas any more—or at Show World Center doing strip speak. It’s no fantasy. It’s a very real, intense, wild ride, a close encounter of the fourth kind. A bizarre, interactive art/life/sex experiment. The ritual comes to a climax, lights blackout, and there is silence. Lights and music gently come up. I remove my oily costume, false eyelashes and wig and sit naked on my altar, heart open, nurturing the feelings of the afterglow. Audience members are invited to either leave, or if they want, to stay and hang out. The Ritual I put on a costume that was designed from a dress I saw on an ancient granite statue of a Sumerian priestess. It is topless and bottomless. The stage is transformed into an altar, upon which are set gold candles and a copper bowl containing ghee and dried cow dung. With a match I light the cow dung. It burns in a beautiful, inspirational, aphrodisiac flame. To my right is a tray of objects—a loofa sponge, scented massage oil, tiger balm (to stimulate my erogenous zones), several dildos, course salt for psychic protection, items of personal meaning, plus something that ancient sacred prostitutes didn’t have, but luckily we have today: a tireless, strong, battery-operated vibrator. I tell the history of the ancient sacred prostitutes: “Women and sometimes men, from ancient cultures in Mesopotamia, Sumeria, Egypt and Greece, devoted their lives to learning the art of sexual ecstasy. Sex was very different for them than it is for most of us today. In the temples, the main elements of sex were prayer, healing, ritual, and meditation. It was believed that the best time to connect with the Divine, to get visions, and create miracles was when you were in a state of sexual ecstasy.” I cast a circle and make an invocation: “I call upon the spirit of the greatest sex experts and sexual healers that ever lived for their wisdom and guidance.” With each candle I light, I make a prayer, for example: a cure for AIDS, to find a house for rent on the beach for reasonable rent, better health for a friend in the hospital, etc. I invite audience members to make a wish for themselves. The idea is to then go into sexual ecstasy to take the prayers and wishes to the Divine, just as they did in the ancient days. My Notes About the Ritual As with any kind of sex, or any kind of performance, some days are better than others. Many variables influence the results: the type, shape, size, and feel of the theater, the particular audience, whether the audience is mostly men or women, whether it’s a weekday or weekend, what country I’m in, my head space and health, my technical crew, the moon, the weather, world news, and who knows what else. The intensity of masturbating on stage in front of hundreds of people brings up a kaleidoscope of feelings that get magnified onstage. Oftentimes, I feel strong, happy, compassionate, and powerful. Sometimes I feel sad, tired, angry, and vulnerable. I’ve discovered that any kind of feelings can co-exist with sexual ecstasy, which is the basis for my approach to sexual healing. Sometimes the experience is not about feelings but about physical sensation, or energy. Often I trance out and travel far; sometimes I feel like dead weight going nowhere. The key is to always try to practice acceptance of what’s there, or not there, and to have no expectations. So, do I have a REAL orgasm? This seems to be the foremost thing on many people’s minds and what members of the press so often focus upon. (When someone doesn’t like my show, they invariably say I faked an orgasm. And some people just assume that all sex workers fake orgasm.) Why people are so hung up on this point is rather odd and amusing to me. Having an orgasm was never the primary goal of this ritual. The ritual is about learning and teaching, about provoking thoughts and feelings, and I had no role models for public sex magic masturbation rituals. So when I started I didn’t really quite know how to be or what to do. It took a lot of practice and refining, and I made lots of mistakes. Once I tried flogging myself with a cat-o’-nine tails to stimulate my skin, which didn’t really work and must have looked pretty weird. I tried blindfolding myself during the afterglow part so I could stay in my erotic trance, because people would want to talk with me, but I found that it broke my connection with the audience. The camphor I used in the flame bowl to burn the cow dung gave me a horrible cough. My healing ritual was making me sick! (I switched to Duraflame.) Finally, I performed the masturbation ritual for thirty nights in a row in huge theaters of five hundred to nine hundred seats. It took enormous effort to fill those “containers” energetically, and I burned myself out to a crisp. That was the last time I did the ritual, and I’m still recovering! about entering a state of ecstasy in order to bring prayers and wishes to the Divine. It is about re-creating the feel of the ancient temples. I would like to address the orgasm question once and for all. Most of the times I performed the ritual, I experienced one or more types of orgasm; keep in mind that I have a more expanded concept of orgasm than most folks. With the use of the cool crystal dildo, I almost always had a vaginal, cervical, and/or G-spot orgasm (super easy for me). I also usually had some kind of breath or energy orgasm—that’s when a buildup of energy from the deep, rhythmic breathing is released, which feels similar to getting the chills. About half the time, I had a clitoral orgasm, and about one-third of the time I had a clitoral climax. For me these two are noticeably different. I experience clitoral orgasms as smallish orgasms that radiate through the pelvis area; it’s possible to have several or many. I experience clitoral climax as much more intense, starting in the clit, radiating throughout the pelvis, then shooting up through the entire torso and out the top of my head. With a clitoral climax usually comes a throat release of moans or screams. My clitoral orgasms are not as obvious as my clitoral climaxes. On approximately a dozen occasions I had what I call a full-body-mega-kundalinigasm, where ecstasy-electricity streamed throughout my entire body for several minutes. Let me tell you, nothing makes a girl feel more like a real live Goddess than a megakundalinigasm. Sometimes my orgasms were very subtle, and sometimes they were very intense. And sometimes I had no orgasms: at times my battery was empty, I didn’t feel much at all, and those times were an important part of the whole and made the performances all the more interesting and challenging. My goal in this ritual was to be authentic and be in the truth of the moment, whatever it was. I could see absolutely no point in faking an orgasm, and I never did. (The only time in my life I have ever faked orgasms was in my first few years in porno movies. Back then, I was not very orgasmic. We girls were expected to fake it on cue. Porn directors didn’t think that going for a real orgasm was important or worth taking time for. For that matter, in those days lots of people didn’t even believe women were biologically capable of having orgasms!) I wore a tiny wireless microphone very close to my mouth, so audience members could hear and feel the genuine quality of my orgasms. Over four years, the ritual changed enormously from demonstrative, wild, physical, animalistic, and loud to a more sensuous, subtle, gentle, and quiet performance. There were nights when I felt really beautiful and sexy, and nights when I felt clumsy and silly. After doing it for about two years, I became conscious of the deliciousness of nurturing the afterglow. After the music and energy of the ritual climaxed, the audience had the choice to leave the theater or to stay. Usually about a quarter of the audience would stay. I would fall into a deep, silent meditation and often go deeper into my trance. The atmosphere became incredibly sweet and heartfelt, and this was always my favorite part of the entire show. Contrary to what most people think, my motivation for masturbating onstage was not to turn people on, to get attention, or to get off on being an exhibitionist. I wish it were that simple. When so many people are witnessing you, it makes every little thing big and clear. I was taking something that’s usually done alone in the dark, putting it under a micro-scope, and shining beautiful theatrical light on it so we could all look at it together. The theater setting became a laboratory in which to experiment; sex became a microcosm for all of life. I learned a lot about how energy works, about how to do ritual (I never had much training), and about trance states. If I was feeling happy, it seemed like the whole audience was feeling happy. If I was feeling uptight, the audience seemed uptight. I learned about letting go, about attaining visions, and about being authentic and sensitive. I learned a lot about sexuality. It was always my greatest hope that people witnessing the masturbation ritual would get something out of it for themselves. Plus, I believe masturbation is an absolutely wonderful thing, and I wanted to promote it. Needless to say, this was the part of the show people either loved the most or hated the most. Some people were totally uncomfortable watching me. They became disgusted and even got angry. Some insisted that masturbation should only be done in private. Other people reported they felt love and compassion, received inspiration, had a realization, or had powerful feelings come up. Quite a few even reported having had spontaneous orgasmic experiences. Women’s tears were always the greatest compliment, and there were many. I learned more from doing this masturbation ritual than from anything I have ever done in my life, and I consider it my most important work to date. 'Legend of the Ancient Sacred Prostitute' was the climax of the one woman show, Post Porn Modernist, which Annie Sprinkle performed in 16 countries, from 1990 until 1995. Sprinkle will be directing a new version featuring three young porn stars of today. https://www.anniesprinkle.org/ INGRID BERTHON-MOINE Red is the Colour: Alison, Elena, Katya, Lee Series 2009 www.ingridberthonmoine.com 'The photographic portrait series Red Is The Colour invited women to pose in front of the camera without makeup and were solely presented with menstrual blood on their lips as if it were lipstick. These images expose the cultural expectations of cosmetics and female representation, reflecting upon ideas of media representation, societal pressure and sexual identity.' INGRID BERTHON-MOINE 'The most sensitive and vulnerable sexual parts of woman affected by touch are mucous membranes. Certainly this part remains generally invisible, and one could say that mucous touch is doubly invisible. But, in a culture which privileges looking over touching, to be approached in the internal mucous part of herself is perceived by a woman as being seen. And, by the way, we can note that our traditional medicine uses looking at as a means of curing more than other cultures.' LUCE IRIGARAY Towards the Sharing of an Invisible Touch BEAN Wondering Womb 2013 https://www.1lii.com/ NICOLA CANAVAN A Disappropriation, of Sorts Photo by Arto Polus 2011 www.nicolacanavan.com 'Britain’s first female porn director, Anna Span has won a historic victory with the passing of her DVD, ‘Women Love Porn’ which includes a woman clearly ejaculating. 'On initial submission to the British Board of Film Classification, the board asked for compulsory edits to remove the female ejaculation section, as they believed the woman to be urinating and argued therefore it fell foul of the Obscene Publications Act. Even though most countries worldwide which allow pornography, do not single out female as opposed to male, ejaculation for censoring, the BBFC historically do not believe in the phenomenon. They have refused to pass previous films such as Ben Dover’s Squirt Queens in May 2001, saying that they had not received a convincing enough argument to support the existence of FE.' 'Determined to put the record straight, Anna Span presented the BBFC with irrefutable scientific evidence in support of model DJ’s ability to ‘squirt,’ as it is known in the adult industry. Anna says; "I am really proud to have changed this outdated ruling and to have made a difference to women who experience this in their own lives throughout the UK. It was never fair that the BBFC dismissed their orgasms as urinary incontinence"' Quotes from: FIRST EVER UK RELEASE OF A FILM THAT CONTAINS FEMALE EJACULATION http://www.easyote.co.uk/ SLAVKA SVERAKOVA & SINEAD O'DONNELL A story of performance Slavka Sverakova and Sinead O'Donnell Interview Excerpts 2008 CIRCA Contemporary Art in Ireland SS: Your use of gold leaf in Underbelly - any particular reason? Sinéad O'Donnell: Backward, part 3, 2008, Nachlaot Neighbourhod, Jerusalem, Israel; courtesy the artist SS: In the evening of 20 September you made your performance in the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. You wrote to me: "I will have an oversized baloon up my dress, I will sit and apply gold leaf onto the outside of the dress, so that the bump underneath turns gradually gold from the outside, just the stomach area... I will have a piece of paper from my notebook in my knickers, because I have my period, and during the time of the performance, I also bleed... no one will see this, for me it is a way of documenting what I am doing from the point of view of my body..." Later on you actually did it. Have you changed anything in response to that place? Sinéad O'Donnell: Underbelly, Material Memory, part 5, 2008, Central Bus Station Tel Aviv, Israel; courtesy the artist SO'D: This time last year, I sat in my mother's kitchen drawing and I saw something gold and moving; it was a sensational feeling or experience, intuitive and imaginary, part of my personal process. Now I am sitting in the same kitchen at the same time of year, writing to Slavka about it, twelve months on. The images and visuals in my mind of something that needs to be gold, now, are getting stronger, becoming clearer with time. SS: You used red ribbons in a performance in Ireland and now again in Israel. Is there a connection? SO'D: In Co. Cavan as part of the Cavan Arts Festival, organised by Joe Keenan and curated by Bbeyond... The red ribbons were for threading of my tied-back hair and contrasted with the large red balloon that I had stuffed up my black full-of-holes jumper. I intended it as a reference to pregnancy and the current state of the abortion laws in Ireland, the suppression of women, and an action that referenced the ages of gender silence and violence that we are still dealing with. I continued this in Israel. SO'D: My intention was to push 'material' with 'duration' as action, that's what I settled on before I left Belfast. My research focuses on the visual in performance to study the coexistence of other women; it has and does also involve men as an other, my genderopposite. I amplify it and draw attention to this when I am in different geographical and social positions. Nothing is ever purely visual. Performance provokes that. It is how I communicate. The first performance in these situations is always the most difficult, you sort of move through a doorway and then into the unknown. After Underbelly in the bus station, I was in it. ... SO'D: I sat on a metal seat on a bench, in the arrival and departure area of the Central Bus Centre, Tel Aviv. I worked for two and half hours. I repeatedly glued sheets of gold leaf to a dress under which I held a large balloon creating an illusion of pregnancy. Gold leaf is a gentle material, a slow material, a beautiful material. A little wind came in from the door of the departure gate, where I was sitting. I could only see the top of the balloon inside my dress, a grey lycra dress that I bought in a pound shop somewhere with a thought that I might use it in some work because it looked industrial. I was more or less gold-leafing my sculptural stomach blindly, I could not see how the leaf was going; I was getting used to its unpredictable nature. RITA MARHAUG Norwegian Liquid Lofoten Islands 2010 RAQUEL PUNTO Hijxs de la mano Mexico 2012 Sinéad O'Donnell: Underbelly, Material Memory series, part 5, 2008, Central Bus Station, Tel Aviv, Israel; courtesy the artist I thought about how some people saw the performance and some saw the gold leaf. I wanted to make a monument, I wanted to make you, them, think more about this area of the stomach , about the superficial way that art and life can be. As I leafed my sculptural stomach, the baloon became not a baloon, but a place where I could put my past and my future, flipping back and forward from emotions to actionist decisions. Always threatening to burst. I did have a piece of paper in my knickers for the duration of this performance, using the trace of my menstrual cycle, as a way of measuring the time in my body. The seat was getting harder, the action was getting tougher, at one point there was a threshold in the action. The soldiers standing and watching me... they were as alien to me as I was to them. The glue I used was water-based and white, it looked like sperm running down the sides of my gold leafed belly, I could not see this until I saw the documentation. I then thought that the performance in a symbolic way without me ever considering it, had male or masculine value. I reached for the top of one of the glue bottles, it was a little blunt, eventually it pierced the baloon, which crashed into my own stomach all wet and sticky. For me, it was beautiful to feel the shape of the gold leaf that was so monumental become flattened and pressed onto my body for the first time. Until then it existed in a distance from my body, apart from my hands. I worked for two and half hours. Then I stopped. Slavka Sverakova & Sinead O'Donnell CIRCA Contemporary Art in Ireland 2008 - Editor Peter Fitzgerald http://www.recirca.com/cgi-bin/mysql/show_item.cgi?post_id=4586&type=articles 'As a painter, Vulva has never accepted the concept of “negative space”’ CAROLEE SCHNEEMAN Carolee Schneeman, Carolee Schneeman, Imaging Her Erotics; Essays, Interviews, Projects 'The difference between THING and PLACE’ CAROLEE SCHNEEMAN Carolee Schneeman, Imaging Her Erotics; Essays, Interviews, Projects 'A no-man's land betwixt and between' VICTOR TURNER Are there Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual and Drama? 'Loved the power pussy had. The way men were drawn to its mysteries, as if prospecting for gold in foreign territory. Sweet evil flower, instrument of torture and ecstacy, Delicate blossom, root of deception. Buried deep in its fleshy folds, so very many ancient secrets, a magic which has confounded men since it was banished from the Garden, full of voodoo who's magic turns men into monsters.' NICOLA CANAVAN I Miss You Photo: Ben Ponton 2010 https://www.nicolacanavan.com/ LYDIA LUNCH Paradoxia: A Predator's Diary PATRICIA MACCORMACK involuted and undone, creating what Deleuze in Difference and Repetition calls a larval sexuality – Becoming Vulva: Flesh, Fold, Infinity metamorphosis, toward encountering the self which is sensed but not wholly perceived, toward the immature and transformed at every synthesis, which acts not toward a thing but toward its imperceptibility within repetition where all elements within syntheses are dissipated, disoriented and reoriented with each turn, each folding and each alteration in the aspects of involution. Pleasure is Patriarchal and psychoanalytic discourses have oriented the dissemination of privilege and power folding with the planes of flesh. Beyond metaphor becoming-vulva enfleshes as fold every part of the which facilitate the dominance of male subjects through not selection of these particular subjects but flesh, every nerve every tissue mass, every artery, every organ, the unfolded skin as libidinally through the systems which structure society and ideology. This abstract system defaults to valuing provocative. In the event of thinking over knowing vulva is present but not present to itself, sensed but certain ‘masculine’ qualities and forecloses the possibility of the recognition of true difference by not perceived and known. Skin may be peeled, planes touched, parts intensified or moved around, describing alterity only as different from. Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari see the male subject as the corporeal minutia explored and every plane of the body reorganised into a new configuration with new most in need of deconstruction in order to facilitate the mobilization of ethics. Luce Irigaray describes function and meaning. Becoming-vulva makes skin-flesh of the world, not the self upon a becoming. the masculine structuration of society as phallologocentric, where knowledge and power are oriented around such qualities inherent in masculinity, such as singularity, solidity, visual total apprehension Becoming-vulva is, put simply, entering into an alliance with the fold, flesh and force of the and transcendental signification. Deleuze, Guattari and Irigaray have all offered alternatives – indeterminacy of this desiring disorganising organ. It is difficult to conceptualise ‘a’ vulva in the same Deleuze and Guattari call to the becoming-woman of dominant subjects, Irigaray describes the model way as one can conceive of ‘a’ penis. One can however have vulvic male genitalia. The use of the word of the two lips which exchanges the symbolic phallus for a feminine-genital model. In this article I will ‘cunt’ as opposed to ‘vulva’ comes as a response to ‘cunt’ being the limits of linguistic profanity in offer another model which negotiates the traditional antagonism between these two theoretical Western culture, where the actual signifier of non-specific female genitalia is exchanged for the suggestions. Using Deleuze’s work on ‘the fold’, I will posit ‘becoming-vulva’. The vulva mediates the signifier of a repulsive or offensive or, more resonant with its affinity with women, disorderly or feminine-genital elements of Irigaray’s two lips with Deleuze’s structure of the fold as one of relations disobedient subject, particularly male (essentially men most often call other men ‘cunts’, ‘pussies’ and between disparate perspectives and elements. Becoming-vulva is available to all subjects while ‘girls’ when they fail to fulfil an expectation). The transference from philologically smooth vulva to the resisting the vaguely essentializing fetishization of the term ‘woman’. As a metamorphic and volatile hard consonants of cunt converts the speaking of the word itself from the open vowel teeth to tongue structure becoming-vulva is necessarily experimental and thus this article will attempt to offer to the guttural and teeth to teeth. Can we redeem cunt from its expropriation from female anatomy to entrance points into other forms of becoming without demanding a prescriptive technique. majoritarian insult? Cunt doesn’t really refer to any body part – while it insinuates genitals it isn’t specific. Like the feminine it is vague, threatening, neither demarcated nor determines. The Anatomically defined, the vulva is the visible external female genitalia. By external what is meant is disobedience of the vulva is intimately related to the transgression of paradigms of the singular, the all that isn’t within the pelvis, so the vaginal aperture is included. Divergent from psychoanalysis and onomastic, the visual and the functional which the vulva performs. This paper uses the term ‘vulva’ as classical sculpture, external female vulva is visible only through exploration. It is two sets of lips, a navigation of the tensions between Deleuze and Guattari’s problematic term ‘woman’ with Irigaray’s clitoris, vagina, anus, g-spot and apocryphal elements. It is spreading out and convergence of labia. model of the two lips. I argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the demonic and Deleuze’s work It is the unity of the clitoris and its concealment of the urethra, a single organ as palimpsest. The on Leibniz and the fold can create fruitful political relations with feminist issues and Irigaray, vaginal ‘aperture’ is a volitional hole, both penetrable and ingurgitant. The general perinea, the acknowledging the imperative becomings of all subjects, their histories and memories, creating a indiscernibility between what constitutes the vulva (not the thigh, not the belly) and what constitutes structure which is not a term which describes becomings to come but an abstract experimental terrain the surrounds (not vulva) and the internal aspect of the vulva, which reflects the infinite potential which is a configuration of all subjects, here and now. found in the exploration of all internality (seen in such activities as speculum sex, fisting, and douche and enema play among other things) offer an organ far removed materially and conceptually from the Negotiating the pitfalls and problems in using the subject position woman I will argue that a vulvic hypostasis of the phallus. Being as a body is a formalisation of flesh into smaller forms which have paradigm can bypass these risks as it works directly (and only) with structure rather than any function and signification: head as seat of logic, face as signifying plane of subjectivity, race, age, phantasmatic notion of a particular kind of subject which has both been oppressed and denied genitals as signifier of gender and possible sexuality and sexual configurations in relation with other validation or self-authorisation of her own subjectivity. Just as phallologocentrism coalesce the subjects. The vulva is informal both as a non-reified biological form and as a mode of expression. dominance of the visible, the phantasy of transcendental truth incarnated in the solid, demarcated, Becoming investigates and exploits the relations between forces of subjugation and seeks tactics to objectifying, investigating and penetrating symbol of the phallus, so the vulva privileges fluidity, reorient strata of desire – how does a vulva desire differently to a phallus or a vagina or clitoris within connectivity, aspectual apprehension, tactility and the other senses. phallic paradigms? Vulvas are materially formed of multiple folds of flesh. The body becoming-vulva is By way of contextualising becoming-vulva I turn to the fruitful field created by relatively recent work (2001: 6), verbing the vagina in an (admittedly vaguely phallic in the persistence of the ‘vaginal’ by feminists who have negotiated Deleuze (both with and without Guattari) and Irigaray. Irigaray terminology) attempt toward female morphology as movement. Politically this would take becoming- uses the configuration of the two lips to elucidate connections between language, self as manifold, woman as always and urgently political in relation to relevance and immediate social issues. Grosz flesh and inevitable but not object activated becomings. points out this is where ‘multiplicities of (more or less) temporary alignments of segments’ (1994: 198) and segments in becoming-vulva aspects of folds. ‘It is thus no longer appropriate to ask what a text In order to touch himself, man needs an instrument; his hand, a woman’s body, language… and means, what it says, what is the structure of its interiority, how to interpret or decipher it. One must this self-caressing requires at least a minimum of activity. As for woman, she touches herself ask what it does.’ (Grosz, 1994: 199) Perspective could thus address singularity issues which we are without any need for mediation, and before there is any way to distinguish activity from all already complicit with and resistant to at once, our folds of negotiation and position with issues. The passivity. Woman “touches herself” all the time and moreover no-one can forbid her to do so, ‘woman’ of becoming-woman is no longer an instrument because t(he)y who enter becoming is as lost for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. (Irigaray: 1985: 24) on many fold-planes as volitional (without aim or destination) on others. Deleuze states ‘the world was an infinity of converging series, capable of being extended into each other, around unique Becoming-vulva, while taking its cue from Irigaray’s model of the two lips, concerns itself more with points…singularity is inflection and curve.’ (2001: 60, 90) When Irigaray seeks to have ‘another look’ temporality in its focus on mobilisation and in reference to space, to perspectival apprehension. The at psychoanalysis (1985: 34-67) she neither limits nor orients looking but invokes a look at a vulva is made of the fold of two lips and with every move the relation and orientation alter. That is, singularity from other points, points of others, which will be perspectival points and where the concept where Irigaray critiques the compulsion to either-ing: either illuminated or invisible, he or she, you or of the unique point is a matter of relevance of a particular singular structure apprehended from me and one or two it is the interstitial aspects of the neither and beyond one or two that becoming- multiple others. The gaze converges and negotiations form folds within gazes as with the unique vulva exploits on the way to pure immanent one-ness, and Deleuze’s input comes from extensive singularity they contemplate. Olkowski states ‘each perception is a complex multiplicity that includes relation. Deleuze’s fold extends and proliferates the potential futures of the lips. In addition to the not only the object perceived but the expanded circuits , the deeper and more distant regions of lips’ structure as creating a morphological pleasure in and for the self, the fold ‘is inseparable in itself memory.’ (1999: 114) Perhaps put very simply becoming-vulva is the convergence-action-potential from the power to affect other forces (spontaneity) and to be affected by others (receptivity’. aspect which navigates movement and demand from the two-lips. An issue, for example, which (Deleuze, 1999: 101) It is compelling at this stage to refer the reader to Deleuze’s pictorial sketch of concerns ‘real life’ women, could be a unique singularity and each subject inflects with that singularity Foucault’s foldings and inside of thought (1999: 120). The similarity between this image and the along divergent planes, not visible to each other, nor to themselves as a unified subject. Women, after undifferentiated vulva is astonishing. This diagram is made of four elements which could be oriented Deleuze, are not ‘things’ but continuity. Planes affect and synthesise with each other based on to feminist theory. Line of the outside refers to the vulva’s affectuation of and by other elements. inflective folding and refolding. Citing Blanchot and resonant with Irigaray Deleuze states this zone has become ‘intimacy and intrusion’ (1999: 120. Strategic zone refers to the powers of thought as creation over knowledge as pre-formed constitution masquerading as reflection, (always by the structure that allows it to emerge). Deleuze states these are fictions but no less capable of affectuation shifts in the folds. More satisfying than exchanging the masculine for the feminine or aspiration to equality (which allows only sameness) strategy encourages specific and singular aims for feminine liberation without essentializing woman. Strata in the fold is fold structure without hierarchy or the geo-atrophy constituted by history. The fold is the zone of subjectivation, being as the experiment in thought. It is also the point in the diagram which most resembles the vaginal aperture, and, perhaps sympathetically, Deleuze’s naming of the hole as voluminous manifold multiplicity shows that even the most traditional parts of female genitalia can – indeed must – be the very sites of reconfiguration. Beyond, (but not better than) Irigaray’s two lips, this aperture attacks the very site of paradigmatic oppression. There is no preferred site of liberation, this diagram is the vulva as all at once and not limited by an enclosing line around it limiting it to one form. Of course Deleuze does not associate his diagram with female genitalia, but I find the incidental collision of the two structures enticing. While many feminists working with Deleuze and French feminists point to the thousand tiny sexes of Deleuze’s thought, becoming-vulva attempts to extend Deleuze’s idea of ‘invagination as a pleating’ Becoming-vulva interrogates phallologocentrism as a structure beyond identity with which all subjects participate. This has a twofold effect – it recognises that participation rather than position in the structure is where reification and revolution is enacted and it shows the imperative availability of feminist structures for male subjects, thus revolt comes from all directions, not simply from those which are directly served by shifts in the structure. Unlike becoming-woman a vulva is a series of connexions between the various elements of female genitalia. Massumi (1994) emphasises the risk Deleuze and Guattari take as disregarding real lived conditions. Braidotti (1991), and Goulimari 1(999) urge a shift from becoming any ‘thing’, because of the problems in Deleuze and Guattari’s use of ‘woman’ to becoming-minoritarian which would catalyse all subjects based on context-historical and specific powers and risks of each unique project of becoming. Jardine (1986) isolates the focus on women as a result of their being in ‘limbo’, neither recognised as subjects nor allowed ownership of the fluidity and other transgressive elements inherent within their minoritarianism. The place of woman is in-between, the state is void, and the unfolding of this void from atrophied fetish – even if it is a poststructural fetish – to mobilised unfurling into infinity (creating the possibility of infinity by its movement within a space and through time). Becoming Vulva first appeared in New Formations 68: Autumn 2009 Continued on Page 34 VICTORIA GRAY 2009 https://www.victoriagray.co.uk/ AMANDA COOGAN Athena 2002 Photo: Jimmy Fay A Celtic mythological story tells of an army, losing battle, sending out their womenfolk with raised skirts to frighten away the enemy. https://www.amandacoogan.com/ ‘The undecideability of the limits of the female body’ ELIZABETH GROSZ http://www.amandacoogan.com/ Volatile Bodies; Towards a Corporeal Feminism 'Vaginas are pluralistic, individualistic, and have wills and intentions of their own' NAOMI WOLF Vagina: A New Biography THE FAMOUS LAUREN BARRI HOLSTEIN Splat! 2013 Photos: Jon Cartwright http://www.thefamousomg.com/ http://vimeo.com/thefamouslbh VICTORIA GRAY Performance material for durational performance at 'THE VAGINA AS AUTONOMOUS ZONE' E-Zine launch: KURT SCHWITTERS Ugly Girl 1943 https://www.victoriagray.co.uk/ 'Female morphology as movement’ PATRICIA MACCORMACK Becoming Vulva: Flesh, Fold, Infinity 'The vagina and the eye are the only two self-cleaning organs on the human body.' ROBERT TAYLOR MAIREAD FARRELL Mairéad Farrell on Dirty Protest. As well as excrement the women smeared their menstrual blood on the walls. 'The faeces and blood character[ized] the protest as primordial symbols. These symbols are invested with political power... Like speech acts, they have a performative character' 'The Armagh Dirty Protest is reminiscent of the kind of symbolic warfare enacted by women in Africa. Ardener and Ifeka-Moller have documented women's exposure of genitals as a powerful sexual insult used against men violating their dignity and rights. This display publicly states disrespect, denial of dominance and nonrecognition of authority.' 'While [women's] political identity as members of the IRA entailed at one level a cultural desexualization, and the Dirty Protest a personal defeminisation, at a deeper level the exposure of menstrual blood subverted this process by radically transforming the asexual bodies of "girls" into the sexualized bodies of women. In so doing, the menstrual blood became a symbol through which gender identity was reflected upon, bringing to the surface what had been otherwise erased.' 'The menstrual blood stood as a symbol of that reality excluded from language. In doing so it acted as a catalyst of cultural change, a vehicle of reflection and discussion BEGONIA about the meanings of gender difference in Northern ARETXAGA Ireland... The articulation of the symbol of menstrual blood with ongoing political and feminist discourses forced a Dirty Protest: Symbolic discussion among Nationalists and feminists alike on the Overdetermination & Gender in Northern exclusionary politics of the very categories of feminism and Ireland Ethnic Violence nationalism, which had a social effect.' ALL QUOTES: RITA MARHAUG Norwegian Liquid Belfast 2010 120 KG 1998 http://www.infraction.info/en/archives/infraction010/artistes/rita-marhaug-norva-ge.html ALEXANDRA UNGER 2012 https://www.alexandraunger.com/ 'The earliest artefacts of human prehistory featured vaginas' NAOMI WOLF Vagina: A New Biography 'I thought of the vagina in many ways – physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the sources of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation. I saw the vagina as a translucent chamber of which the serpent was an outward model: enlivened by its passage from the visible to the invisible, a spiralled coil ringed with the shape of desire and generative mysteries, attributes of both female and male sexual power.' CAROLEE SCHNEEMAN Carolee Schneeman, More Than Meat Joy; Performance Works and Selected Writings 'An endless, evolutionary slipping and sliding, hard against soft, form against matter, consciousness against unconsciousness, idea let loose in chaos…' ELIZABETH MANCHESTER Vagina Diologues RAQUEL PUNTO Contra Menstruaciones Mexico 2010 https://www.Raquelpunto.tumblr.com VICTORIA GRAY Vessel 2009 https://www.victoriagray.co.uk/ 'It is a space in flow, a form permanently in flux' ELIZABETH MANCHESTER Vagina Diologues 'The position of the in-between lacks a fundamental identity, lacks a form, a givenness, a nature. Yet it is that which facilitates, allows into being, all identities, all matter, all substance. It is itself a strange becoming' ELIZABETH GROSZ Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space 'The secret, interior space of the vagina is a place where things happen – a zone where matter moves in two directions, creating ripples of events on multiple levels that may be both microcosmic and macroscopic in their scale. This hidden place is a passage and a chamber, a zone of friction and sensation, and a starting point for several kinds of journey, one of which ends in a life.' ELIZABETH MANCHESTER Vagina Diologues 'The space of the in-between is that which is not a space, a space without boundaries of its own, which takes on and receives itself, its form, from the outside, which is not its outside (this would imply that it has a form) but whose form is the outside of the identity, not just of an other (for that would reduce the in-between to the role of object, not of space) but of others, whose relations of positivity define, by default, the space that is constituted as in-between.’ ELIZABETH GROSZ Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space ROCIO BOLIVER My vagina is bait for my hunt For the last twenty years I have been active in the actual art circuit. In 1992 I started my performance art career by reading my own porno/erotic texts, concentrating on criticizing the repression of /in women, from then on I find new mediums to devote myself to transgress limits, dig into human behaviour and disrupt the accepted reality. I’m a voracious hunter of human reactions; consumer and provocateur. Human beings want to feel. I make them feel deeply. I intend to show you the horrors within societies hidden lies. My field can be found in any space: the street, public places, wherever there are people, preferably with no references of me. I practice a constant situationism, disrupting daily routine. When facing the inability of thinking how to react, the most authentic truth is revealed. I take on sex topics because the world still shivers to them. I willingly break the conventional woman’s behaviour by empowering my sexuality. I was born a seductive Nabokovkian “Lolita”. My vagina is good bait for my hunt. My aesthetic is grotesque, in search of severity. I have lived censorship, scolding, fear and guilt, typical in a repressive society, so I started a kind of situationist anthropology throughout the world, searching for reactions of people onslaught by my vagina, therefore I have verified sex is STILL a universal Achilles’ heel. Rocio Boliver aka “La Congelada de Uva,” Mexican sex radical, writer, activist and media personality. https://www.rocioboliver.com/ REBECCA WEEKS BASIC SEX MAGIC - INSTRUCTIONS REASONS FOR USE Sex magic is particularly useful to address sexual blocks, teaching erotic self knowledge, physical healing, emotional healing, stress and tension, low self esteem, learning to cherish the self, bringing lovers closer together, and generally affecting positive change. Sex Magic can however be used to achieve any desired outcome. OPERATION STEP 1 - Identify your chosen site it should be safe, comfortable and secure. STEP 2 - Gather and arrange sufficient bedding, drinking water, comfortable warm clothes, incense, candles, music and objects that will help you to action the process in the chosen place. STEP 3 - Visualise a protective circle of light encapsulating the space you are working in, extend the light 360 beneath and above you. Casting a circle is a necessary safety precaution to contain the energy you raise and to keep out uninvited others. STEP 4 - Read the praise of the Goddess. Understand that you are welcoming her in, and that you are going to work with her. Praise the goddess, the most awesome of the goddesses. Let one revere the mistress of the peoples, the greatest of the Igigi. Praise Ishtar, the most awesome of the goddesses. Let us revere the queen of women, the greatest of the Igigi. She is their queen; they continually cause her commands to be executed. All of them bow down to her. They receive her light before her. Women and men indeed revere her. She is clothed in pleasure and love. She is laden with vitality, charm, and voluptuousness. Ishtar is clothed in pleasure and love. She is laden with vitality, charm, and voluptuousness. In their assembly her word is powerful; it is dominating. Before Anum their king she fully supports them. She rests in intelligence, cleverness, (and) wisdom. They take counsel together, she and her lord. In lips she is sweet; life is in her mouth. At her appearance rejoicing becomes full. She is glorious; veils are thrown over her head. Her figure is beautiful; her eyes are brilliant. Indeed they occupy the throne room together. In the divine chamber, the dwelling of joy, Before them the gods take their places. To their utterances their attention is turned. The goddess - with her there is counsel. The fate of everything she holds in her hand. At her glance there is created joy, Power, magnificence, the protecting deity and guardian spirit. She dwells in, she pays heed to compassion and friendliness. Besides, agreeableness she truly possesses. Be it slave, unattached girl, or mother, she preserves (her). One calls on her; among women one names her name. The king their favourite, beloved of their hearts, Magnificently offers to them his pure sacrifices. Ammiditana, as the pure offering of his hands, Brings before them fat oxen and gazelles. Who - to her greatness who can be equal? Strong, exalted, splendid are her decrees. Ishtar - to her greatness who can be equal? Strong, exalted, splendid are her decrees. By her orders she has subjected to him The four world regions at his feet; And the total of all peoples She has decided to attach them to his yoke. She is sought after among the gods; extraordinary is her station. Respected is her word; it is supreme over them. Ishtar among the gods, extraordinary is her station. Respected is her word; it is supreme over them. Akkadian hymn to Ishtar, translated by Ferris J. Stephens: Man, Myth and Magic. Vol.13.) It was written in the latter part of the First Dynasty of Babylon, approximately 1600 BC. From Anum, her consort, she has been pleased to ask for him An enduring, a long life. Many years of living, to Ammiditana She has granted, Ishtar has decided to give. STEP 5 - Pleasure yourself, it may take some time to relax and to begin to enjoy yourself and approach orgasm. STEP 6 - At the point of orgasm focus and release the energy for your chosen purpose. You may repeat this action. Be aware that you may become disorientated after prolonged activity and experience numbness, tingling, and spasming. This is normal and is temporary. STEP 7 - Conclude the activity by ceasing to pleasure yourself and by taking time to come back to a neutral state. This may take some time. STEP 8 - Give thanks to the Goddess and close the circle by visualising its opening. Slowly clear the site allowing time for disorientation, re-hydration and fatigue. RESULTS After following the steps you will arrive at a new relationship to yourself and the cosmos: o You will know that it is out of passion that faith is born. o When you surrender to your passion for happiness, for fulfilment, for truth, you will automatically connect to the source of life inside yourself. o You will feel infused with strength, with purpose, with something far greater than what you previously experienced as your self. o You will realize that faith has nothing to do with hope - it is a confidence, a knowingness that Universal Intelligence is working through you, as you. https://www.rebeccaweeks.co.uk/ IGGY AZALEA PU$$Y Lyrics Iggy iggy pussy illy Wetter than the amazon Taste this kitty Silly billy poppin pillys Smoke it like a swisher ... lick this philly Mold em ah' soak em ah' Hook em like crack After shock Molten ah' lava drop This should be outlawed. call me pac The illest on the planet Better play ya cards right mr gambit If you wanna hang here Aint no hammock Never, not better - law should ban it Never, no better - law should ban it I do it right, wit d.r.u.g.s understand it I do it right, now please sir pan it Left right back to the middle Head on swivel neck till I quivel Open ya mouth... Taste the rainbow taste my skittles ah! Pussy. WILLIAM HUNTER Engraving 1774 From The anatomy of the human gravid uterus exhibited in figures 'A Sadhu dressed like Goddess Kali during the three-day-long festival 1794 celebrated to mark the menstruation period of the goddess' http://kamakhyamandir.org/schedule/ambubasi-2/ RAQUEL PUNTO Masturbadora Mexico 2010 https://www.raquelpunto.tumblr.com/ 'The Menstruating Goddess' on the exterior wall of the Kamakhya temple in Guwahati' reproductivejusticenow.tumblr.com/post/39907008579/blood-magic You know bitches envy me Cause you can't get rid of me When you cum. I run. This cats got you mission me Bad boys get a mouth fulla pussy Aka listerne Here to make you lose your mind Gonna need sherlock holmes To solve your mystery I'm nastttyyy Baby what you thinking? Aka titanic So much wet will have yo ass sinking Treat that tongue like a bullet Give me head abe lincon This is so out this world But no you not dreamin' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9flnp3bzfY CATHY SMITH inside-out: speculating on the interior Queensland University of Technology, Australia Abstract: In this paper, I have speculated on the interior as a site and an idea of betweeness. Feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray (Irigaray 1999) has associated the concept of interior with dualist and gendered philosophies. Nevertheless, the interior as a site has offered many opportunities for artists and occupants to challenge how we inhabit and change architecture. In this paper, I will focus on a design project that involves experimental making and living as part of a subversive approach to architecture: suggesting that we might re-conceptualise ‘interior’ as the space of betweeness rather than the space of the contained. This paper, part of my ongoing doctoral research, has extended ideas about the interior that I explored in the 2003 IDEA journal and has reflected my personal experience of collaborative, experimental design practices. The purpose of my research is to explore the betweeness of spatial practice. Keywords: interior, architecture, betweeness interior as a philosophical idea Firstly, I will establish a conceptual framework for the idea of interior, which I will later use to critique my personal experience of design practice in interior sites. I have drawn from writings about space by two feminist philosophers, Luce Irigaray and Elizabeth Grosz. Both authors have associated interior space with being oppressed in dualist, gendered philosophy: both have sought alternative ways to think about space differently. For this reason, I believe their ideas are provocative for thinking about interior space and practice, focusing in particular on alternative approaches to the making of physical interior environments. According to Irigaray’s (1999) feminist critique of space, in the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger (1975) the interior has been reduced to a space associated with containment. In Heidegger’s writings, the concept of interior relies on a clear division between inside and outside, to the extent that the interior is a conceptual space that contains in an oppressive, negative way (Irigaray, 1999, pp. 95–96). Irigaray believes Heidegger reduced space to a singular construct by relating all of our interrelations with space and architecture to the overarching concept of Being. Heidegger has therefore constructed a ‘world’ that encloses and suppresses other kinds of thinking within his philosophy: ‘by organizing the parts of space into a single totality…man obtains an ‘interiority’ (Irigaray, 1999, p. 95). Consequently, Heidegger’s descriptions of architecture embody patriarchal and dualist thinking: the interior created by ‘his’ architectural envelope is an oppressive and exclusive space (Irigaray 1999, p. 95). In other words, the interior is inferior and limited by the architectural form that contains it. The only way to overcome this conceptual interiority is, for Irigaray, to redefine space through its interrelationship with time, birth and movement (Grosz, 2001, p. 157). The space created by the womb is, for Irigaray, the original space of the ‘maternal-feminine body’ (Grosz 2000, p. 263 ): a space associated with the gift of life, the passage of birth and a sharing of life between male and female (Grosz, 2001, p. 159). Grosz (2001) describes Irigaray’s interest in the interval or between as a way of acknowledging the difference denied in patriarchal thinking: the between refers to ‘...the movement or passage from one existence to another’ (Grosz, 2001, p. 157). The blurring of interior and exterior, for example, equally acknowledges both qualities while allowing for the sharing or merging reflected in the processes of birth. Grosz (2001) speculates on the implications of this thinking for architects and architecture, suggesting we might think beyond functional and fixed notions of space, to make: …architecture as envelope, which permits the passage from one space and position to another, rather than the containment of objects and functions in which each thing finds its rightful place. Building would not function as finished object but rather as spatial process, open to whatever use it may be put to in an indeterminate future, not as a container of solids but as a facilitator of flows: ‘volume without contour’, as Irigaray describes it in Speculum (Grosz, 2001, p. 165). interior as a physical site I believe Grosz’s and Irigaray’s thinking is provocative for the discipline of interior design, as it has highlighted how interior space is contained and constrained by the architectural envelope in philosophical writing. Grosz and Irigaray have also described how we can think of architecture as more than a space that contains – and, consequently, how interiors and interior objects can be more than that which is ‘contained’ by architecture. Grosz’ has also speculated on how this shift in thinking might affect architectural practice, suggesting that buildings might be less restrictive in terms of how they can be occupied. I have explored how designing might be enmeshed with building and occupying space in my doctoral research, and have used Grosz’s and Irigaray’s thinking to critique and re-conceptualise practice as a blurring of these activities. In this paper, I have focused on the alteration of an existing residence, Avebury St, which I have worked on for many years. Using Grosz’s and Irigaray’s thinking about interior space and containment, I have been able to reconceptualise the manipulation of spaces and objects inside a building as betweeness and blurring. The Avebury St project has reflected a blurring of both interior and exterior physical space and the processes of designing, making and occupying space. As a consequence, the architectural envelope has been physically and conceptually eroded through our experimental, collaborative designing of this project. Designing from the inside-out has provided my collaborators and I with an opportunity for practice denied in the restrictive, dualist practice of professional architecture. My family and I have extended the making of our personal home into a practice based in a broader social ritual and experimental construction, and as such, I believe the interior has become a space that interconnects rather than contains. Many artists have used the interior as a project site in which to question notions of containment and boundary: artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark (Diserens, 1993, p. 35; Ran-Moseley, 1995, p. 81), Andrea Zittell (Bartolucci, 2003, pp. 14–15) and Allan Wexler (Shulz, 1998, p. 46) have created experimental spaces and interior installations that reflect a questioning of how we inhabit space. Rather than being a site of containment, the interior has provided a site in which these artists might question the conceptual boundaries of building envelopes and spatial occupation. The Avebury St project has extended this approach into an everyday, family and collaborative, rather than artistic, context. Avebury St has involved the alteration of an existing, termite-eaten, one-bedroom house at West End. Unlike conventional architectural projects, my partner and I have lived in the site as part of the design and building process. As we do not have the budget to extend the building shell, we have focused on the interior and the materials and surfaces of the architectural envelope. My partner and I have struggled to accommodate myself and my family within a dilapidated and inadequate building structure, re-working existing and salvaged materials. Aided by my partner’s cabinetmaking and building skills, we have developed an approach to the building that resembles the experimental making of Do-It-Yourself projects and installation art rather than professional design practice. In conventional architectural and design practice, I developed a design concept for the client: I produced drawings of the proposal that represented the qualities of the design and which could be used for building approval and costing; I then arranged for a builder to construct the design on behalf of the client. In professional practice, each activity of designing, building and occupation is normally performed by separate entities and as distinct stages. The architect or interior designer is also regarded as the design ‘author’, such that the builder and building occupant become peripheral to the design process. This has resulted in Western architectural practice reflecting a segregated approach to society and building (Willis, 1999, pp. 206–209). At Avebury St, we have taken a more experimental approach, exploring space through simultaneous building and inhabitation, thus ‘developing the concept from the making’ (Guedes, 2004) rather than through drawing. We have valued the physical and conceptual contributions of friends, colleagues and visitors as an essential aspect of the experimental making and living, and, most importantly, the design process. Projects such as Avebury St can help us ‘rethink’ the interior as a blurring of physical and conceptual boundaries of space: Irigaray’s ‘volume without contour’ (Grosz, 2001, p. 165). a provisional life: the ephemeral nature of interiors In the following sections, I have highlighted four important issues of making the Avebury St interior that contribute to its conceptual betweeness. The first issue relates to the provisional nature of designing. We have treated our alterations at Avebury St as built propositions about how we might live in space. These propositions in turn generate subsequent questions which we investigate through altering our environments. This reflects the idea that building is a process of becoming, rather than producing a finite, finished object: acknowledging that life is provisional and experimental to some degree (Brand, 1994, p. 23; Willis, 1999, p. 114). We have treated spaces, their uses and the objects in them as ephemeral installations: for example, a walk-in wardrobe has been transformed into several different uses including study, bedroom, dining room, play space, and a library / office. Termite-eaten walls were removed, and then replaced with walls made of shelves. We reinvent the space, and it reinvents how we live through simultaneous designing, making and occupation. architectural envelope as interior objects Interior objects and decorations are often seen as unnecessary and inferior to the quality of space and function defined by architecture (Miles, 2000, p. 80). Objects exist in space: architecture makes space. By re-appropriating standard interior objects and materials as architectural elements, we have challenged the boundaries of what constitutes the architectural envelope and its internal and external limits. For example, objects that once sat inside space (IKEA bookshelves, timber bath mats) have become interior walls and external security screens. By using objects in different ways, Rendell (1998) believes that we can reimagine how the world defines us, and therefore the construct of what is outside (world) and what is inside (us) (p. 245). Objects and spaces are no longer associated with the singular functions they were originally allocated – cupboards might be for storage, define rooms inside the building, and frame views of the landscape outside the building. I believe when interior objects can become and define the quality of spatial enclosure, the interior is no longer bounded by the structure of architecture. material re-invention Similarly, working with found and recycled materials on site helps architects and designers to be connected with the social and material conditions of architecture (Willis, 1999, p. 115): materials become part of the ‘story’ and the continuity of a place. In professional practice in Western societies, architects and designers develop concepts away from the site and construction using drawings and abstract ideas about materials (Robbins, 1994; Willis, 1999). At Avebury St, designing and materials were blurred, because designs were tested at full-scale on site using the materials salvaged from local construction site bins and demolition shops. We used drawing as an active part of our making on site, rather than the abstract representation of ideas. Materials were also salvaged from the existing building. We demolished non-structural timber walls and lining to open up interior spaces: later transforming the material into timber battens forming internal and external screen walls. undoing edges: surface as a blurring between interior and exterior Recognising that ‘a border has thickness and edges’ (Hill, 1998, p. 150), we have treated the architectural envelope as a space that contributes to both the internal and external building quality. We replaced solid external wall cladding with layers of translucent, transparent and ‘broken’ materials like polycarbonate sheeting and recycled timber boards. We also re-made existing window and door openings with new joinery, awnings and vertical screens. Both strategies have created new transitional zones that physically and visually blur interior and exterior space while working with the existing architectural volume. By removing existing, non-structural walls, we have also enabled all internal rooms and spaces to have views through each other, and through the new thresholds, to soft or green landscapes. The existing house was once defined by solid materials and small internal spaces, so that we were contained by the building fabric. By re-constructing the interior and its edge materials, the interior has become a space of conceptual and physical blurring with the external landscape. redefining making as betweeness For social theorist Tanya Titchkosky (1996), betweeness refers to a state of blurring, a transitional condition involving people coming to terms with their place in the world. We could also describe the process of designing at Avebury St as betweeness. In professional practice, professionals ‘design’ and builders ‘make’. At Avebury St, we have extended the concept of making to embrace everyday social activities inside the house as well as conventional construction work. Making has therefore included: conceptual and physical contributions by friends, neighbours and visitors; repairing termite-eaten structure; building of furniture installations, screens and stairs; and painting and decorating. According to local building regulations, this work may be interpreted as building maintenance rather than new building work. We may not often consider maintaining building materials, furniture and interiors as design or art practice (Morgan, 1998, p. 114), yet I believe this collaborative design-and-making reflects the potential for practice to be simultaneously driven by the social, ethical and experimental aspects of architecture. Our friends and colleagues have valued the opportunity to participate in the project (Brisbin & Tocker, 2003; McMahon, 2003): revealing the potential of an ‘above-subsistence sociality’ (Grosz 2001, p. 165) beyond the functional mandates of commercial architectural practice. Avebury St has recently become a more ‘public’ space through two changes in circumstances: the expansion of the household to accommodate our child, and mother/mother in-law: and the participation in the Not for Sale public art project, selected to be part of the Art and Arch Infinite exhibition in September – October 2004. This art project involved other artists and extended from our negative experiences of real estate in West End: our proposal involved the installation of re-coded real estate signs in front of the properties of project participants around the suburb. Our group did not proceed with the installation due to the onerous public liability placed on the participants. Nevertheless, the proposal has helped our project become part of a broader social practice of people, materials, places and place-making politics. summary: interior as betweeness What are the implications of experimental projects like Avebury St for architecture and design? These projects demonstrate that by challenging the conceptual, qualitative and physical boundaries associated with architectural envelopes, we can redefine the concept of interior from being contained to betweeness. This redefinition highlights a number of issues for design practice. Firstly, our approach shows how space can be made to reflect the provisional, ephemeral and experimental nature of life. The participants and I have been able to design in collaborative, experimental ways denied in commercially-orientated professional practice, segregated from the processes of making and building occupation. Small, interiorscaled objects and cladding materials have provided opportunities for experimental building without the safety issues associated with alterations to building structure. Furthermore, interior elements, cladding materials and non-structural installations have enabled us to reconnect the interior to external landscape, such that interior is neither secondary to nor limited by the existing architectural form. We should think of the interior as more than an empty fitout space, a container to be filled by our ‘interior design’, as this implies that the interior is defined by and secondary to architecture. Instead, we might think of interior as a site of possibilities for making, occupying and most importantly, generating architecture from the inside-out. In my professional practice experience, interior designing was seen as an activity that either happened within, or in opposition to, the framework established by architectural structure and master planning. However, this study has shown that interior space can be re-made and re-imagined beyond the conceptual categories of interior / exterior space, structure, decoration and fitout. Daniel Willis (1999) has stated that activities that are different to professional practice, such as experimental building, help to rekindle the imaginative, material and social dimensions of architecture so easily lost within the complexities of the commercial world (p. 203). Avebury St is an example of one such practice. As an educator, I believe design students need opportunities for designing through experimental making, to show how architecture can be made as more than a discrete form or container, and how the interconnections of people, materials and sites can generate space. These approaches require a significant investment of time and resources. An excessive degree of change in both life and space can be emotionally and physically demanding on the physical occupants, as highlighted by the project participants: at Avebury St, my family and I have struggled with limited finances, internal space, materials, time and labour. Nevertheless, if we had approached the project in a conventional architectural manner by extending and altering the existing building volume according to a preconceived plan, we would have limited our people-space interactions to the dictates of the architectural form - thus becoming ‘contained’ by the architecture. Projects like Avebury St provide opportunities for designers and architects that are unlike conventional practice, and thus disclose the social and conceptual betweeness of architecture: in these projects, the interior provides the medium through which we reveal the social, collaborative and ephemeral aspects of space that are repressed in conventional design practice. inside-out: speculating on the interior References 'The Sheela-na-gig 'embodies a Bartolucci, M. (2003). Living Large in Small Spaces. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd. between, threshold space and Brand, S. (1994). How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built. New York: Penguin therefore refuses to be categorised. Books Ltd. She contains the energy of things Brisbin, C. & Tocker, K. (2003). Interview about Avebury St with Cathy Smith. Brisbane. Diserens, C. (1993). Gordon Matta-Clark. Art and Design Profile, 30, 34–41. coming together’ Grosz, E. (2000). Architectures of Excess. Anymore. C. C. Davidson. New York: Anyone Corporation, 9, 260–266. KATHRYN PRICE NICDHAN Grosz, E. (2001). Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Sila na Geige; Sheela-na-Gig & Sacred Space Guedes, D. (2004). Personal conversation about the Avebury St project with Cathy Smith. http://www.bandia.net/sheela/ Brisbane. Heidegger, M. (1975). Hofstadter, A. (Trans.). Building dwelling thinking. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 143–161. 102 Hill, J. (1998). An other architect. In Hill, J. (Ed.). Occupying Architecture. London: Routledge, 135–159. Irigaray, L. (1999). Mader, M. B. (Trans.). The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger. Austin: University of Texas Press. McMahon, W. (2003). Interview about Avebury St. with Cathy Smith. Brisbane. Miles, M. (2000). The Uses of Decoration: Essays in the Architectural Everyday. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Morgan, R. C. (1998). The End of the Art World. New York: Allworth Press. Ran-Moseley, F. (1995). Pre-Occupations and Occupations of Space; Towards a Definition of Installation Art. Graduate Division of Queens College of New York, Master of Arts in Art History. New York: The City University of New York. Rendell, J. (1998). doing it, (un)doing it, (over)doing it yourself. In Hill, J. (Ed.). Occupying Architecture. London: Routledge, 229–246. Robbins, E. (1994). Why Architects Draw. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Shulz, B. (Ed.). (1998). Allan Wexler. GG Portfolio. Barcelona: GG Portfolio. Titchkosky, T. L. (1996). The Primacy of Between-ness: A Hermeneutics of Marginality and Art. Graduate Programme in Sociology, Doctor of Philosophy. North York: York University. Willis, D. (1999). The Emerald City And Other Essays on the Architectural Imagination. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Figure 7: Edges, materials, protrusions, 2004. (Photography: Matthew Dixon Cathy Smith, First Published in IDEA Journal, Australia 2004 'Figures express a very common practice rubbing the sacred centre of ancient feminine power itself, the vulva, and it is probable that all Sheelas, or those within reach of pilgrims that is, would have been touched or rubbed in this way. The power of the actual dust form the figure was held to have special healing powers.' JACK ROBERTS Sheela-Na-Gigs https://www.geocities.ws/gagdaclt/sheela.html 'There is something more to their symbology than just reproductivity. The majority are shown either holding, touching or pulling apart the vagina, accentuating focus on this part of the anatomy and when we look at what they are pointing to we are surprized to see that the sexual organs are often shown in rather startling detail. Sheela-na-Gigs are essentially symbolic representations, stylistic rather than representational, but researchers have often commented on this careful portrayal of the part of the genital anatomy not directly involved in reproduction at all, such as the clitoris and the structure of the labia, in some even the anus." JACK ROBERTS SHEELA-NA-GIG Kilpeck, Herefordshire Kilsarkan, Co. Kerry Sheela-Na-Gigs https://www.geocities.ws/gagdaclt/sheela.html 'Voluminous manifold multiplicity’ PATRICIA MACORMACK Becoming Vulva: Flesh, Fold, Infinity’ SOOZY ROBERTS Feather Red Tactile Bosh, 2010 http://www.facebook.com/pages/ Soozy-Roberts/119180554800410 'Vulva strips naked, fills her mouth and cunt with paintbrushes' CAROLEE SCHNEEMAN 'Deterritorialized space' ROSI BRAIDOTTI Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory Carolee Schneeman, Imaging Her Erotics; Essays, Interviews, Projects 'I’m not sure science has the tools yet to understand the energy potential of this doorway within and how women have yet to embody it in a collective way.' TAMI KENT How Emotions Get Stored in the Vagina - A Responce to Naomi Wolf from Tami Kent BEAN 2012 https://www.1lii.com/ 'I’ve been shocked by the level of disconnect to the vagina and womb and lack of truly embodying the capacity of this creative space. It led me on my own search and my desire to put words around how to come back to this center... Every one of us needs to make the journey to discover the biography we are carrying and choose what we intend to carry forward.' TAMI KENT How Emotions Get Stored in the Vagina - A Responce to Naomi Wolf from Tami Kent RAQUEL PUNTO Contra Concepcion Mexico 2010 https://www.raquelpunto.tumblr.com/ POPPY JACKSON Nest Bruno Glint, London 2012 https://www.poppyjackson.yolasite.com/ Photos by: MARCO BERARDI https://bmarco.com/ ‘Not fluidity without boundaries but acute awareness of the non-fixity of boundaries’ ROSI BRAIDOTTI Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory NEST - MY BATAILLE 2012 Performance in response to 'The Eye' by George Bataille ACTIONS: Audience enters space Begin reading text (thin tissue paper with text on wasps nest building, mating and larvae maintaining activities) Break eggs on back of neck - eggs run down neck/arms/hair, fall between legs onto text Continue reading what can be seen of text Pour, sugar, margarine, and other remaining cake ingredients on back of neck - build up on body and between legs obliterating the text Continue reading text until no longer possible Tip gold leaf over back of neck - sticks to ingredients on body/hair and falls between legs Light candles - plant into mess and text debris between legs in a '0' shape Stand, put wine glass between legs Pour red wine over hair - move body so wine channelled into glass between legs Move legs apart - full glass falls to the floor Remaining with legs apart, take penny out of vagina and drop onto pile of ingredients on the floor Leave space DELPHA HUDSON WEARING THE TROUSERS MAKES THE BABY COME Which voice can I use today? There are many. They rush in polyvocity and velocity to glosserating heterophony. Let’s talk about my ‘angel in the house’ who died some time ago. Woolf described her, she was ‘intensely sympathetic…. she was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg, if there was a draught she sat in it – in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others……’ (Woolf in On Women and Writing, 1979, ed Michele Barrett) Woman is neither closed nor open, indefinite, unfinished, infinite, form is never complete in her. The incompleteness of her form, her morphology, allows her to become something else at any moment. Who am I? I am plenary/multiple/counting and translating this tiny grey braille, I read the stretching and contorting , like elastic contracted back now. I am writing my body as it has been written upon, as it has been written on for me. I am the belly, caught up in faster and faster, whirling’s, swirlings until matter shatters and falls to dust…. Oh THAT me. That not very autonomous, ME, still makes an appearance, just for the sake of peace and quiet but the real problem still, is for women to tell the ‘truth about a body’. The stories of my intimate female parts become those of others….My four grown children are long departed, but my body is still scarred from those sudden and not-so-sudden exits. Very sudden in my daughter’s case as she ricocheted and ripped from with such force, that the bed became an operating table and without anaesthetic my other lips were sewn back together as my other lips moved in agony to pain more intense than the birth itself. POSTPARTUM: the aftermath is as intense as the mending, and bringing back together than the PARTUM itself which is rewarded by the sensation of the head moving through you, crowning, and glorious release. I am the breast from which the babies held on with all tenacity to feed and live, whilst I hold on with all tenacity to let them, clenching teeth and resolve, not to give in . Like childbirth, writing, is the moment of letting go, then post-haste, post-event, revisiting, reading, correcting and fixing the things you said. Utterance, enunciation, fine, but painful as you consider your audience and the meaning that you intend that moment to have, knowing meaning is never healed. Texts remain, create dialogues, fugues, interruptions – they become many things. It is a moment of becoming always. So I am plenary/multiple/counting and translating this tiny grey braille, I read the stretching and contorting , like elastic contracted back now. I am writing my body as it has been written upon, as it has been written on for me. WEARING THE TROUSERS MAKES THE BABY COME: a phrase used to describe how to make the baby come out in childbirth, sometimes trousers were actually placed on the woman in childbirth to draw the baby out . SKIN:. What you see is containment. My body is encased. Encased by expectation, supposition, histories, stories, myths, fallacies. The skin is the blank canvas onto which these things are written. These things are projected. The text I weave is woven with the tension of the body lived and the body inscribed – what you have inscribed, what you have read. Can you read these veins? Here the skin is not thick enough to hide the words. It is pushed aside, by blood that rushes, gasps, providing oxygen for two not one. It speaks of the weight of the womb bearing down on leaden legs that stumbled on, padded on, quietly, up and down, waiting for the day to break, waiting for the child to finally be silent, waiting for sleep. Dragging this body to their command, to be vertical when every sinew and cell revolts. I hear their cries now. My ears, conicle constructs, still keening to check every child’s cry. A certain pitch. No, it is not his. Like Pavlov’s dog this head is finely tuned, finely trained. A breath, a cry, a murmur, a scream, the pain, the joy, inextricable, like some story-struck, hospital drama. But let me wear the trousers. I am the womb engorged, growing, then contracting back in pain. After pain. After the Madonna? After Goya? After identity? My blood boils, runs and ceases. Shall I set myself apart until my issue has stopped? Can I talk with the lips of lips? Perhaps I cannot name the name, the places…woman is the place, the whole of the place where she cannot appropriate herself as such. These two hips sever me from myself, from the past, from the world of objects, from my offspring, from the fruit of my womb. They were strong now painful, I feel them worn down by the weight of carrying small, large babies, children. Two at once, and one in the middle. But I am strong I can bear it, I said. These two arms cradled, pushed, rocked, pulled, teased, bore. They cannot sublime themselves to one term, generic or specific. They are multiple.. What I desire is ‘autonomous ideality’. I do not want to be reduced to a fiction, or empty gestures of enforced everydayness, to a single or plural image, to a mechanism, or a dream to a shade or even a ghost. I am not unified in my insistence. I want words to envelop me, cover me, assist me from passing back from interior to exterior. I want to situate myself in identities: loved, revered, idolized mother, a shimmering chimera of ‘good enough mother’, super-woman, in-between nothing, a multi-headed hated, abhorred beast, life-giver, gushing writer in blood. (Based on an original text used for a video-performance work, of the same title 2002, where I coated my body in lard.) I DREAMT LAST NIGHT I touched myself, and there were teeth, just there at the entrance. There were two rows of tiny pointed brittle teeth, perfectly curved like those in a fish’s mouth. Almost like a tiny trap. I was not afraid, just curious. Were they there to stop intruders to my deepest darkest place? Were they a warning? Or to create friction? Some friction, even between parts of our- selves, our bodies, creates frisson, frippery, fritterllery or maybe fiction. It IS really hard to tell the truth about a body. PAULINE AMOS The International Menopausal Woman I AM AN INTERNATIONAL MENOPAUSAL WOMAN And I am free Menopause is the new freedom POPPY JACKSON The strength of The International Menopausal Woman is celebrated. Zero PAULINE AMOS The Blood Works series:: New York 2012 https://www.poppyjackson.yolasite.com/ The Last Period Menstrual Blood drawings and collage GABRIELLA DARIS The International Menopausal Woman Photo: Molly Gibson Blood Painting Performance Forthcoming performance http://www.amosartworks.com Lop Lop 2008 AMELIA ABRAHAM HEARTBREAK LAUNDERETTE The East London Fawcett group have recently launched a campaign exploring celebrity breakup culture and the subsequent portrayal of female role models in the media. In a time when Caitlin Moran’s “feminism for the masses” meets the same audience that trawl (not trollunfortunately) the labyrinthine HTML of the Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame, it seems poignant to ask why the name-calling and pigeon-holing that sites likes this perpetuate, along with tabloids, women’s magazines and celebrity gossip columns, goes largely unchallenged. Why do male celebrities so often escape public break-ups unscathed, while women wind up denigrated by some all-too familiar negative stereotype? Where do these categories come from? Why are they so repeatedly assigned? And what are their effects on a gossip-hungry readership? The title “Heartbreak Launderette” refers (in part) to the name of a recently launched East London art exhibition. The show, realised by not-for-profit arts organization Pamphlet (www.pmphlt.com) is a permanent installation in a working East-End launderette, featuring over forty artists’ responses to the theme of a broken heart. The exhibition's curator, Sienna Murdoch, found that women submitted a clear majority of the responses received, 116 of 150. When word of this garnered intrigue from local feminist organisation the East London Fawcett group (ELF), to which I belong, we suggested incorporating the issues raised by such an alarming statistic into the event itself, and finding a way to self-reflexively explore why women apparently engage with “heartbreak” and “breakups” more so than men. “Heartbreak Launderette” serves as a metaphor for the public exposure of persona languish, the airing of one’s dirty laundry as it were. For ELF, the tabloid’s portrayal of celebrity breakups immediately sprung to mind, a sphere in which women seem to be laden with the weight of the blame and pain, at least via the media’s mediation. One need only glance upon a magazine stand, log in to twitter, or pick up a tabloid newspaper to encounter images of grieving or guilty women, negatively stereotyped as the pitifully lonely, the cheating “whore”, the psychologically unstable, or the “bitch”. This tendency often leaves a negative representation of the female as both the cause and effect of the break-up. Acknowledging this, and drawing a link to Pamphlet’s findings, ELF contributed to the exhibition by placing takeaway, D-I-Y, zine-style reading materials in the launderette. These featured provocative articles, exemplar twitter slurs, and even an etymological glossary of terms used to slander women in the media, collectively illustrating just how rife this culture has become (you can view these handouts here - http://www.mrsite.co.uk/miriamimages/heartbreakreading.pdf). One thing became especially clear; the media’s vendetta against certain female role models manifests itself via specific labels and recurrent tropes, the media a stage upon which famous women are regularly cast into two-dimensional and degrading roles. By trawling online archives of tabloid celebrity break-up coverage, I found that the mainstream media tends to polarize women into two, restrictive categories; the chaste victim and the homewrecking hussy. The Jennifer Aniston-Brangelina debacle is exemplar, the narrative familiarly evoking Freud’s Madonna-Whore model in the way that it played out across the papers; Jennifer was the respectable and faithful partner for whom Brad could not maintain fidelity, for he was inevitably inclined to abandon her for the debased yet tempting whore, Angelina. Brad cannot, of course, be held responsible, because he was simply acting on Oedipal castration fears, but we won’t go into that, because the man’s behaviour is never to be dwelled upon. So instead we concern ourselves with Jennifer; what happened to her? She became the poster girl for singles everywhere, pigeonholed as the tragic victim before morphing into “desperate Jen”, her body clock speedily ticking away while she roamed LA for a man. As Hadley Freeman put it in The Guardian, Jen encapsulated “that media construct that proved so useful for insinuating that any woman is a failure, no matter how brilliant her life appears to be, if she INVERTED SPORT Cheryl Cole Upskirt Pic Shock 2012 doesn’t have a husband and seven children” (16.08.2012). No matter how many times Jen assured the press that she was happy, it was assumed that she was lonely; how could she not be, without a good man to take care of her? From maltreated girl-next-door to mad spinster-downthe-street, Jen was transformed from one disempowered female stereotype to another. Yet, better these archetypes perhaps, than “the man-stealing whore”, as Angelina was branded, seemingly due to an anxiety over her general sex appeal rather than any concrete evidence that her and Brad had an affair. It’s a blame game, what I perceive as a punitive reaction to Angie’s hypersexual image, which was shaped by her past behaviour (e.g. two previous marriages and open bisexuality) and probably bolstered by her continuous confidence. Angie’s vilification might, more recently, be termed “slut-shaming”, loosely defined as “the act of making a woman feel guilty or inferior for engaging in certain sexual behaviours that violate traditional gender expectations. These can include; having a large number of sex partners, having sexual relations outside marriage, having casual sexual relations, or acting or dressing in a way that is deemed excessively sexual” (-Wikipedia). Why is this age-old, but newly termed, “slut-shaming” notably specific to women? Likely because men rarely receive the same treatment, Ashton Kutcher took little flack for having an affair recently, and when do we hear One Direction’s exploits criticised? The idea of this gender inequality, men more free to enact sexual autonomy and freedom than women, seems outdated. Yet evidence of it’s perseverance comes from the vocabulary still used to persecute famous women (and all women), which tends to stem from pejorative semantics (“slut”, “whore”, “hussy”, “slag”), verses the language used to describe sexually liberal men, which tends to hold altogether more positive connotations, often relating to sport (“stud”, “player”, “baller”). By continuing to use this language, the media contributes to a double standard in what is deemed appropriate sexual behaviour for men and women by our society at large. Another particularly illustrative instance of this so-called “slut-shaming” came as a consequence of Kristen Stewart’s infidelity to Robert Pattinson last year, after which she was vilified to an extent that, for me, conjured Elizabeth Proctor in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Pattinson fans the world over launched a Twitter vendetta against Stewart, calling her a “homewrecker” and a “slut”. In a comedy sketch satirising this public outcry, Will Ferrel branded Kristen a “trampire”. Regardless of whether or not it was throwaway comment made in jest, America soon latched on; celebrity columns adopted the mantle and `“Kristen Stewart is a trampire” t-shirts became available to buy online for the sartorially sexist everywhere. The term “Tramp”, pertaining to “a disreputable woman”, originally stems from etymological connotations of walking and wandering, thus “tramp” as a dysphemism against women insinuates that they can have too much mobility or agency. Combine this with “Vampire”, an allusion to Kristen’s acting career, and you’ve got what speaks to me at least, as a portmanteau which succinctly embodies the cause of most slutshaming, a social insecurity about sexually autonomous and successful women. Break-ups aside for a second, an obvious example of a social anxiety over sexually assertive women in a dominant position (that is, world domination, here) would be Madonna and Lady Gaga, who often get placed in the “bitch” category. As Madonnaresponded, “I'm tough, I'm ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.” And as Lady Gaga sings in “The Queen”, “Whenever I start feeling strong, I’m called a bitch in the night”. I think we need to ask; do these women, with their millions of dollars and twitter followers, threaten the traditional power structures of patriarchal hierarchy? It seems another popular methodology for undermining these women’s sexual behaviour and success is to question their sanity; Madge has been called mad and Gaga has definitely been called Gaga (excuse the tabloid puns). Speculative and sexist, these terms are frivolously used like a modern day version of “female hysteria”, a medical diagnosis popular until the 20th century, made exclusively for women and reached from any number of symptoms including, paradoxically, “too great a sexual appetite” and “too little”. As with hysteria, trashy magazines pathologise women’s relationship status and sexual behaviour by attributing an amateur diagnosis of mental ROSEA LAKE Judgements 2012 https://www.roseaposey.tumblr.com illness on an often trivial and arbitrary basis, identifying “signs” like a fivepound weight loss/gain or a new haircut. I recently heard an activist cleverly distinguish between “the disturbed” and “the disturbing”, speaking of cases in which those who challenge hegemonic beliefs structures are designated as mentally unhinged. Social pollicising operates on the basis that anyone who behaves outside the realms of what is “acceptable” in a given society is to be cast out of it. Similarly, to call a woman crazy in the headlines is to completely discredit her, the woman in question is at once robbed of voice and agency. A popular refrain used inthe media to denounce successful female celebrities as crazy is “woman on the edge”, which, for me, conjures Andrea Dworkin’s proverbial metaphor, “women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge”. As celebrities catapult into stardom, paparazzi lay in wait for them to make a mistake, or experience a breakup, before they are either demonised or belittled. To me, celebrity breakups often seem to serve as an opportunity for the mainstream media to launch an attack on female celebrities that enacts a culture of discouragement and restriction. Having touched on some of the ways in which famous women are typecast, it seems that ultimately, to put these people into categories is to contain them, to contain, for example, their sexuality and success (by the latter we mean economic power and social influence). As journalist Ann Friedman put it in the New York Times, “Society abhors a woman who can’t be categorized — especially if she is wilfully defying the categories, and even more so if she’s famous” (08.02.2013). But by placing women in absurd boxes, they are immobilised, controlled, limited. The media is the locus of current affairs and the space in which we see our culture represented. At present, popular media platforms are perpetuating negative female stereotypes, marginalising women as a result of their sexual behaviour and countering celebrities’ success with debasing labels. I worry that this creates a critical and hostile environment for women and a gender imbalance that dissipates outwards. Slut-shaming and other means of demeaning people is designed to warn others against enacting the same behaviours; it is a system of societal control. To come back to our original questions, this entire system and more specifically, many of these labels, seem derivative of archaic ideas, so why are they still perpetuated in the media? If we are in an age that some people to believe is equal, the work of feminism done, then why does a breakup or affair act as a trigger for the press to hound and degrade women in a way that men simply do not fall subject to? These urgent questions have been broached by feminist journalists like those cited above, and on blogs such as The Vagenda and Jezebel. Recognising the problem at hand and inspired by those already highlighting these issues and working against them, ELF decided it was necessary to create a space, a tangible space, for a counter- dialogue; a discussion in which slut-shaming and other means of negative stereotyping could be challenged. Not only a space to explore celebrity breakup culture, but a positive space for the acknowledgement of successful women and their agency. In aid of this, ELF are holding an event on February 17th 2013 which will include a panel discussion and open conversation about the kind of media sexism outlined above, with a particular address to the effect this can have on women and young girls. You can find more information about the event here http://eastlondonfawcett.org.uk/heartbreak-launderette.html. If you are unable to attend, the discussion will be live streamed via this link: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/elf-heartbreak-launderette ‘Women, and particularly their sexuality, serve as important boundary markers.' PATRICIA CAPLAN The Cultural Construction of Sexuality 'The vagina is a gateway to a woman's happiness and to her creative life' NAOMI WOLF Vagina: A New Biography PRIYA SAUJANI 11 Glorious Trauma Festival 2010 http://www.utopriya.com/ CHARLIE MURPHY You Feel so Beautiful Inside (Internal Female Cast as Sphere) Cast lead crystal 1999 Inside (Internal Female Cast), Cast lead crystal, 1999 Lips Parted (Positive and Negative) Cast glass, 2010 https:// www.charliemurphy.co.uk/ ANNIE SPRINKLE & ELIZABETH STEPHENS Ecosex Manifesto https://www.ecosexlab.org ROSMARIE TROCKLE: A COSMOS 13 February - 7 April 2013 Serpentine Gallery ROSMARIE TROCKLE Replace Me 2011 Digital print BENJAMIN SEBASTIAN Reflections on WIN: A letter to Poppy (Miracle) Jackson from Benjamin Sebastian. Art is never an end in itself. It is only an instrument for tracing lines of lives... - Deleuze and Guattari If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive. - Audre Lorde Poppy, HUGH O'DONNELL INVERT FADO Toronto, Toronto Free Gallery 2010 https://www.hughodonnellartm.yolasite.com INVERT PERFORMANCE SOUNDTRACK: VAGINA,VAGINA,VAGINA, SUITED AND BOOTED, YOUR NOT MAD IT WILL BE ALRIGHT SOON! VAGINA,VAGINA,VAGINA. ME,ME,ME,ME,ME YOUR NOT MAD YOU WILL BE ALRIGHT SOON, SUITED AND BOOTED, VAGINA,VAGINA,VAGINA. AND SO ON AND SO ON............................ Above is the statement I have recorded (my own voice) as a material to use also as audio within performances. As I write this I am overcome by a nervousness (fear) I am all too familiar with. It is that nervousness that Audre Lorde describes often and so eloquently with regard to speaking out, being heard/visible. This to me is important, specifically in relation to your work; being heard/visible, but a self-owned visibility. Not a visibility imposed from the outside. It is now six months since we were in Brooklyn (NYC) together. Six months since we paced two blocks in Bush Wick convincing each other that the only failure possible would be self-censorship. We were both scared of opening ourselves up (literally), becoming vulnerable and showing that which so many (still) do not want to see or have exist; the penetrated male and the self-owning woman. Although I would normally consider myself a non-binary identifying body, I find it productive at times to identify on the basis of sex and gender strategically, but we can talk more about that in person. I want to share with you some of my memories of our time in New York and my experience of your install-action, WIN, which took place at Grace Exhibition Space. Grin and Bare It. I have been thinking about how much unwanted attention Bean received, apparently due to 'looking different' and when she was researching the legality of states of undress and found that (as in England) it was legal in the state of New York for women to be topless in public. I can't remember why you were not with us but I want to recount when Bean and I went for that walk... Two bodies, both bare-chested, walking across the Williamsburg Bridge. Yes it was a provocative act, but does not research dictate a rigorous approach? Talk about a reality check. Reactions varied from humour to aggression and disgust. One man, on jogging past (topless) commented jovially “Now there's something you don't see everyday” and asked to take a picture. With a reply of no, the man proceeded to take the picture anyway. After being informed he was operating within the same power dynamics as rape, this enlightened creature replied: 'If you want to dress like that, I am within my rights to respond how I like”. This was the first of many people (men) who felt it was there right to objectify and capture (digitally) Bean's body for their own desires. I remember Bean and I recounting this experience to you and the myriad of discussions that ensued. WhatI remember the most is the absolute feeling of frustration and anger surrounding the inequality of it all. I made a piece in FADO Toronto, Toronto Free Gallery 2010 called 'INVERT' and I had the above on audio playing on repeat. It is based on the fact of thinking you are mentally ill because you are gay (early teenage years). Perhaps if I thought about vaginas and repeated the word vagina, I might have started to like one/fancy one. As you know that did not happen. Targeted. On return from a trip to Coney Island, you and Bean had won a fish (which you later gifted to me, where was I that day?) from the Win Fish & Critterz fun stall. From the stall operator you had negotiated a sticker in the style of a target with the word WIN printed on it. You placed this on your solar plexus and left it there, documenting its disintegration across time (10 days?). I remember feeling this was just as provocative as Bean walking topless through Brooklyn and Manhattan. The sticker drew attention to your cleavage, labelling your body/chest (your heart?) as a target. The word WIN insinuating domination already achieved. Was this an act of defiance, eroding the misogynistic ownership of your body? Or was this an act of resignation, accepting and becoming that target fully, enabling self-ownership? I perceived it to be both and something more still. WIN. Our time in New York was almost over, 6 weeks had past. It was the evening that you and I were programmed to make our install-actions. I had finished my install-action (after having almost suffocated in a full head bind of gaffer tape) and you helped me to calm down. It was time for you to begin. Prior, you had instructed me move the entire audience out of the exhibition space for the beginning of your work. The audience obliged and were instructed that in a moment they would reenter the space, one by one. We began to re-enter the space. As I entered, I was forced to move through a narrow passage, between wall and counter. I instantly felt controlled and manipulated. The layout of the room channelled me towards you – naked, cornered, inverted. Supporting your bodyweight through your neck and shoulders, your arms flowing out across the floor. You looked to have been thrown there. Your thighs where I expected to view your shoulders, feet in place of head. Legs splayed wide apart, a tatty homemade sign was inserted into your vagina (it read WIN – a digital copy taken from documentation of the target you had worn on your chest). In one hand you held a small blade and in the other, a handful of gold leaf, spilling, floating out with air currents in the room. Silence. Your position and my height facilitated an awkward, topical view of your vulva, penetrated lips separated by the cardboard shaft of the sign. Your body suggested the fallen, pornographic choreography and somehow, a misuse of the female body, particularly the vagina. Yet there was no misuse: you had orchestrated this scene, claiming the space, body, time and vagina as self-owned. I remember feeling as though I was in a temple and reverence was required, perhaps demanded. Even before I had made eye contact with you, I was uncomfortably aware that your eyes were upon me. You were gazing at me. As I traveled past your body into the open area of the space, you traced my movements, only your eyes moving. You controlled that interaction totally. Over and over again your defiant gaze silently ushered each audience member past your contorted body and into the space. Some shocked by your install-action, others laughed nervously. All were unsure of how to act and where to look. You knew exactly where to look. With everyone beyond your gaze, you slowly rolled your head to face us, momentarily, you lifted the blade to your left shoulder and began to cut a long, curving line. Shoulder – solar plexus – shoulder. Like the line of a bird’s wings in flight, a red mark followed your finger tips and blade. The blood began to trickle down over the tops of your shoulders, in sporadic little streams. You then began to gold leaf the curved, now bloodied lines. This echoed in me of the Japanese pottery practice known as Kintsugi, whereby broken objects are repaired, not in an attempt to hide the damage but to highlight cracks, fault lines and breakages with gold. The belief is that the objects become more beautiful because of their history, because of such damage and re-assemblage. Gilded, you paused. You withdrew the shaft of the sign from between your labia. Carefully, you lent the sign against the wall, upright, folded yourself down from the wall and stood before us. Staunchly, you searched our faces momentarily with your gaze before slowly starting to shake your hands. Your Head followed, hair flowing across your face and chest. Eventually your arms began to flail and your whole body violently convulsed until the action was no longer possible. You regained your balance, gold leaf fluttered and glistened around you in the air. As you shook, your body was freed of all rational, socially-required calmness and the gold leaf radiated from you. Sparkling, almost suspended in space and time. That moment felt like a new world where we could be and do anything. You slowly swept the hair from your face, paused, regarded us and walked through our mass, parting us as you left. _ I often think of New York and WIN. In turn Poppy, I think about the opening quotes in this letter. I think about the 'lines of lives' you traced with WIN, the bodies (women, men and everyone in between) damaged by misogyny, sexism, heterosexism and cis-sexism. It seems the world becomes more multiple and complex with every passing moment. I wonder, if we can define ourselves and not be 'eaten alive', where might we end up and what lives might we live? Remembering the final moments of your install-action one particular element blazes in my mind. In the golden, quite calm that followed your convulsions, I noticed the blood lines (the stream like tears that had trickled away from the lines that you had cut), that had aptly run with gravity over your shoulders towards the floor, were now inverted. Uncannily, they now ran up your chest, seemingly weightless, as though droplets of blood were about to lift from your shoulder tops and float up and away from your body. In this moment I felt light. Everything felt light. There was hope and the potential of something... New? I wanted to reflect here Poppy, share some memories, write a personal letter to you rather than write an essay referencing theoretical approaches. There seems to be more than enough academic activity surrounding our field and sometimes I think this is to the detriment of the actual work. My finale thought for you is this: Do you remember when we met Tehching (Sam) Hsieh? Do you remember how terrified we were to know he was in the audience, viewing our work? Why? Why were we so scared? Both you and I are exploring the world and everything that has come before us through our bodies in our time, in our space. No one can tell us how to do this or that we are doing it wrong. There are no benchmarks, no one has ever lived in our bodies, here and now. Watching you reclaim your body from the violent histories of misogyny and patriarchy was so inspiring and gave me courage to dream of other ways of being. I will hold onto this lightness Poppy, thank you. With love and autonomy, Benjamin. Xx WIN was curated by Bean and Benjamin Sebastian as part of the residency programme/performance festival; Alien(s) in New York (Funded by Arts Council England and the British Council through the Artists' International Development Fund awarded to the curators). Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn. NY. August and September - 2012 Continued from Page 13 Inherent within all these (generally sympathetic) criticisms is the difficult disjuncture where structure and subject collide. Materiality emerges through signifying systems and these systems are themselves material, thus the collision is never between two but creates an involuted encounter that dissipates molecules of each as more or less intensified in regard to moments of thought and actualisation. The tactical selection over the subject-thing ‘woman’ for the paradigmatic vulva makes a voluminous rather than absent or male-defined space, a feminist space that is imperative for all sexes to participate with and which can allow all subjects to have similar intensive aspects of political unity without themselves being the same. Deleuze and Guattari’s reminder that women themselves must become-woman risks formulating a chronological evolution of becoming as a temporal project – which woman, what intensities make up woman? Is asking defeating the very purpose of the ambiguities of the noun? Without asking what are we doing? Irigaray critiques the very asking of the question itself as making a woman-ing impossible. (1985: 120-121) She says: ‘I don’t know whether the [male] person who asked the question wants to try again or not…’ (1985: 121) The many folds of the vulva create connections, multiplying Irigaray’s model of the more-than-andless-than-one two lips. Like the penis and its relation to the phallus, the vulva is an organ that is known but not (in polite company) seen. It is the ultimate phantasy of nothing to see and the horror of seeing it is too much – unlike the penis the vulva is neither funny nor virile but confounding. This is true both metaphorically and in popular parlance actually. The vulva is not visible when the human body is erect. The concentric resonances of erect phallus-erect human-erected-speech erectedknowledge can be reconfigured through the vulva being there but not necessarily seen, thus the categories of human and knowledge also contort. Because the vulva is made up of folds, shared language is always expressed from one fold and is neither independent of the perspective of the speaker’s position nor entirely apparent to that speaker – language, rather than seen as coming from outside as a transcendental structure, frees itself to inherent independent ambiguity at the crease where two folds are juxtaposed, fused only through inflection not assimilation or metonymic juxtaposition. Incommensurability is therefore always part of the vulvic structure, neither a failure nor celebrated rupture. The vulva is female but in aspects thus becoming-vulva allows one minoritarian subject woman to share one aspect or fold with another based on a common political or ideological activist-desire, Deleuze’s continuity thus incorporates other elements, a continuity between what is traditionally discontinuous. Continuity is constituted by particle-intensity elements, not forms. Becoming-vulva emphasises the movement of the two lips as our folding with them and our foldplanes forming connections which we cannot see but which affect the singularity nonetheless, as we perceive relations with elements of other planes that do not perceive themselves but affect, to infinity. In relation to the fold-unfold-foldings of becoming-vulva is the fold itself as a fluid inflection, what Irigaray has called blurring and mucosal. This resists the risk in creating yet another binary from the mechanics of fluids versus solids. Mucosal describes the fluids emergent of and from the vulva which connects the vulva’s folds with itself and blurs demarcations of externality, while Irigaray claims sperm has been associated with a form of object, but because it is within spermal fluid threatens to ‘crumble’ the penis. (1985: 113) Crumbling creates a becoming-vulva of the penis because the penis does not disappear, only dissipates as a unity. Braidotti points out that unique singularity is not universalism but what Deleuze would call singularity as potential, singularity as expression (2002: 66), relating expression to Irigaray’s concept of the unconscious which means singularity as political anchoring point that is, in becomings ‘flows like symbolic glue between the social and the self…it flows but it is sticky.’ (2002: 143) Perhaps Irigaray expresses the stickiness of each fold, where we neither select nor apprehend the planes to which we stick, and where angles are sticky and infinitely fluid, so that fold is always folding, just as becoming-vulva is morphology-in-action. This all occurs in the space which is here and now, neither exchanged economy nor deliberate nomadic immigration or defection, but a process which celebrates rather than asks ‘where does this element of the vulva begin and end?’ just as one asks where as subject do I begin and end? Deleuze and Guattari’s lauding of multiplicity in becoming-vulva is always and only the multiplicity of aspectivalfolds and movements within the one. The point of convergence between the two-lips and becomingwoman resolves the phallocentric tendency to bring ‘multiplicity back to the economy of sameness, oneness, to the same of the one’. (Irigaray, 1985: 131). This point for Irigaray is the shift from solid to fluid, and the creation of a territory that is not ‘woman’ ripe for male colonisation. She uses the term pleasure to critique desiring machines. Becoming-vulva could be described as the ethico-political imperative within pleasure, that is, the desire for that which we cannot know but which needs mobilisation within a particular political territory in reference to particular real life issues – folds – that are aspects of the one which is neither unity nor multiplicity, and where becoming-woman is one trajectory that twists, involutes, emerges and explores the labyrinth of the fold. Some of these turns may be deeply unpleasurable for the majoritarian. Becoming-vulva creates all these turns as a structure, or what Irigaray sees as the urgently needed woman’s terrain of becoming – the ‘unterritorialized spaces where her desire might come into being’ (Irigaray, 1985: 141) – rather than becoming which demands one term, such as ‘woman’. ‘The process of imitation may set up analogies between ourselves and what we imitate but cannot engage us in creative becomings. Irigaray says something similar when she insists that our encounters with others – in particular the feminine other to whom we would like to relate – must involve mutual becomings rather than specular identifications.’ (Lorraine, 1999: 182) While Deleuze and Guattari are explicit that becoming is adamantly not imitation, Irigaray asks how man can become what woman never had, that is, her own pleasure? (1985: 141) None of us are but we all occupy becoming-vulva. Vulva is a noun, yes, but a mucosal inapprehensible one, and indeed a word not frequently used in common parlance in the same way as woman. As a fold structure we also do not occupy one versus many spaces but one space which stretches, folds, inflects and thus multiples are aspects not sets of singulars which can co-opt other singulars. In this sense Deleuze would emphasise the fold as a consistency-relational space more than the hybrid form posited in A Thousand Plateaus. He calls this a dimension, not a physical environment. (1999: 109) The vulva thus could be a dimension-form, and Irigaray’s terrain a material dimensional reality, in excess but not ignorant of ‘real life’ dimensions. Indeed as Deleuze offers the singularity of dimensions there can no longer be a doubling of real versus abstract places. They are always both, like the fleshy vulva configuration. known, the phantasy of objectivity, even the question itself ablate and atrophy fluidity, connectivity, ‘Woman’ cannot cause becomings, inflection with certain, specific, politico-historical planes invoke accountable subjectivity, thought, the multi-sensorial and speech which is not through the language of becomings, and the becoming-minoritarian of the majoritarian is a question of resistance to or desire the same/one. The lips are always and already in a condition of pleasure and they need nothing other for mucosal folding: not a question of terminology but becoming-vulva is the terrain rather than the than themselves. Any additional connections create extensions and becomings as third, fourth, fifth term. All elements occupy the terrain and so becoming-vulva describes tensions, thresholds, activity- elemental terms. Man’s need for woman as a tool places onus on the tool as a signifier, not of affect-passivity-syntheses, and action-potential, not a project involving a thing. The terrain of the something that is, but something that is to be used. Man cannot touch himself and thus his self is vulva is always there and perhaps a more appropriate element would be to apply Deleuze and always object and objective. He is neither mani-fold nor in reflective relation to himself. Activity and Guattari’s becoming-imperceptible, as the vulva-terrain is discursively affective but not perceptible as passivity are forces which occur within the same space as resistance-expression. Most importantly noun, smooth singular space or uni-localised place for occupation, against the ‘kingdom’ of women woman touches herself as her condition of being, not as autonomous choice. The phallus rents the two (for becomings). However, as Deleuze and Guattari claim concepts come from problems, to remain in vulva lips apart and penetrates the vagina, shifting woman’s relation to herself to one as object for the field of politics as problems, I will return to the tactical use of the vulva as noun. How the vulva is male sexuality and her many folds as quickened into a mournfully empty aperture. Male language desired toward becoming the vulva, momentarily, will ‘be’ a concept before describing a larger forces itself between the mouth lips of women, compelling her to listen and speak only in the language abstract territory. and always flawed. The use of a tool performs two functions. The first is to nomenclature the expressive aspect of content within a phallic discourse, the second to prevent it acting beyond or These ideas are simply a series of sketches of issues. I neither wish to vindicate nor condemn Deleuze without that discourse and especially, acting for itself (which is the self it does not and cares not to and Guattari, but many of the issues are ones which have also plagued feminism. When feminists ask ‘know’, but to think or touch). ‘what do we want’, the ‘we’ is far more problematic than the want. This has been the nexus of innumerable and continued discussions. The problems within a male discursive navigation of women The crux of the difficulty with these many issues can be summed up by Deleuze and Guattari’s can itself offer a traversal line of flight where different perspectives of the same issue and different navigation of content and expression. Content is pragmatic, action and passion, while expression is issues from a sympathetic perspective create assemblages rather than antagonisms – a vulvic fold, semiotic – the regime within which content operates and through which action-passion is potentialised. not one elements demand to penetrate and colonise the other with language, thought and flesh. ‘Incorporeal transformations’ (1987: 504) attribute certain qualities to content-forms. Content and Becomings are assemblages, and, like the horror of the vulva tamed as vagina/castration site, are expression form a strata which is cut through by a line of flight which deterritorialises expression and always more than and less than one, infective, leaky, scary, literally round-ed up, to resemble inside- thus materially transforms content by connecting it to another assemblage – a different refrain – or out penis apertures. Before they ever mention woman, in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari operating within its own territory to reconfigure it. This second deterritorialisation is most pertinent to invoke female genitalia: ‘Comparing a sock to a vagina is OK, it’s done all the time, but you’d have to becoming vulva in that it is the reciprocal territory of expression-content within singular concepts that be insane to compare a pure aggregate of stitches to a field of vaginas.’ (1987: 27) The connective can orient the accountability of a majoritarian in becoming-woman without leaping straight onto and aspect of the stitches, and their inside-outside folding-emerging is expressive of the vulva, and recalls hijacking the woman’s own becoming-refrain or, worse still, teaching her the refrain she has been Lyotard’s möebian skin because ‘rather than being smooth, is on the contrary (is this topographically extricated from in phallologocentric culture. But neither deterritorialisations are entirely extricated. It possible?) covered with roughness, corners, creases, cavities which when it passes on the first “turn” is thinking Irigaray’s two lips as two-two lips, folded into infinity – the genital to mouth lips where will be cavities, but on the “second” lumps’. (2-3) It is indeed topographically possible – but as semiotic female speech and pleasure are one fold configuration; the mouth to another mouth Deleuze and Guattari state you have to be insane – so the vulva-field is a schiz-territory. Does the connection where my top lip is the others other lip and speech cannot be spoken with one mouth but mucosal unconscious require an insane-‘man’? Deleuze and Guattari claim nouns domesticate two mouths creating one expression; the vulva to vulva connection where women speak together their multiplicities and jeopardise the assembling connections of their intensities, just as the vagina own pleasure independent of men and thus within a different system of language, this language being domesticates the vulva as its own multiplicity while smoothing it as aperture and ignoring all its other explicitly corporeal, ‘she has two mouths and two pairs of lips’. (Irigaray, 1992: 170). This resonates folds to prevent any intensive connections with the penis as phallus (because, most obviously and with Wittig’s claim that without alterity there can be no definition, and, while Irigaray sees difference perhaps most imperatively needing to be challenged) the penis is domesticated by the phallus. The as imperative in feminism (which is why she has been maligned as advocating compulsory domestic chore… the woman reduced to only mother or wife darning to repair the smoothness of the heterosexuality) Wittig’s nomenclaturing of lesbians as not women fares little better than Deleuze and sock, utters ‘darn this sock!’ Guattari’s claim that all men should be minoritarian-women. For Irigaray it is alterity in itself, not Irigaray demarcates particular qualities of the morphology of the phallus as preventing the opening of a space of difference. The prevalence of the visual, the solid, the demarcated, the relegated, the between two defined entities, that is key. The sharing between the unlike evinces the alterity rather than ablating it. The genital lips speak as the mouth lips, a language which is silent to phallologic audibility. She speaks of breathing together, the sexual pant but also the trembling breath that awaits the ethical difference between love – which is imagination and creation – and hope, which is always for but does not need to know what it awaits, speaks as imagination, creation. the pre-formed, always simultaneously hope for and through slavery, causality and the elusive. (Deleuze, 1988: 26) A vulva is already a pack animal, a demonic schema between various connected The only guide there being the call to the other. Whose breath subtly impregnates the air, like a elements. We may know what to do with a vagina, but what do we do, what can we do (what can’t we vibration perceived by those lost in love. Their senses awake, they boldly go forward by ways do) with a vulva? – ‘the demon functions as a borderline of an animal pack, into which the human where others see only shadows and hell. They go forward and sometimes a song comes to their being passes or in which his or her becoming takes place by contagion.’ (1987: 247) The vulva’s lips. From their mouths come sounds which mean nothing.’ (Irigaray, 1992: 217) borderline sexual organ undifferentiated pleasure fold requires the affected connected to enter into alliance, to be infected by the vulva’s molecular possibilities of sexual acts and pleasures and The vulva breathes beyond speech or silence. The vulva is the wound, too much, not enough, too signification and semiosis as acts of pleasure in power. The whole desiring body must be more than visceral, not present. Freud’s dark continent, castration, Lacan’s specular lack and Irigaray’s one and folded to enter into alliance with the vulva – a sorcerer body. Otherwise the vulva is reduced elucidation of the larger philosophical trajectories in dominant culture that make the way we to the little penis clitoris and the absent-penis sheath. understand genitalia a symptom rather than the cause of the blind spot. Deleuze sees folds as crucially ‘free of any intentional gaze’ (1999: 109) and the phallic compulsion to look and thus know Becoming implies: is thus antagonistic to the fold. An initial relation of alliance with a demon…There is an entire politics of becomings-animal, as Repudiation of inappropriate objects – for Deleuze and Guattari anything that is irredeemably other, well as a politics of sorcery, which is elaborated in assemblages that are neither those of the woman, girl, animal, and asemiotic elements without signification such as colour, harmonious music family nor of religion nor of the State. Instead they express minoritarian groups, or groups that without melody – prevents unfolding-refolding from producing a hybrid third term or self as part of a are oppressed, prohibited, in revolt or always on the fringe of recognised institutions, groups all greater in-between and less than its own ideational subjectivity. Folding with another the more secret for being extrinsic, in other words, anomic… becoming-animal takes the form of incommensurable element – what Deleuze and Guattari call an inter-kingdom or unnatural a Temptation, and of monsters aroused in the imagination by the demon. (Deleuze and Guattari, participation – makes the subject more than and less than one dividuated, apprehensible and 1987: 247) knowable, therefore phallic, self. Deleuze, after Spinoza, claims ethics comes from what is produced between the encounter of two entities, not from two entities addressing each other according to a The vulva is a tempting form. Its tempting aspect is traditionally one of the reasons for its danger and larger, established and prescriptive structure. The fold relation cannot help but produce because the imminent downfall of the (usually majoritarian) tempted. The vulva is also a monster, all the more traditional structures do not allow for these unnatural inter-kingdom relations. They are prohibited or monstrous for simultaneously being so tempting, evoking the fascination of ambivalence – elaborated named perverse. According to Irigaray women are oppressed because they must accede to larger in feminist teratology, particularly Braidotti’s work. Without using the term however, and beyond the structures – as wife, as mother but never as for-herself. Only when women can be a for-herself can everyday monstrosity of traditionally oppressed subjects, Deleuze and Guattari invoke monster she enter into productive relations. Parts of women’s former folds have been constituted by structures – hybrids, demons, abstract entities. phallologocentrism so while the past does not guarantee the future it also doesn’t forget it. The forherself as mani-fold allows feminism to avoid the trap of essentialising what woman ‘is’. All that For all the ways the vulva transgresses and traverses dominant phallic paradigms it is both prohibited woman is is a condition independent of phallologocentric structure because within that structure and perceived as revolt-ing (in both senses of the word). The vulva, as opposed to the obedient ‘woman’ is relegated to wife, mother and so forth. Irigaray is adamant: ‘woman would be wife and vagina, will not be defined by production (family), chastity (Church) or an acceptance of subjugation mother without desire’ (1993: 117). Thus becoming-vulvic is a shift in patterns of desire. (state). It cannot be seen with a speculum. It is, nothing more than the everything which is an Form and Force-Fold assemblage of folds, organs, elements, textures, tastes and involutions with its disciples. It is, materially and conceptually, a rupture and rupturing. The vulva is a demon – convoked by the sorcerer fascinated with the possible but unknowable futures the vulva offers, tempted by the vulva’s seduction Form against the warnings of family, church, state. But like a demon the vulva must also be evoked. It will Forms are shadows only when seeking to apprehend the solid is impossible, knowledge prevented and not come unless it is desired and it cannot materialise unless through the desires of the sorcerer. The the self relegated to hell – perhaps a feminine realm, where Deleuze and Guattari’s demons reside. idea of the vulva is the temptation, but its evocation is the demon with which the unholy alliance is Meaningless sounds are words without syntax, devoid of the nouns that are the little phalluses of formed and the becoming-vulva facilitated. Many demons in a variety of literature and lore are vulva- speech. Deleuze, after Spinoza, sees belief in the possibility of seeing, knowing and controlling and like. Many demonic forms follow the basic tenets of the vulva as somehow gender ambiguous, as assemblage or fold, as both tempting and dangerous. Against the singularity of the phallus and the contrary of folding but follows the fold up to the following fold.’ (Deleuze, 2001: 6) For each form majoritarian subject, ‘My name is Legion: for we are many’ said Satan (Mark 5:9, also referenced in there are those forms which impress upon it to offer its form as the act of creation and reaction Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 239) and so is the vulva and the affinities we form with it. Leviathan is through those forms which buttress it; mouth, genital, skin, object, breath, heat, vibration, cold, one example of a demonic form becoming-vulva. Leviathan, like vulva, translates from Hebrew as absence, pressure, vacuum. Lyotard’s möebian band: ‘open up the so- called body and spread out all ‘that which gathers itself together in folds.’ (Davidson, 173) its surfaces…the labia majora, so also the labia minora…and this is not all, far from it, connected onto these lips a second mouth is necessary, a third mouth, a great number of other mouths, vulvas.’ If vulva is infinite and indefinite, how can we refer to it as being of a form? Deleuze and Guattari state (Lyotard: 1) As with becomings, Lyotard includes the organic, inorganic, the sonorous and the of form as a turning point in thought; coloured, adjectives disanchored from nouns, inflections and always there are concealed planes and elements, connections which are not apparent. Through becoming-vulva the act of conceptualising a a form in itself that does not refer to any external point of view… so many inseparable variations vulva, which has no transcendent form, creates another dimension to the act of becoming; a on which it confers an equipotentiality without confusion…under its first aspect of absolute form constellation of conceiving as creating, while becoming. In order to become, form must be reoriented , appears as the faculty of concepts, that is to say, as the faculty of their creation (Deleuze and from analogy to transformation through contagion. However because the vulva form is itself unstable, Guattari, 1994: 210-211) demonic becoming is launched. The vulva here does not appear prior to the act of thinking and its appearance is concept-aspect, Fold which is also the act of creating it as a perception-thought-force. The vulva is infinite determinates The folding of two matters refers to the involution of two forms and their impact within and upon each and its dimensions become reformation of the single plane through perception as creation. Unlike the others’ memory, future and present form and force. The fold is not the result but the act of force of phallus, which has already been folded into a particular configuration to the extent that to create it as forms. Becoming-vulva is how we are vulva and vulva is us, how we reform vulva and as vulva, and a concept is subsumed by its immediate presence to its own transcendent form. Shifting from how vulva reforms us and as us. While each form becomes the other, their specificity and for feminism knowing to thinking female form as aspectual foldings necessitates the death of majoritarian their memory is essential to their becoming. The forms do not homogenise or forget but retain subjectivity, which is why theorists refer to the fatal results of the ancients’ attempt to locate female specificity and yet assemble. ‘If two distinct things can be really inseparable, two inseparable things pleasure in demonic women; Medusa’s gaze (Cixous, 1981), the Sirens’ call (Foucault, 1997) and the can be really distinct.’ (Deleuze, 2001: 12) Woman already has a vulva (rather than being had by the gaze of Orpheus demanding Eurydice come into the world of the male gaze (Blanchot, 1981). Because phallus, both duped and biblically) distinct and indistinct from her form. The fold of vulva, thought and the vulva is internal, external, relatively smooth mons verenis full frontal, occluded and splayed labia, self creates a simultaneity of differential elements and integration. According to Leibniz, unlike and various other possible configurations depending on positioning, to see it through one perception inanimate forms which are components of assembled parts, organic elements cannot have their choices or orientation is impossible. The body must actually be reformed or refolded to catch a glimpse of all inferred in advance, thus an organic element is required in becoming, through relations with organic the vulva’s various aspects. or inorganic elements, as yet undeveloped, larval. ‘[There is] no universal reason or law of nature is assignable from which any creature, no matter how perfect and well informed about this mind, can Force infer with certainty what the mind will choose.’ (Leibniz: 102) One’s own incapacity for inference is Can we say we have a memory of vulva in the same way as we refer to the meaning of the phallus as included. And the vulva neither follows a predictable narrative of temporal ‘choice’ (what it will do) nor a historical artefact? ‘Man constitutes himself as a gigantic memory, through the position of the spatial ‘choice’ (what it will be). central point, its frequency (insofar as it is necessarily reproduced by each dominant point) and resonance (insofar as all of the points tie in with it.’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 293) The phallus is Irigaray’s model of the two lips shares much in common with Deleuze’s work on Leibniz and Foucault. a memory which paradigmatically resonates with systems. Memories of a sorcerer are invocations, Through Leibniz Deleuze elaborates the baroque as a physics of process over content, where any memories of a phallus are recognitions. concept can only be apprehended from perspective, that is sensed, and that perspective offers folds which are believed to be present but are not ‘visible’ (knowable and so forth), which are visible but not Forms fold and refold, recreating their own forms by their capacity to influence themselves. At the able to be known – seeing in the dark – and the larger structure of which folds with the observer. The same time they influence external elements and external elements influence them. In the act of fold is a homogeneity made of heterogeneous expression which, at each reconfiguration unfold and creating the vulva toward its various becoming potentials, the vulva’s dimensions fold and refold. ‘A refold (however not ‘back’ into an original plane). The unfold is a future and creates the conditions of fold is always folded within a fold, like a cavern in a cavern [but not fractal of same, rather what possibility of the refold without knowing what the refolded concept will produce. If expression Lyotard would call a labyrinth]…correlative to elastic compressive force. Unfolding is thus not the actualises content, then the fold is what actualises a thing, rather than a thing autonomously folding. The fold, like the möebian band, is made up of the sides of planes which, depending on the folded present to themselves, all the while folds of shared indivisible presence are present to both. Deleuze configuration, encounter each other in a particular expressive structure, thus elements which are not and Irigaray both use a fold structure where the subject exists as folds and folds with the world to known to be commensurable are nonetheless possible and condition the possibilities of the next fold. express a version of that world, necessarily therefore folding with other subjects. Both see desire as The point of encounter also cuts across and between elements, traversing fold configurations and the driving force of the ways in which subjectivity unfolds and refolds, shifting paradigms and self as creating new trajectories between fold homogeneities. The organic and inorganic are not of the same metamorphic, always and in spite of itself launching upon new becomings. The politico-ethical moment matter yet activate folds with each other, emphasising the materiality of word and flesh as a comes when the self seeks to fold with the unlike or inappropriate. Dialectic desire maintains distance sensuous continuum. and therefore subject and object do not involute, reducing the unfold-refold potential of the subject. Deleuze lists six elements inherent in the baroque fold. Put very simply these are: 1. Fold as a Becoming-vulva is splaying of self, becoming-indeterminate, palimpsest, the open and pure intensity of problem not of completion but continuation. The vulva depends on the movement of the body to being a visceral, viscous and shuddering signification – stuttering, silence, folded, present but invisible, create new configurations, while only the still erect body can express the phallus. The phallus, truth visible but not knowable, catalysing a structure and series of pleasure planes beyond and in excess of and male sexuality seek completion. The feminine neither starts nor ends in space and time, and as a the phallus. It may include aspects of becoming-clitorised, variously penetrated and penetrating, problem itself can neither be posited nor solved. 2. The line of inflection which does not reconcile or onanistic and orgiastic, confusing dominance and submission and most importantly, becoming- homogenise elements but harmonises them through their mobile relation. Women, lips, desires, manifold. Not knowing what will be-come of oneself as thought-materiality. Becoming-vulva is speech are not the same between those of others or between themselves. Harmony is a question of receptive and ravenous, desire as infinite and inevitable. ‘It is defined by the number of dimensions it relation without conversion to sameness. Harmony seeks not equilibrium but a connection which has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature…continually necessarily alters the nature of each element while maintaining its specificity – the hybrid moment of transforming itself… according to its thresholds and doors’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 249) The becoming. 3. Two elements being of and expressing the same world, but not in the same way. The territory becoming-vulva reassembles the tensors and thresholds upon which it expresses (us as) force problem which plagues phallologic is that things perceived as impossible or incommensurable are and by which force is expressed upon its various planes and dimensions. The self, the vulva and the nonetheless present and express a world which does not agree with the phallic. The vulva is a schema world are labyrinthine threshold and their infinity relies only on our exploration. of expression possible but not unifying. 4. The unfold as continuation, the temporality of the spatial event. The issue with any invocation of a schema, including becoming-vulva, is that it can be understood as a model into which one fits. Rather, in becoming-vulva, new positions open new ideas which could not have existed before – the elements are the model. There is no going back, so continuation is inevitable and, indeed, frightening, ‘what opens up does not stop in any direction. No waymarkers in this total risk.’ (Irigaray, 1992: 215) Irigaray sees risk as risk of life. Phallic life is equilibrium, stasis, atrophy, already dead. 5. The action-passion tension between elements – too taut and it breaks, not taut enough and it cannot attain harmony. Texture is dependent ‘not on the parts themselves, but on the strata that determine its cohesion’. (Deleuze, 2001: 37) The vulva is multiple strata, situating parts at places always crosses other places and creates particular conditions. Certain conditions will destroy the elements – Deleuze and Guattari’s junkie and masochist risk death. Covertly when the subject becomes-woman understood as fetish the strata cannot continue until it leaves behind the masculine-active tautness. 6. The fold as inherently material, beyond an ideationalmodel. This is the most salient encounter with Irigaray and corporeal feminism in general, and why Lorraine claims Deleuze and Irigaray constitute a visceral philosophy. ‘Unless it becomes the speech of the flesh, a gift and a message of the flesh, speech remains an outer skin that again and again exhausts, flays, that falls and covers without giving up its secret.’ (Irigaray, 1992: 111) In the fold, alterity is encountered within the self, through the other, and the other encounters the self in ways the self cannot autonomously express. 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