Creating from the Body: Gendered Agency in Contemporary Music Performance

Venus rising, Furies raging: bodies redressed in contemporary visual art

What is the nature of human touch and human contact in contemporary music performance, both in general and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic? In a time when bodies must be kept at several meters distance, what comes of works which explicitly call for closeness, physical contact, and sharing? How might these works be interpreted differently in light of the COVID-19 pandemic? Percussionist and performer Jennifer Torrence reflects on the impact of the pandemic on her artistic practice and on her research as part of the project entitled Performing Precarity, which seeks to explore the inherent risks in performance when musicians and audiences are entangled in codependent structures. In light of COVID-19, this exposition attempts to unfold and trace modes of vulnerability in contemporary music performance—from human contact via eye contact and physical touch, to the precarious negotiation of shared space—and to reflect on how such encounters might breed new understandings and knowledge.

The bodies of disordered women … offer themselves as an aggressively graphic text for the interpreter—a text that insists, actually demands, that it be read as a cultural statement, a statement about gender. (Bordo, 94)Violence is transgressive in fundamental ways. It erases boundaries, and imposes agency over others, or groups of others. The assumed social stance is to disapprove, morally and ethically, as a ‘good’ and ‘moral’ female subject. My current research has made me question the simplicity of this approach, to interrogate how aggression socialises power and how resistance to structural violence might look. I analyse three cultural practices to consider the social demarcations around aggression and gender, both within overt acts of violence and in less overt protocols. This research will focus on artistic practices as they offer unique embodied ways to “challenge our systems of representation and knowledge” (Szylak 2).The three creative works reviewed: the 2009 Swedish film the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the work Becoming an Image by Canadian non-binary/transgender artist Cassils, and Gambit Lines, by artist Carolyn Craig, each contest gendered modes of normativity within the space of the Cultural Screen (Silverman). The character of Lisbeth Salander in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo subverts the aggressor female/femme fatale trope in Western cinema by confusing and expanding visual repertoires around aggression, while artists Cassils and Carolyn Craig re-draw how their biologically assigned female bodies perform power in the Cultural Screen by activating bodily feedback loops for the viewer’s gaze.The Aggressor ModeThe discussion of these three works will centre on the ‘female aggressor trope’, understood here as the static coda of visual practices of female power/aggression in the western gaze. This article considers how subverting such representations of aggression can trigger an “epistemic crisis that allows gender categories to change,” in particular in the way protocols of power are performed over female and trans subjectivities (Butler, Athletic 105). The tran/non-binary subject state in the work of Cassils is included in this discussion of the female aggressor trope as their work directly subverts the biological habitus of the female body, that is, the artist’s birth/biologically assigned gender (Bourdieu). The transgender state they perform – where the body is still visibly female but refusing its constraints - offers a radical framework to consider new aggressive stances for non-biologically male bodies.The Cultural Screen and Visual RepresentationsI consider that aggression, when performed through the mediated position of a creative visual practice (as a fictional site of becoming) can deconstruct the textual citations that form normative tropes in the Cultural Screen. The Screen, for this article, is considered asthe site at which the gaze is defined for a particular society, and is consequently responsible both for the way in which the inhabitants of that society experience the gaze’s effects, and for much of the seeming particularity of that society’s visual regime. (Silverman 135)The Screen functions as a suite of agreed metaphors that constitute a plane of ‘reality’ that defines how we perform the self (Goffman). It comprises bodily performance, our internal gaze (of self and other) and the visual artefacts a culture produces. Each of the three works discussed here purposely intervenes with this site of gender production within the Cultural Screen, by creating new visual artefacts that expand permissible aggressive repertoires for female assigned bodies. Deconstructing the Cultural ScreenThe history of images … can be read as a cultural history of the human body. (Belting 17)Cinematic representations play a key role in producing the visual primers that generate social ‘acts’. For this reason I examine the Swedish film Män Som Hatar Kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women, 2009), released as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for foreign audiences, as an example of an expanding range of female aggressor representations in film, and one of particular complexity in the way it expands on representational politics. I consider how specific scripting, dialogue and casting decisions in the lead female character of Lisbeth Salander (played by Noomi Rapace) serve to deconstruct the female aggressor trope (as criminal or sexual provocateur) to allow her character to engage in aggressive acts outside of the cliché of the deviant woman. This disrupts the fixity of assigned body protocols on the social grid to expand their gendered habitus (Bourdieu).Key semiotic relations in the film’s characterisation of Lisbeth prevent her performance of aggression from moving into the clichés of erotic or evil feminine typologies. Her character remains unfixed, moving between a continuous state of unfolding in response to necessity and desire. Here, she exhibits an agency usually denoting masculinity. This allows her violence a positive emancipatory affect, one that avoids the fixity of the representational tropes of the deviant woman or the femme fatale. Her character draws upon both tropes, but reformulates them into a postmodern hybridity, where aggression slips from its sexualised/deviant fetish state into an athletic political resistance. Signification is strategically confused as Lisbeth struts through the scaffolding of normalcy in her insurgent gender game. Her post-punk weaponised attire draws on the repertoire of super heroes, rock stars and bondage mistresses, without committing to any. The libidinal component of violence/aggression is not avoided, but acknowledged, both in its patriarchal formula and Lisbeth’s enactment of revenge as embodied pleasure.The visual representation of both lead actors is also of interest. Both Lisbeth and Mikael have visible acne scars. This small breach in aesthetic selection affects how we view and consume them as subjects and objects on the Screen. The standard social more for the appearance of male and female leads is to use faces modeled on ideas of symmetry and perfection. These tendencies draw upon the cultural legacies of physiognomy that linked moral character with attractiveness schedules and that continue to flourish in the Cultural Screen (Lavater; Principe and Langlois). This decision to feature faces with minor flaws appropriates the camera’s gaze to re-consider schedules of normalcy, in particular value and image index as they relate to gendered representations. This aesthetic erasure of the Western tradition of stereotyped representations permits transitional spaces to emerge within the binary onslaught. Technology is also appropriated in the film as a space for a performative ‘switching’ of the gender codes of fixity. In her role as undercover researcher, Lisbeth’s control of code gives her both a monetised agency and an informational agency. The way that she types takes on an almost aggressive assertion. Each stroke is active and purposeful, as she exerts control through her interface with digital space. This is made explicit early in the film when she appropriates the gaze of technology (a particularly male semiotic code) to extract agency from within the structural discourse of patriarchy itself. In this scene, she forces her guardian to watch footage of his own act of raping her. Here Lisbeth uses the apparatus of the gaze to re-inscribe it back over his body. This structural inversion of the devices of control is made even more explicit when Lisbeth then brands him with text. Here ‘writing on the body’ becomes manifest.The director also frames initial scenes of Lisbeth’s nude body in subtle ways that fracture the entrenched history of representations of women, where the female as object exists for the gaze of male desire (Berger). Initially all we see are her shoulders. They are powerful and she moves like a boxer, inhabiting space and flexing her sinew. When we do see her breasts, they are neutered from the dominant coda of the “breasted experience” (Young). Instead, they function as a necessary appendage that she acknowledges as part of the technology of her body, not as objectified male desire.These varied representational modes built within Lisbeth’s characterisation, inhabit and subvert the female aggressor trope (as deviant), to offer a more nuanced portrayal where the feminine is still worn, but as both a masquerade and an internal emancipatory dialogue. That is, the feminine is permitted to remain whilst the masculine (as aggressive code) is intertwined into non-binary relations of embodied agency. This fluidity refracts the male gaze from imposing spectatorial control via the gaze.Cassils The Canadian non-binary/transgender artist Cassils also uses the body as semiotic technology to deny submission to the dominant code of the Cultural Screen. They re-image the self with bodybuilding, diet and steroids to exit their biologically female structural discourse into a more fluid gendered state. This state remains transitive as their body is not surgically ‘reassigned ‘ back into normative codes (male or female assignations) but instead inhabits the trans pronoun of ‘they/their’. This challenges the Cultural Screen’s dependence on fixed binary states through which to allocate privilege. This visible reshaping also permits entry into more aggressive bodily protocols via the gaze (through the spectorial viewpoint of self and other).Cassils ruptures the restrictive habitus of female/trans subjectivity to enable more expansive gestures in the social sphere, and a more assertive bodily performance. This is achieved by appropriating the citational apparatus of male aggression via a visual reframing of its actions. Through daily repetitive athletic training Cassils activates the proprioceptive loops that inform their gendered schema and the presentation of self (Goffman). This training re-scripts their socially inscribed gender code with semiotically switched g

“The Evolution of a Black Aesthetic, 1920–1950”David C. Driskell and Race, Ethics, and Aesthetics Julie L. McGee (bio) This article considers David Driskell’s catalogue essay, “The Evolution of a Black Aesthetic, 1920–1950,” in the context of the author, the times, and exigencies behind the exhibition “Two Centuries of Black American Art” (1976). Situated historically, Driskell’s essay manifests the dominant voices and parameters relative to race and artistic practice in African-American art at that time (1970s). Nonetheless, it is also a deeply individualistic essay, written from the perspective of a practicing artist significantly indebted to modernist conceptions of art and scholastic aesthetic philosophy1 A work of art is immersed in the whirlpool of time; and it belongs to eternity. A work of art is specific, local, individual; and it is our brightest token of universality. A work of art arises proudly above any interpretation we may see fit to give it; and, although it serves to illustrate history, man and the world itself, it goes further than this; it creates man, creates the world and sets up within history an immutable order. (Focillon 32) In 1976 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art mounted two significant traveling exhibitions: Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris’s “Women artists 1550–1950,”2 and “Two Centuries of Black American Art.” Conceived largely in 1974 and before its signifying bicentennial year opening, “Two Centuries of Black American Art” emerged during a period of heightened group action by artists demanding historical recognition and visibility in the mainstream art world. These emergent voices and artistic practices, largely ignored by the Western canon, included Chicano/a, Native, and African-American artists. Feminist scholars such as Linda Nochlin, Eleanor Tufts, Cindy Nemser, and others worked tirelessly to document women’s artistic practices and call out the flawed and prejudicial nature of the art historical discourse and praxis.3 The seminal “Two Centuries” exhibition was guest curated by artist and historian David C. Driskell, then on the faculty at Fisk University.4 “I was looking for a body of work which showed first of all that blacks had been stable participants in American visual culture for more than 200 years, and by stable participants I simply mean that in many cases they had been the backbone,” Driskell recalls (qtd. in Fraser). Black artists’ historical omission, invisibility, and derisory representation in art discourses are unfortunate but very real aspects of American art history. Examples of historically flawed or racially tinged art criticism relative to African-American art are easy to find; this holds true for the decades preceding and contemporaneous to “Two Centuries,” including [End Page 1175] reviews of the exhibition itself. Though several exhibitions highlighting contemporary black artists’ work emerged during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art wanted an exhibit that would index the historical achievement of African-American artists and thereby provide a context for the more recent and contemporary work. “Two Centuries” ostensibly concluded in the 1950s, excluding work by artists born after the 1920s. Nonetheless, artists who worked well into and beyond the 1950s, such as Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Elizabeth Catlett, were included. Though criticized for excluding more contemporary work, Driskell eloquently defended the chronological parameter: “1950 is not a bad cut-off date [ . . . ] it allows us to honor our ancestors [ . . . ] [and] pass on a mantle to go forth and look to that which came after them” (qtd. in Kutner). Artistic practices and artists excluded from the entrenched canon were expected to demonstrate aesthetic viability, maturity, and legitimacy. Mechanisms for doing this included noting omissions, documenting historicity of practice and practitioners, establishing difference, and calling into question the discourse of exclusion. Exhibitions and exhibition catalogues are instrumental tools in knowledge production; they shape discourse and subsequent exhibition programming and collecting. Aided by Driskell’s quintessential assailing elegance, “Two Centuries”—the exhibition and its catalogue—significantly participated in this “rupture moment” in American art history. This paper takes up one of Driskell’s two catalogue essays, “The Evolution of a Black Aesthetic, 1920–1950,” in the context of the author and the exigencies of the era. In his 1946 article, “The Negro...

Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges

Bodies under the Law:Feminist Artistic Practice and the Struggle to #Repealthe8th* Sinéad Kennedy (bio) Before the Law stands a door-keeper on guard. To this door-keeper there comes a man from the country who begs for admittance to the Law. But the door-keeper says that he cannot admit the man at the moment. The man, on reflection, asks if he will be allowed, then, to enter later. "It is possible," answers the door-keeper, "but not at this moment." Since the door leading into the Law stands open as usual and the door-keeper steps to one side, the man bends down to peer through the entrance. When the door-keepers sees that, he laughs and says: "If you are so strongly tempted, try to get in without my permission. But note I am powerful. And I am only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall, keepers stand at every door, one more powerful than the other." franz kafka, "before the law" The parable "Before the Law," later incorporated into Franz Kafka's posthumous novel The Trial, has long served as a powerful metaphor for legal scholars exploring the experience of those subject to the forces of institutionalized law. In the parable the supplicant fails to circumvent and defy the gatekeeper; growing old, the man finds himself approaching the end of his life without ever having achieved the access he so desperately seeks. Just before his death the gatekeeper tells him that the doorway was made exclusively for him and that upon his demise the entrance to the law will be closed (Kafka 197). Intentionally enigmatic, the parable illustrates the profound psychological effect of the law by expressing the duality of how its processes can be experienced. Purportedly objective and impartial, the law [End Page 241] remains remote from the daily life of the man experiencing it as he lives without access, unable to gain entry. The parable also reveals the illusory character of Kafka's law, which requires the man's cooperation and deference to sustain its power. Were we to reimagine Kafka's parable with a female protagonist, our understanding of the experience would differ: the law would again exist as a partisan system with only the appearance of objectivity. But more significantly, regendering the parable's perspective would make visible the hidden structures of domination and exploitation, as well as the ideological work of institutional apparatuses, that define the modern capitalist/liberal state. Women's experiences of the law are often characterized by violent intimacy, thereby disclosing the law's embodied consequences and its intersection with institutional and intimate violence. In other words, unlike the male body of Kafka's parable, the female body occupies a space not before the law, but rather under the law—as subject to its domination. Through the prism of three feminist performances—Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones's The Touching Contract (2016), Speaking of IMELDA's Pro-Choice Proclamation (2015), and Jones's Tremble Tremble (2017), this essay argues that a central theme of women's artistic practice in Ireland envisions the female body as a site of resistance, exposing the law as a force that grants and then restricts access to institutional authority through its power of determination and punishment. Ireland's Constitution or framing legal narrative, Bunreacht na hÉireann, haunts such feminist practice as a structuring presence. Each of the three performances explored below offer possibilities for creating new forms of knowledge and resistance, thereby allowing women to move collectively from a position of bodies under the law to bodies against the law and, finally, toward the possibility of bodies beyond the law. Feminist Theory Redefines the "Body Politic" Feminist theorists have long engaged with questions of embodiment as they confront the female body's relationship to the law and the state. They argue that the identification of women with a corrupted conception of corporeal reality has been central to the construction and maintenance of the modern liberal state. Feminists thus challenge [End Page 242] the foundational premises of western political and legal theory and its symbolic focus on the male body by transforming the metaphor of the...

The evolution of contemporary music performance has led to increasing experimentation with percussion instruments beyond the traditional drum set. Among these instruments, the West African drum Djembe has gained international recognition for its distinctive tonal range, portability, and expressive rhythmic capacity. While the drum set remains the dominant rhythmic instrument in modern popular music, alternative percussion instruments have begun to emerge as viable substitutes in specific performance contexts. This study investigates the role of the Djembe as an alternative percussion instrument in contemporary music performance. Using a qualitative research approach combining literature analysis, performance observation, and reflective practice based on the author's professional experience as a percussionist, the research explores the historical origins, acoustic characteristics, and performance techniques of the Djembe. The study further analyzes how Djembe performance techniques can emulate or complement drum set rhythmic patterns in various musical genres, including acoustic pop, folk, world music, and experimental music. Additionally, the research examines audience perception of the instrument in live performance contexts. The findings indicate that the Djembe possesses strong adaptability due to its wide tonal spectrum and rhythmic versatility. Its portability and acoustic resonance make it particularly suitable for small ensemble performances and acoustic settings where the drum set may be impractical. The instrument also encourages audience interaction and enhances the emotional atmosphere of musical performances. This study contributes to ethnomusicological discourse by highlighting the evolving role of traditional percussion instruments in contemporary music environments.

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

This article addresses ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ as two distinct categories in African artistic practices and art history. It engages with exhibitions as sites of knowledge production and examines how they construct narratives of artistic modernism, modernity, and contemporaneity. By focusing on the Tendances et Confrontations exhibition, at the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Negres Dakar in 1966, and Dak'Art biennials since 1992, it explores the role of the two exhibition platforms in shaping artistic practices and discourse in two moments in African art and history in the last 50 years. The article also places particular emphasis on the interpretation of artworks in Tendances et Confrontations and Dak'Art to outline a transformation in artistic practices and knowledge production.

What’s in a Term: Can Feminism Look beyond the Global North/Global South Geopolitical Paradigm?

Embody

While much feminist STS has focused on science and laboratories as sites of critical engagement, feminism and feminist theory has introduced alternative sites of knowledge production and engagement. This essay draws on new materialism and feminist theories of nature, embodiment and technology in order to analyze the disabled cyborg body as an epistemic site of feminist science. In particular, I analyze my own experience of adopting and using networked technologies—specifically, an insulin pump and glucose monitor--to manage Type 1 diabetes and the kinds of scientific practices that I engage in on a daily basis. These technologies and practices deserve attention in terms of what they can teach us about common discourses around science, innovation and infrastructure and, ultimately, about ourselves.

The treatment of female body in the paintings of Zora Petrovic anticipate the feminist theories that originated during the 70’s and 80’s of the 20th century, which suggested androcentrism and absence of the female perspective and the necessity of re-evaluation on the concept of body. Through the expression of female body, in the traditional painter’s act, Zora Petrovic flirts with the social constructions of body and gender, intuitively pushing the boundaries towards the spiritual realm while treating body not only as an physical object but also as the bearer of the subjectivism and the point where personal and sexual identity, cultural and social stereotypes and relations between power and domination interconnect. The Act (1956/1957) represents an artistic deliberation on the social position of female body in the patriarchal capitalism with the elements of her own fictitious projections in search of the artist’s personal female and artistic identity, including her own intuitive artistic indication and conjecture on the feminist theories that had followed. The painting of this act depicts an act of self-identification, while the object of observation becomes the perspective of beholder who detaches the perspective of an observer while rendering his (male) absolute power ineffective. The naked body brings disarray by an indication of an erotic promise while dismissing an illusion of the absolute capitulation. The developed artistic form of ambiguous sexualised body that is revealed to the male voyeuristic observation transitions into the sensual dreaming of the model about own erotic and exhibitionistic body seductiveness which is, in fact, a provocation to the observer by its revealing eroticised position while encouraging a voyeuristic enjoyment that becomes an outcome of creation and observation of self-admired body, and in the process transposing the artist and the model into the voyeuristic roles. The innate understanding of eroticism, in the process of development of a new form of female act, in Zora Petrovic’s paintings, faces us with an array of ideological presumptions and stereotypes that are conceptualised around the perception of body as an object and as a bearer of subjectivism while allowing an opportunity to question own interpretations and boundaries of personal and social discourse on the subjects of body, gender and sensuality.

This essay assesses the value of social constructivist theories of science to the history of medicine. It highlights particularly the ways in which feminist theorists have turned their attention to gender as a category of analysis in scientific thinking, producing an approach to modern science that asks how it became identified with objectivity, reason, and mind, set in opposition to subjectivity, feeling, and nature. In the history of medicine this new work has allowed a group of scholars to better explain not only how women were marginalized in the profession but also the manner in which politics, male anxiety about shifts in power relations between the sexes, social and political upheaval, professional concerns, and changes in the family all had an impact on the production of knowledge regarding the female body, including the discovery, definition, and treatment of a wide range of female ailments, from anorexia nervosa to fibroid tumors. Building on the work in the history of medicine already accomplished, the essay offers a critical rereading of the writings of Elizabeth Blackwell, a pioneer nineteenth-century woman physician and leader of the woman's medical movement. It contends that Blackwell, who lived through a revolutionary change in medical thinking brought on by discoveries in immunology and bacteriology, remained critical of as the best form of knowing and suspicious of the laboratory medicine that promoted it so enthusiastically. Moreover, her critiques of radical objectivity and scientific reductionism deserve to be recognized as foreshadowing the maternalist strain of thinking among contemporary feminist philosophers and thinkers such as Sara Ruddick and others. In the last thirty years, ever since Thomas Kuhn demonstrated that culture has historically influenced the pursuit of science and helped shape which scientific paradigms eventually prevail, the image of scientific knowledge as neutral, value-free, and privileged has become slightly tarnished. Indeed, post-Kuhnian debates within a variety of disciplines have only added to suspicions that the structures of knowledge that have informed and dominated Western culture since the Enlightenment are less authoritative than they originally seemed. Busy philosophers from many different perspectives are rejecting the foundationalism that has guided the post-Enlightenment search for truth, itself premised on * The author wishes to thank George Sanchez, Ann Lombard, Mario Biagoli, Emily Abel, Anita Clair Fellman, Margaret Finnegan, Barbara Bair, Gerald Grob, and especially Louise Newman, who rendered helpful critical readings of this essay. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.128 on Mon, 18 Jul 2016 05:53:38 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 52 REGINA MORANTZ-SANCHEZ the belief that thoughtful and reasonable people can, indeed, explain the world as it actually exists. Instead, they prefer versions of William James's argument that What we say about reality . . . depends on the perspective in which we

The dialectical relationship between the text and performance has been a perennial point of debate in theatre and performance studies. For example, gestural elements are considered as one of the foundational principles of epic theatre practice. Similarly, Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty (1989) rests entirely upon the body and the somatic imageries of the performer. The text unfolds and physically transforms its structure and meaning when the performer rereads it in a performative context through gestural interventions that include acts, gestures, movements, speech, tonal articulations, visual elements of the body and objects in a performance. As a result, the very involvement of the gestural elements in the process of performance-making allow a reconfiguration of the text, dissolving its dominant ideologies and reiterating its cultural and political meanings. It is, therefore, clear that the performer's gestural intervention is a political act that problematizes the linguistic authority that constitutes the text. Any discussion of the interconnectivity between the text and performance, therefore, will certainly foreground the performer's body as the central locus of negotiations. From a gender perspective, feminist scholars and theatre practitioners have argued that gender, like text, is constructed by the dominant ideologies pervasive in a society in its cultural, linguistic and historical contexts. The text is a masculine property (Butler, 1988; Kristeva, 1980) in which female bodies are represented, objectified and sexualized. In order to challenge this gender bias Butler introduces a new term, expressive acts (1988, 519-531; Price, 1990, 322-331), as an ideologically accurate way to resist and reverse the gender inscriptions in cultural and artistic practices. Placing the term in opposition to performative, Butler argues that expressive is non-logocentric and a corporeal field of cultural play. Extending this argument and asserting a phenomenological critical position of lived experience of the body, I maintain in this chapter that gender identities can be challenged and textual meanings reversed through gestural reconstruction, without rewriting the masculine text. As a performative act, gestural reconstruction subverts the masculine dominance in the text through improvisation, the unscripted and unwarranted in performance that uses kinetic and temporal properties of the body to reiterate the political discourse.