Women's Bodies of Performative Excess: Miming, Feigning, Refusing, and Rejecting the Phallus

Abstract

In one of his late essays before his premature death of AIDS related diseases, the art critic Craig Owen observed that a certain calculated duplicity had come to be increasingly regarded as an indispensable tool for deconstruction. Both contemporary art and contemporary theory were rich in parody, the effects of trompe-l’oeil, dissimulation, and strategies of mimetic rivalry. The appropriated official discourse—the discourse of the Other—was mimed not to praise or vivify its existence, but to wrestle away its power so that its function as the dominant model was cast into doubt. Mimicking was a form of dis-semblance (and not resemblance), a non-reproductive repetition which repeated rather than re-presented. It belonged to the realm of simulacra. As Deleuze once argued, the simulacrum was “an image without resemblance” (49), but then, not quite. The simulacrum “still produce[d] an effect of resemblance,” but it was a “looking like” that took place in a trick mirror where the spectator lacked mastery. The observer could not dominate the simulacrum because it had already incorporated the point of view of the observer. Before the simulacrum, the spectator was mastered. Perhaps because of Western culture’s long standing identification of femininity with masquerade, women make “very good mimics,” wrote Barbara Kruger: “We replicate certain words and pictures [and bodies—as will be argued] and watch them stray from or coincide with your notions of fact and fiction” (qtd. in Owens 201). Mimicry, therefore, has been especially valuable as a feminist strategy. Nowhere has mimicry succeeded so well as in women’s bodybuilding. At first glance, it would appear that women bodybuilders are simply copying men, producing an iconic representation, and therefore desiring to possess the phallic power. Such an impersonation of mimesis, however, takes us away from its more radical performative possibility. As Aoki and Ian have cleverly shown, it is the bodybuilder who is capable of a disorienting mimetic strategy. In what follows, I juxtapose the theories of Jacques Lacan1 and Judith Butler (to show how the woman bodybuilder puts into question the public’s commonsense understanding of the sex/gender couplet. I then show how the bodybuilder relates to other postmodern bodies—namely the mannequin (model), anorexic, and bulimic — within a network of discursive circulation which resist the phallic signifier in yet other ways. Finally, I attempt to show how queer bodies, that of the butch/femme, transvestite, cross-dresser and transsexual, further complicate the already troubled heteronormativity.