You Thrive on Mistaken Identity

Abstract

Since the early 1980s Barbara Kruger's work has insistently shown female bodies bound up by sadistic violence-acts of shattering, slicing, stripping, piercing, biting, stabbing, choking, smothering-and by masochistic enslavement-being framed, pinned, or frozen in ritual poses, being or making themselves objects, especially of the gaze, fusing with or being absorbed by powerful others. And the text messages superimposed over these pictures ritually intone masochistic slogans: We are the objects of your suave entrapments; We have received orders not to move; am your almost nothing; am your slice of life. The female masochistic identity Kruger puts on view turns out to be, however, not fixed or frozen, as in the stereotype it parodies, but multiple and shifting. Pronounced from a range of positions, including those of submission, resistance, reversal, and irony, these phrases-written on bodies-both enact and problematize female masochism: We are unsuitable for framing, Do I have to give up me to be loved by you? Use only as directed, It's our pleasure to disgust you, articulating masochism across a space susceptible to rearrangement and to reframing. The framework within which Kruger repeats scenarios of domination and submission is one of oscillation, a charged space of movement in which identification is painstakingly worked over; it is this more than anything else that defines it as a fantasy space. Kruger's compendium of masochisms can be related to a project of feminist theory: to rethink masochism through the psychoanalytic model of fantasy itself.' A number of writers have argued that the strict gendering of sadomasochism-in which masochism is feminized through the devalued gender attributes of passivity and submission and opposed to sadistic fantasy,