Session 3: Carving Up
Session 3: Carving Up
Chair: Frank Faulkner
Carving Out Identity: Sadomasochism and the Discourse of Evil in the Work of Catherine Opie
Lauren Gallow
University of the Pacific, USA
Cutting. Mutilation. Manipulation. Distortion. As both a photographer and member of the lesbian and sadomasochistic communities, Catherine Opie has embraced extreme and violent actions as a means of fighting against narrow definitions of gender, sexual identity, and family values. During the early 1990s when Opie produced two of her most controversial works – Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993) and Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994) – a discourse of “evil” was often evoked in an attempt to marginalize and disempower the subcultures Opie represented in her photographs. The key players involved in the NEA censorship controversy (1989-1991) propagated just such a discourse, leading to a demarcation of these subcultures as “evil” and “wicked” in the American media and popular culture. This paper aims to deconstruct this “language of wickedness,” uncovering the hegemonic views of the American heterosexual nuclear family and the homophobia that formed the underpinnings of this discourse. I also mean to examine how Catherine Opie’s use of powerful, provocative imagery, particularly in the self-mutilation used in her two self-portraits of the 1990s, fought against the heterosexual values being touted as “righteous” and “moral” by right-wing politicians involved in the NEA controversy. Two such politicians who were at the forefront of the debate, Senator Jesse Helms and Rep. Dick Armey, applied such statements as “patently offensive” and “morally reprehensible trash” to homosexual themed works, working to forward the notion of homosexuality as “sinful” and “evil.” However, in writing on her body and positing a provocative language of imagery for herself as a member of the sadomasochistic and lesbian communities, Catherine Opie actively carved out a place for herself in opposition to this “discourse of evil.”
Devouring Boundaries – The Cannibal of Rothenburg: Two Discourses of Transgression
Franziska Lindner
Not a long time ago a German court heard how on March the 10th, 2001 the computer expert Armin Meiwes stabbed, fried and then digested Bernd Brandes, a 43-year-old Berlin engineer he met through the Internet. Mr. Brandes travelled by train to Mr. Meiwes’ rambling timbered farmhouse in the German town of Rotenburg after answering an advert requesting “hunky man for slaughter”. Meiwes has acknowledged carrying out the killing but said it was with the victim’s consent and not for sexual satisfaction. Before the killing, he agreed to have his penis cut off – which both men tried to eat. 41-year-old Armin Meiwes allegedly killed and dismembered Bernd Juergen Brandes and later ate his flesh. Parts of Brandes’ body were found packaged and labeled in Meiwes’ freezer. Bones and other ‘unusable’ parts were discovered buried in his garden. Meiwes told authorities he had eaten about 40 pounds of Brandes, after barbecuing the flesh in his garden. A note left in Brandes’ Berlin apartment said he was a willing victim.
The presentation plans to draw on the issue of the fragmented body and live flesh, as a phenomenology of matter in terms of painful / joyous corporeality and the importance of understanding the practice of cannibalism in relation to the appropriation of the Other’s body within the anguishing limits of the encounter of the One with the Other. Cannibalism is here seen as the symbolic practice, whether real or metaphoric, of devouring the Other. Furthermore, the Foucauldian ‘un-normalising’ judicial discourse during Meiwes’ trial creating the victim’s insanity and thus, demonising and criminalising the ‘cannibal’s’ deed, making him evil, shall be explored. Im Verlaufe, Foucault’s concept of ‘transgression’ and ‘normalisation’, Bataille’s ideas of ‘taboo’, ‘transgression’, ‘continuity’, ‘discontinuity’, ‘the sacred’ and ‘the profane’ and also Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘carnivalesque’ and Kristeva’s ‘abject’ shall be employed.
Sacred and (sub)human Pain: The Body as Witness in Early Modern Hagiography and Contemporary Literature of Atrocity
Sophie Oliver
Birkbeck College, London, United Kingdom
As is etymologically inferred, the ‘martyr’ is always also the ‘witness’. Testifying in the death and defamation of her body, through her body, to a faith that survives and surpasses the limits of human pain and suffering, the martyr attains a sacred or sur-humanity. More modern literary narratives of atrocity in general and torture in particular recount a similar pattern of corporeal degradation working in the opposite direction: for the perpetrator, victim and – very often – the bystander(s) of atrocity, narratives of torture and the intense physical and psychological suffering it inflicts are read and heard as narratives of subjective destitution leading not to sanctification but to de- or sub- humanisation. The monstrosity of the abject suffering body of the victim is rejected as witness precisely because of its perceived non-humanity, its destabilising immediacy: the unspeakable has no voice.
This paper will explore (un)ethical reactions to witnessing in two historically distant but thematically aligned literary representations of (non)human suffering. Close analysis of, on the one hand, early modern hagiographic narratives of sanctifying torture and, and on the other hand, 20th and 21st century literature of dehumanising atrocity will lead to a questioning of current modes of (not) reading the testimony of the abject body of the victim. In denying the witnessing potential of the body are we complicit in the dehumanisation of victims of atrocity? How may we (and why should we), as individuals, or within the international regime for eliminating human suffering (namely, human rights) alter our ways of reading and hearing testimony of suffering to allow for a mode of witnessing through the body?
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