Abstract
This chapter investigates the artwork of Sibande and how her work makes explicit and implicit references to hysteria in the South African context. The character, Sophie, a domestic worker who is invariably deeply immersed in fantasy, appears throughout Mary Sibande’s oeuvre (ranging from Long Live the Dead Queen 2009 to the series The Purple Shall Govern 2013, 2014). This chapter traces how Sibande’s portrayal of Sophie, where she is continually engaged in fantasy and articulates trauma at the site of the body, is consistent with hysterical representation. The authors interpretation of hysteria is derived from the feminist understanding thereof, where it is not understood as a form of pathology, but rather as a mode of representation which allows the subject to articulate repressed traumatic knowledge and repressed desire in a negotiated manner, from within the confines of an oppressive system.
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Notes
- 1.
The term hysteria originates in ancient Greece, where the disease was considered to be an exclusively female condition, as may be inferred from the etymology of the word: hysteria is derived from the Greek word hyster (uterus; Peters 2005, p. 124). Physicians ascribed the presence of the malady to the existence of a migrating womb, a sign of the female sufferer’s violation of sexual and reproductive prescriptions, including that of procreation (Yarom 2005).
- 2.
Feminists particularly engage with hysteria via Freud, where his encounters with the hysterical patient known by the pseudonym of Dora, are especially influential. In The Newly Born Woman (1975) Hélène Cixous, viewing hysteria as a form of silent resistance, describes Dora as a feminist martyr (Cixous and Clément 1987, p. 154). Dora is also the subject of Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane’s compilation of feminist writings entitled In Dora’s Case. Freud—Hysteria—Feminism (1985). Dora is the pseudonym of Ida Bauer, the patient who Freud (2015, pp. 572–617) refers to in Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905). Dora suffered from a range of hysterical symptoms, including aphonia (an inability to speak) and a nervous cough. She was traumatized when, while she is still an adolescent, a close friend of her father’s known as Herr K made sexual advances to her. Freud argued that Dora suffered from repressed sexual desire for Herr K, as well as repressed homosexual feelings for his wife, Frau K.
- 3.
Siopis (in Willis 2010, p. 134) notes that, like Bauer, “Saartjie could be seen in some sense to represent, for all African women, a body bearing out desire”; for Siopis (in Coombes 1997, p. 120), Baartman symbolizes the manner in which black women’s sexuality has historically been interpreted in both a sexist and racist manner.
- 4.
The term, resistance art, refers to art which was critical of the “racial, cultural and or political polices” of the apartheid state (Towards a people’s culture, Art and Resistance under apartheid 2016).
- 5.
As Laplanche and Pontalis (1973, p. 317) note, the different spellings, “fantasy” and “phantasy”, which are to be found in translations of Freud as well as in the secondary literature, hold no significance and can be attributed to the different translations of Freud’s German word “Phantasie”.
- 6.
While her analysis cannot be explored within the limitations of this chapter, Corrigall provides a particularly intriguing examination of Sibande’s artworks in her article, “Sartorial Excess in Mary Sibande’s ‘Sophie’” (2015), by analyzing the artist’s phantasmatic outfit in relation to dandyism, where luxurious clothing “visualises a desire for social mobility” (p. 146).
- 7.
Image available at: http://umma.umich.edu/archive/view/exhibitions/2013-Sibande.php.
- 8.
As Corrigall notes, Sophie’s guise as domestic worker is apt and enables Sibande to explore the politics of race: “OVEREXPLOITED and positioned within the heart of white South Africa, domestic workers have been the ultimate victims of a skewed social and political system thus their occupation embodies the vexed racial dynamics in this country” (Corrigall 2009, capitalization in original).
- 9.
While it remains an integral part of her work in our reading, we do not wish to imply that Sibande’s artworks function solely in the register of trauma. As Bystrom (2016) indicates, Sibande’s artworks also move beyond this and cannot be categorized as being purely post-traumatic. Sarah Nuttall (2013:429) similarly states that Sibande succeeds in moving “away from the language of wounds” toward a form of resistance.
- 10.
Conversations with Madam CJ Walker can be viewed at: http://www.artcritical.com/2010/06/29/dispatches-capetown/. The latter image is available at: http://www.anotherafrica.net/art-culture/mary-sibande-triumph-over-prejudice.
- 11.
As is characteristic of Sibande’s artworks, Conversations with Madam CJ Walker is ambiguous and does not purely have negative connotations. As Bystrom (2016) notes, Madam CJ Walker was an iconic figure—a slave who later managed to become a millionaire—and Sibande’s reference to her therefore also serves to signify emancipation. Bystrom (2016) supports this interpretation by referring to the fact that Sibande’s own mother’s work in a hair salon similarly enabled her to escape a life of domestic servitude.
- 12.
Freud (2015) argues that primal fantasy is derived from inherited memories, stating that primal fantasy does not only have its basis in the subject’s own experiences, but may also relate to “things that were innately present in him at his birth, elements with a phylogenetic origin––an archaic heritage”. Laplanche and Pontalis reject Freud’s account of primal fantasy and provide a contemporary analysis thereof, by stating: “Like collective myths, they claim to provide a representation of and a “solution” to whatever constitutes a major enigma for the child” (1973, p. 331).
- 13.
Helene Strauss provides an interesting analysis of the work of Zanele Muholi, the South African artist who, like Sibande, explores the themes of race and gender by using her own body (2014, p. 474). Strauss refers to Muholi’s installation What Don’t You See When You Look at Me (2008) wherein a tire and a sausage feature as prominent motifs (pp. 474–476). The artist employs these motifs ambiguously: the tire evokes both the safety of the womb and “South Africa’s history of resistance”, and the phallic sausage refers to both the patriarchal violence, which is rife in South Africa, and intestines. In Muholi’s art, ambiguity is seminal and masculine and feminine signifiers are interwoven, in order to complicate conventional gender ideas (Strauss 2014, pp. 486–487). Her work, therefore, bears various similarities to that of Sibande and a comparison of Muholi’s work with that of Sibande in this regard may prove to be productive.
- 14.
One such artwork is a lithograph of Pierre Aristide André Brouillet’s painting, A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière (1887), where Charcot is portrayed holding a woman who has succumbed to a hysterical attack. Two other artworks also lined the walls: Dr. Philippe Pinel at the Salpêtrière (1795), by Tony Robert-Fleury, which depicted the physician amongst the women housed in the asylum; and Paul Richer’s Arc de cercle (1887), a graphic image depicting a particular phase in a hysterical episode (Showalter 1985, p. 149).
- 15.
- 16.
Sibande’s work is layered with meaning. Nuttall provides an interesting interpretation of Sibande’s use of the mannequin, where she argues that the plastic skin of the mannequin is employed figuratively. Whereas the wounded black female body has routinely been used in feminist culture to serve as reminder of trauma of racial oppression, the polished plastic skin of Sophie-as-mannequin seems impervious, and, as such, suggests a resistance to suffering (Nuttall 2013, pp. 428–429).
- 17.
We employ the term interpellation in an Althusserian sense. The term is coined by the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser in order to describe the manner in which ideology addresses the individual (1971, p. 11).
- 18.
Freud defines sublimation as the process whereby the libido is deflected toward more socially desirable purposes (2015, p. 588). Bronfen’s definition of sublimation is an adaptation of its conventional meaning; in her framework, sublimation refers to a process whereby traumatic knowledge and traumatic enjoyment is repressed (1998, pp. 20, 84–86). Her association of sublimation with repression therefore resonates with Freud’s definition of sublimation insofar as both interpretations involve the moderation of the libido.
- 19.
Leibbrandt (2014) describes Sophie as “terrible” on the basis of the title of one of the works in The Purple Shall Govern series, namely, A Terrible Beauty.
- 20.
In The Purple Shall Govern the dress-like tendrils of flesh unfurl from Sophie’s body in such a manner that flesh and fabric become indistinguishable. Flesh and fabric interpenetrate to the extent that these can be referred to as comprising a body-dress.
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Acknowledgments
The financial assistance of the National Research Foundation toward the completion of this research is hereby gratefully acknowledged.
This chapter has previously been published as: Anne Scheffer, Ingrid E. Stevens and Amanda du Preez. 2017. “Hysterical Representation in the Art of Mary Sibande”, de arte 52. no. 2–3, pp. 4–28. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00043389.2017.1332503
Images courtesy of the artist and Gallery MOMO.
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Scheffer, A., du Preez, A., Stevens, I.E. (2021). Hysterical Representation in the Art of Mary Sibande. In: Braun, J. (eds) Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_9
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