Abstract
This paper examines the performance work of Holly Hughes through the Lacanian triad of imaginary, symbolic and real. It is my contention that, for Hughes, the body offers a very important point of resistance to the hegemony of the symbolic order.
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Notes
For clarity, it should be noted that Hughes has two separate pieces of work titled “Clit Notes”. The 1996 reference is from her autobiography, Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler. The 1998 reference, taken from the collection O Solo Homo, is from her performance piece.
I think it is necessary to point out that, for Lacan, ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are not exclusively female and male, respectively. Rather, they signify the role a caregiver plays in the oedipal drama. In this sense, a woman could easily be the castrating figure just as the man could be the desired object.
Judith Halberstam (1998) writes extensively about female masculinity, and its reception ‘by hetero- and homosocial cultures as a pathological sign of misidentification’ (p. 9). For those interested in reading more about these ideas, and their specific application to Clit Notes, I recommend reading her fascinating book, Female Masculinity.
This speculation is not without precedent. John Frohnmayer, the NEA chairman who originally defunded Hughes and her colleagues, ‘never actually saw the work of the four performance artists’ (Meyer, 2000, p. 544).
This idea follows from an argument made by Judith Butler (1993). She cites an important quotation from Lacan: ‘What is refused in the symbolic returns in the real’ (p. 187). As Butler points out, the Lacanian Real is not a delimited outside in relation to the symbolic, which always already defines the discursive circuit. To argue the real from this position, as Žižek (1992) does, is a reification of an ideology. According to Butler, ‘that there is always an “outside” and, indeed, a “constitutive antagonism” seems right, but to supply the character and content to a law that secures the borders between the “inside” and the “outside” of symbolic intelligibility is to pre-empt the specific social analysis that is required’ (p. 206). For Butler, the real is not that which exists prior to discourse, but that which has been expelled from the intersubjective circuit, that which discourse has rejected. I am very compelled by the idea that the Lacanian Real is formulated inside the symbolic (while still remaining constitutive of it). I hope that my formulation of the movement between the imaginary (constituted within language as tautology) and the real sheds some light on this debate.
References
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Gaertner, D. ‘The clit is just a clit’: The imaginary, symbolic and real in the performance work of Holly Hughes. Psychoanal Cult Soc 15, 84–99 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2009.23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2009.23