Abstract
Irish artist Mary Duffy, who was born without arms, laid herself bare in a 1995 live performance. The performance displayed multiple acts of exposure: personal, political, and corporeal. Posing in the nude, Duffy revealed verbally how her disabled body is defined by medicine and society as lacking, inadequate, and undesirable. She reflected upon her confrontations with medical and social gazes and described how they impacted her sense of self. Duffy’s performative act transgressed the boundaries between representation and everyday life, as it simultaneously refigured histories of art and performance. Duffy’s body as an armless nude invoked the Classical Venus de Milo, while at the same time offered itself as a vulnerable human being and naked, medicalized specimen. The performance showcased disability as the source and site of creative production and the disabled body as a work of art, while Duffy projected an empowered, self-mediated body image into the social arena. In a self-objectifying act, Duffy explained how her body was already objectified in society, and in the act of talking back, Duffy’s monologue became social dialogue.
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Notes
- 1.
I viewed this performance in a documentary filmed at the Ann Arbor, Michigan conference, which features interviews and performances by several disabled artists, disability studies scholars, and disability rights activists. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, directors, Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back (A Brace Yourselves Productions, 2000; 1996) (director’s cut, 47 minutes).
- 2.
Duffy refers specifically to her teachers encouraging her to cover her body in an interview on the videotape: Mitchell and Snyder, Vital Signs.
- 3.
Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Pantheon Books, Inc., 1956).
- 4.
Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (New York: Atheneum, 1985).
- 5.
Peggy Phelan summarizes this narration of the subjugating gaze: “A re-presented woman is always a copy of a copy; the ‘real’ (of) woman cannot be represented because her function is to re-present man. She is the mirror and thus never in it.” Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 101.
- 6.
Gaze theory is derived from psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan surrounding the interplays of sight, identity formation, and marginalizing processes of “othering.” The gaze has been interrogated predominantly for its dependence on heterosexual desire (in film and extended to other visual media) and construction of sexual difference. See, for example, Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), reprinted in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989) give first and last page number; John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1972); and Griselda Pollock, Vision & Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1988). These discussions have expanded to considerations of how the gaze mediates class (based on the works of Michel Foucault and, bringing Foucault’s work to analysis of photography, John Tagg. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995, 1977)); The Birth of the Clinic: an Archaeology of Medical Perception, A.M. Sheridan Smith, trans. (New York, Pantheon Books, 1973), and John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Education, 1988). Many scholars analyze the gaze in relation to racism and constructions of racial difference: see Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York and London: Routledge, 1991); Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” from The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper & Row, c1989), 33–59; and Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Charles Lam Markmann, trans. (New York: Grove Press, c1967). For a discussion of the gaze in relation to constructions of race and gender in photography, see Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999) and Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). Such works theorize how the gaze articulates power and produces social hierarchies.
- 7.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Staring Back: Self-Representations of Disabled Performance Artists,” American Quarterly 52, no. 2 (July 2000): 334–338.
- 8.
In an article on staring, Garland-Thomson, in reference to visual images brought about by technologies in the nineteenth century, states: “This kind of mediation changes the living staring encounter in several ways; first, it absolves the starer of the responsibility to the object of the stare; second, it eliminates the possibility of engagement between the two people in the staring relationship; third, it grants all agency to the looker and withdraws any agency from the looked upon; fourth, it renders the confrontation static. In short, virtual staring evacuates any dynamism from a lived encounter.” See Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Staring at the Other,” Disability Studies Quarterly 25, no. 4 (Fall 2005) (www.dsq-sds.org).
- 9.
Phelan’s theories are drawn from the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, whom she argues formulates seeing as social and the gaze as reciprocal and intersubjective.
- 10.
“Amputee” is an ambiguous term that commonly designates anyone born without, having lost, or having so-called deformed limbs.
- 11.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, ed., (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 335–374, and David Hevey, The Creatures that Time Forgot (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
- 12.
Timothy J. Clark, “Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of ‘Olympia,’” from Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris, eds., 105–120 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1992). This essay is a later version of Clark’s chapter on Olympia in The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). [“Preliminaries” was actually published before the chapter in The Painting of Modern Life—the 1992 publication is in an anthology.]
- 13.
Rona Goffen, “Sex, Space, and Social History in Titian’s Venus of Urbino,” in Titian’s “Venus of Urbino,” Rona Goffen, ed., 1–22; 63–90 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
- 14.
Mary Pardo, “Veiling the Venus if Urbino,” in Goffen, 108–128.
- 15.
Clark, 118.
- 16.
Clark, 116.
- 17.
All the essays in Goffen’s collection, including a version of Clark’s work on Olympia, agree that what proves fundamentally disturbing in the images (Titian’s and Manet’s) is the inviting and forcefully returned gaze of the female body. They note also that in the Venus tradition, the female conventionally looked away or lavished her gaze on her male lover, rather than the viewer of the painting. The face of Titian’s model seems complacent with or unaware that she is on display.
- 18.
“Hottentot” was a term coined by Dutch settlers to Africa.
- 19.
Baartman was featured as the only human in the text The History of Mammals (1826), where she was contextualized with 41 species of apes. This text was written by one of the founders of teratology, the science of monsters, Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, and comparative anatomist and prominent French zoologist, Georges Cuvier.
- 20.
Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815–1817,” in Deviant Bodies Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla, eds., 19–48 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 20.
- 21.
Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” from “Race,” Writing, and Difference, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., 223–261 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
- 22.
Garland-Thomson has discussed the “Hottentot Venus” in relationship to disabled female characters, empowered through their liberation from norms and social standards for beauty, in the resistance literature of contemporary feminist, African-American writers. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 70–77.
- 23.
Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson, trans. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004; 1893).
- 24.
Information on Anne E. Leak-Thompson is drawn mainly from Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 217–219.
- 25.
See Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1997) and Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998).
- 26.
Schneider (1997).
- 27.
Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Pantheon Books, Inc., 1956).
- 28.
Warner (1985).
- 29.
Duffy’s photographic series Cutting the Ties that Bind (1987) was also featured in the exhibition “Vis-Ability: Views from the Interior” at the Slusser Gallery at the University of Michigan (May and June of 1995). The series is discussed by Lennard J. Davis, and one of the photographs graces the cover of his book: Lennard J. Davis, “Visualizing the Disabled Body: The Classical Nude and the Fragmented Torso” in Enforcing Normalcy, 126–157. Duffy has written two short pieces on these photographs as well: Mary Duffy, “Redressing the Balance,” Feminist Art News 3, no. 8 (1991): 15–18 and “Cutting the Ties That Bind,” Feminist Art News 2, no. 10 (1989): 6–7.
- 30.
Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” in Sister Outsider (Santa Cruz, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 40–44.
- 31.
Mitchell and Snyder, (2000; 1996) and Bonnie Sherr Klein, Shameless: The Art of Disability (The National Film Board of Canada, 2006).
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Millett-Gallant, A. (2024). Disarming Venus. In: The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48251-9_2
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