Chapter 5
Passing, Queering, and Recovering: Feminist Psychoanalysis and the Performance
of Plastic Surgery
The thing about plastic
surgery is that its the only surgery that’s also a philosophy.
--Dr. Joseph M Rosen, plastic surgeon
The flesh is deceiving
. . . It is unnecessary, because the being and the appearance do not coincide,
and this possession is a cause of misunderstanding in all human relations. I
have the flesh of an angel, but I am a jackal; the flesh of a crocodile, but
I am a pup . . . the flesh of a woman, but I am a man. I never have the flesh
of who I am. There is no exception to the rule because I am never who I am.
--Orlan, performance artist
Woman as entertainer
is a history of varying manifestations of female oppression . . . positioned
always in relation to the male construction of femininity and in relation to
male desire. Women performance artists, who use their own bodies as the instrument
of their work constantly hover on the knife edge of the possibility of joining
this spectacle of women.
--Sally Potter, filmmaker
The 1994 black and white film, Suture, begins by posing the question, "How
is it that we know who we are?" Narrated by a male voice that identifies
itself as a "doctor of the mind," the opening sequence features a
black man as he is awaken in bed by the sound of a door being unlocked. Another
man seen in silhouette enters with a gun, stalking the first man who proceeds
to pick up a shot gun and hide behind a shower curtain. As a high vertical camera
angle reveals the two figures from above, separated by a curtain with weapons
pointed at point blank range, there is a gun shot heard and a fade to white.
The narrator, as if hypnotizing the transfixed spectator in a regressive dream
therapy, interrupts his explanation of memory structures and their pathologies,
rejects this beginning for the story, and offers to "take you back to a
proper beginning . . . to a time before identity has been confused."
This attempt to recover the narrative structure of a lost past reflects a ‘lack
of fit’ that psychoanalysis proposes as the correlation between social
relations and psychic reality. Psychoanalysis suggests a narrative recovery
of the history and organization of the psyche and has offered the concept of
suture to explain the inaugurating gesture of the subject as it emerges within
a discursive network of social relations . As first described by Jacques-Alain
Miller, the concept of suture resembles the subject's sexually differentiated
entry into the symbolic register and the accompanying impositions of law, language,
and loss. Suturing, according to Miller, guarantees social identity in the guise
of a signifier (a pronoun, a personal name, an identificatory descritption)
rejoining the conflicting constellations of subjectivity that constitutes a
fragmented 'self', but always at the expense of symbolic alienation. Hence,
the subject is always a passing subject: passing as a signifier for other signifiers.
This psychoanalytic concept of "suture" was transported to the analysis
of classic films in order to probe the nature of cinematic signification. While
its application has been varied, "suture" has broadly been the name
given to "procedures by means of which cinematic texts confer subjectivity
on their viewers." It has largely, but by no means exclusively, been identified
with the shot/reverse shot formation and the convention of the 180-degree rule
which dictates that the camera stays on only one side of the axis of action
in order to preserve "narrative continuity" and the illusion of an
absent camera. This "system of suture" that articulates the viewing
subject's position with respect to the narrative has been summarized by Daniel
Dayan and Jean-Pierre Oudart who suggest that the camera presence is most systematically
disavowed in the two-shot sequence. In shot one, the viewer experiences an imaginary
plentitute, but then discovers the frame. The spectator becomes aware of the
limitations of what it sees: aware of the frame, aware that the camera is hiding
things, aware that s/he is only authorized to see what happens to be in the
axis of the glance of another spectator (who is absent) and hence aware of the
"Absent One" (the camera). Shot one is, then, a signifier of lack.
In the reverse shot, the missing field is "sutured" by the shot of
a character who stands in for the "Absent One." This second shot identifies
the controlling gaze of the first shot as belonging to a character within the
fiction and conceals the controlling gaze of the camera. Within this system
of suture, the viewer both mistakes itself for the speaking subject while simultaneously
discovering its own passivity as the spoken subject. The recognition of the
fact that there is an absent field and a controlling gaze outside the fiction
reactivates the moment of castration and inaugurates a complex signifying chain
unique to the cinematic apparatus that "sutures" the wound of castration.
The invisible cuts in classical narrative cinema are sutured over as one shot
is the signifier of the next and the signified of the preceding, and thereby
disavowing the possibility of alternative discourses. Suture is finally successful
when the viewing subject agrees that the contrivance of narrative cinema is
in fact "how I see."
The system of suture suggests the "Absent One" as analogous to the
"law of the Father" and feminist film theorists have noticed that
the cinematic operation of suture reinscribes the subjective structures of patriarchy.
Laura Mulvey has famously suggested that the pre-existing patterns and socially
established interpretations of sexual difference are reinforced in the suturing
of masculinity in terms of the capacity to look and femininity in terms of the
capacity to attract the male gaze. Hence, in psychoanalytic treatments of cinematic
suture, the "pass" of the viewing subject for the speaking subject
has largely implied a sexual differentiation. The viewing subject is compelled
to pass for the gendered constituents of the gaze since the primal drama of
sexual differentiation and the "discovery" female lack is reenacted
in classic film narrative. What this feminist explanation of suturing does not
account for is that the "pass" not only suggests sexual difference,
but also racial differenceas operating in the heterosexualizing regimes of patriarchy.
In fact, it has been widely noted that the privileging of sexual difference
in feminist applications of psychoanalysis for the interpretation of culture
"passes" over the impact of race on the development of human subjectivity
within a matrix of social realtions. It is this "passing" over of
race in psychoanalytic accounts of cinematic suture that becomes the revealed
contrivance of the film Suture and demonstrates the "racialization"
of sexual difference.
Following the opening scene and credits, the film Suture introduces us to Clay
Arlington, the black man from the opening dressed in a work shirt and cap, arriving
on a bus to Phoenix, Arizona. He is met by Vincent Towers, a white man with
slicked back hair, a white suit and a white BMW. In conversation between the
two, Clay acknowledges that the two are bothers and share "common blood,"
though nobody else knows about Clay. Vincent agrees that their physical similarity
is "disarming." The viewer is struck by their physical difference
and yet this mutual affirmation of resemblance is maintained throughout the
film. Such a disconnect exposes the operation of enunciation--the discursive
mark of the narrator--creating anxiety in the spectator and a desire for narrative
explanation and closure. Bearing this out, it soon becomes evident that Vincent
and Clay's father has just been murdered and that the nasty, condescending,
suspicious Vincent is the prime suspect and likely perpetrator of the Oedipal
crime. Vincent executes an elaborate ruse that enables him to stage his own
death, blowing up his own car while Clay (Vincent’s "double")
is driving. Clay miraculously survives the explosion however, burned beyond
recognition and suffering from amnesia. Despite his black skin, his distinctive
voice, and his pleasant personality, Clay is mistaken for loathsome Vincent
Towers. Clay’s injuries have required him to undergo extensive plastic
surgery which will be performed by the skilled hands of doctor Rene Descartes.
It is the face of Vincent Towers that Dr. Descartes will model Clay after. Despite
the photos and home movies of the "real" Vincent, the reconstruction
of Clay’s face restores his African-American features, not those of Vincent
Towers. Clay is convinced by his psychologist, his lawyer, and his accountant
that he is Vincent and is pursued by detectives who are investigating Vincent
for the murder of his father. This affirmation of resemblance compels Clay to
pass as Vincent throughout the entire film as his identity is affirmed by those
around him who refuse to recognize his difference, disavowing the archaic notion
of identity and betraying the putative visibility of racial difference. The
spectator, like Clay, must also pass in order for the operation of suture to
be successful--an operation that is only successful when the viewing subject
says, "yes, that is how I see." The anxiety producing disruption of
identity's mimetic conceit can only be assuaged when the viewing subject accepts
the recognition and resemblance between Clay and Vincent. And, in order to find
comfort in narrative, the viewing subject must be willing to pass, but this
pass presupposes its own failure.
Even when Clay is called to stand in a police lineup in which he is the only
black man, his racial difference still goes unnoticed. Clay is forced to pass
as Vincent and as white even though he has not consented to the practice, trespassing
across the boundaries of identity. He is the victim not only of the crime of
attempted murder but of the theft of his identity, a crime that has become the
plight of the disenfranchised and underrepresented. As Carole Anne Taylor notices:
Passing has become the sign of the victim, the practice of one already complicit
with the order of things, prey to its oppressive hierarchies--if it can be seen
at all. For the mark of passing successfully is the lack of a mark of passing,
of a signifier of some difference from what one seems to be.
Amy Robinson explains that the drama of passing involves recognition by those
who are members of the oppressed group and who are privy to visual codes that
evade the duped spectators of the pass. The narrative scenario in which a pass
is performed involves three participants: the passer, the dupe, and a representative
of the in-group. The pass may only be considered a "successful" pass
if there is recognition by the presence of the third literate member. In other
words, the pass owes its very possibility to its failure and to its recognition
by a member of the in-group to which the passing subject belongs. "Passing"
traffics in the affirmation of identity, displaying or disguising difference
from a presumptive norm which has also served as the measure of superiority.
It is this drama of passing that is enacted in Suture, and it is the spectator--over-enthusiastic
to submit to the operation of suture and mend the insult of passivity--who passes
in order to be sutured as a subject. In order for the viewing subject to recognize
Clay's pass, it is placed in the situation of the literate member of the in-group,
and hence, the spectator is interpolated as African-American, perhaps "despite
itself." The triangulation of the passing performance is complicated by
this pass that the spectator inadvertently performs: just as Clay is compelled
to pass for white despite himself, the spectator is compelled to pass for black.
Such a "pass for black" presupposes a normative white spectator and
would seem to discount the non-white viewing subject. However, the film positions
all viewers as passing subjects as the film compels the pass as the only route
to narrative closure. Such a narrative conceit will highlight not only the racializaiton
of sexual difference in cinematic suturing, but also the passing over of race
throughout a history of Western philosophical thought, most notably in psychoanalysis.
In the course of his extended recovery, Clay becomes romantically involved with
his plastic surgeon, Rene Descartes, whose namesake affirmed the metaphysical
equivalence central to Enlightenment thought, "I think, therefore I am."
Rene Descartes confirms this axiom by reinforcing the fantasy of Clay’s
"Greco-Roman" nose, "crisp angular jaw," "fine straight
hair," and "thin, smooth lips," despite the fact that these descriptions
contradict everything we observe. The character traits that correspond with
these features, according Dr. Decartes, including "patience and refinement"
and an "affectionate, kind hearted gentleness" do indeed, describe
Clay, but are in striking contrast to the evil, obnoxious Vincent who does possess
the physical qualities that Dr. Descartes enumerated. Finally, when Clay regains
his memory of his former identity, he affirms the name "Vincent Towers,"
claiming the identity that has been given to him, paradoxically, in terms he
calls "his own." This is the paradox of passing: the wish for one's
own proper identity, and one's own proper name and image through the recognition
of oneselves by others. But the name is always in the Other's terms, and the
promise of a full recognition of identity always fails to deliver. This is also
the paradox of suture--where the viewing subject absents itself in place of
a "stand in"--a fictional, named, character and a signifier that represents
the viewing subject for itself. This "passing" operation of suture
is a nominative system that carries the structures of patriarchal reproduction.
The heterosexualizing of race through naming is dramatized in Dr. Decartes'
transexual character, blinding her to Clay's racial difference and sanctifying
their emergent romance that trespasses across the racialized bounds of heteronormativity.
Near the conclusion of the film, the opening sequence in reenacted, and we realize
that it is Vincent who has returned to attempt to kill Clay once again. But,
it is Clay who fires the first shot, blowing Vincent’s face off, erasing
the sign of Clay’s mistaken identity and allowing Clay to remain Vincent
Towers. In a series of photographs, Clay is shown fully assimilated into Vincent’s
life, married to Dr. Decartes, enjoying opera, garden parties, and golf. The
psychologist is the only one in the story who finally believes that Clay is
not Vincent Towers and suggests that "there is a dead body that can’t
be identified, and in the most real way it is not the body of Vincent Towers."
This "real" is the social structure guided by mind/body dualism, racism,
class privilege, misogyny, and sexism in which Clay chooses to pass. However,
Doctor Shimoda (the Japanese-American analyst who quotes Freud throughout the
film), believing in the latent truth of dreams and affirming the notion of the
return of the repressed also believes that Clay "can never be Vincent Towers,
simply because he is not." Shimoda, who has narrated throughout, seems
to have uncovered the "lying" conceit of the film through his psychoanalytic
approach. And yet, his own conclusions and methodologies are exposed as an analytical
framework in a crisis of legitimacy. After all, he only comes to realize at
the end of the film what the viewing subject has "known," but been
compelled to disavow all along: that Clay is black.
In psychoanalytic morphologies, it is the Law spoken under the "name of
the Father" (and in cinema, the "Absent One") that keeps the
sexual differential in its place, one in which women will always be the symptom
of man, and the constitutive lack that defines the very nature of the subject
and object. And as Slovoj Zizek affirms after Lacan, the name orders and institutes
a variety of free-floating signifiers into an "identity"; the name
effectively sutures the object. But the conclusion of Suture ruptures the invariant
status of the "Name of the Father." It is unclear whether Clay has
followed its phallocentric precepts by choosing the name "Towers"
and the patronym that would fix the authority of patrilineal forms of kinship,
or if he is rejecting the law by turning away from the law of the father of
psychoanalysis, Freud, and returning toward the Enlightenment tradition of Decartes
by taking the name that will (according to Dr. Shimoda) fail to describe him
fully. The name effectively sutures the gap of racial difference, and this name
highlights the singularity of sexual difference in the formulation of the subject
of psychoanalysis.
Suture provides an illustration of the challenge psychoanalysis poses to Enlightenment
philosophy, science, and aesthetics as it pits their competing epistemologies
against one another. Simultaneously the film reveals how psychoanalysis also
structures an interpretive framework that "passes" over differences,
abstracting them into universals, and disavowing them in order to "fix"
one’s own. Psychoanalysis finally proves to be both profoundly inadequate
and simultaneously indispensible in accounting for the spectacle of race in
Suture. As Jane Gaines affirmed, "a theory of the text and its spectator,
based on the psychoanalytic concept of sexual difference, is unequipped to deal
with a film which is about racial difference and sexuality." However, the
narrative of the Suture encourages a psychoanalytic read with its direct references
to Freudian interpretations of dreams, its dramatization of the disconnect between
"image" and "essence," and because it references the classic
noir thriller genre which has been so fully theorised in Lacanian psychoanalytic
terms for feminsit film criticism. Insofar as the film highlights both the insufficiency
and the necessity of psychoanalytic interpretation, it demonstrates the operation
of suture and the signifying practice of passing as critical frameworks that
account for the racialization of sexual difference. The film also importantly
dramatizes how plastic surgery might be read as a metaphor for the operations
of suture and passing as it is played out in other cultural contexts. Finally,
the film highlights the recovery rhetorics structuring analytic approaches that
fix one difference as the primary or only difference that matters. Specifying
the consequences of such a recovery in feminist discourses has been the task
of this book thusfar and will again direct my comments in this chapter. As feminism
seeks to legitimate itself in a contemporary context, it cannot do so by recovering
sexual difference as the only difference that effects the status of women in
American society.
In what follows, I will specify the problematic consequences for a recovery
of sexual difference at the expense of an analysis of race through a consideration
of the various debates incited by the performances of Orlan, a French multimedia
artist who has been the object of prodigious feminist responses. I maintain
that Orlan is a passing performance that rents apart the sutures that would
hold sexual and racial difference as distinctive and separate regimes. Orlan's
engagement in an ongoing project, "The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan,"
which features the artist’s own body as the material for her art, cosmetic
surgeries as her working media, and images from classical painting as her template,
implicates her work in what I have been referring to as the structural crisis
of addiction. The discourse surrounding plastic surgery disturbs the oppositional
relation of addiction’s dominant paired term--voluntarism; particularly
with regard to the performative and political formulations of "choice"
and the act of self naming. Challenging both a liberal feminist affirmation
of "choice" and the equivalence figured in identity politics between
visibility and power, such "elective" surgery disfigures the asymmetry
of the addiction/voluntarism dyad. And, discourses surrounding elective surgical
operations that challenge foundational notions like "the natural"
summon a rhetoric of recovery in order to handle the threat that such a challenge
poses to dominant binary logics, suturing precisely those categories, identities,
and relations opened up, destabalized, and denaturalized by medical/aesthetic
practices.
In the course of my own investigation of the way Orlan’s performance is
appraised in popular, clinical, art historical, and feminist academic contexts,
I want to resist the impulse to recover the real meaning in Orlan’s work.
Rather, I will attempt to map out the terrain of discourse surrounding her work
and offer a reading that identifies constitutive ruptures in the morphology
of recovery and the logic of identity. I will show that feminist interpretations,
and particularly those that employ psychoanalytic terms, also engage rhetorics
of recovery that have typically passed over the multiple identity fictions that
underwrite the impact of Orlan’s work. I will underscore psychoanalysis’
explanatory force while pointing out the tendencies towards an oppositionally
structured model of recovery in a number of feminist psychoanalytic appraisals
of Orlan’s work. And, by maintaining the conceptual terms of both suturing
and passing, I will suggest queer agency as the performative possibility for
the feminist critic who might inhabit multiple and contradicting subject positions.
As Judith Butler explains, "queering" . . . "is what upsets and
exposes passing; it is the act by which the racially and sexually repressive
surface of conversation is exploded, by rage, by sexuality, by the insistence
on color." For Butler, when passing is upset and exposed by queering, it
rents open the ideological sutures of heteronormativity and it interrupts the
repressive surface of sexuality and race.
The analysis of the complicated operations of suturing and passing that structure
my appraisal of Orlan’s critical impact preserves the explanatory force
of psychoanalytic theory for a feminist cultural criticism without recourse
to the symmetry of identity and the rhetoric of recovery. I find in Orlan’s
performance a theorization of identity and desire that might hold significant
implications for rewriting psychoanalytic theory in ways that explicitly come
to terms with race. It is in the conversation staged between Orlan and news
anchor, Connie Chung, that I find the opportunity, not to recover the binary
logic of sexual difference, but to challenge, transform and queer the recovery
discourse explicit in several feminist psychoanalytic readings of Orlan. Chung
is variously situated as the Enlightenment reader of "ontological legibility"
and as the psychoanalytic interpreter of unconscious deceits. Like Dr. Decartes
Suture, Chung disavows Orlan's (Clay's) "whitness" in order to affirm
her sexual difference. And, such a disavowal allows for a "transexual"
pass that codes their conversation "queer." Chung is also like Dr.
Shimoda, the Asian-American interpreter of the scene of mis-identificaiton.
Chung, like the analyst in the film, seems to be the possessor of the truth
that belies the ruse. But, just as the conclusion of Suture throws Shimoda's
psychoanalytic conceits into question, so too does the conversation between
Chung and Orlan. As Chung disavows her identification and desire for Orlan,
she engages a disidentification that might encourage such reconceptualization
of feminist psychoanalytic theory, and lay the theoretical groundwork for a
new politics of affiliation.
The Art of Plastic Surgery: Feminist, Identity, Psychoanalysis, and Bodies that Matter
Being a narcissist isn’t
easy when the question is not of loving your own image, but of re-creating the
self through deliberate acts of alienation.
--Orlan, L’Acte pour L’Art
Art, medicine, and philosophy have a shared history in the tradition of Western
metaphysical thought in which the human body represents the ultimate organizing
structure. In her thorough examination of the body and body metaphors in eighteenth
century art and medicine, Barbara Maria Stafford identifies one of the chief
forces for the Enlightenment as the characteristic systematization of antinomous
phenomenon. The body, the primary metaphor for such an ethically inscribed systematization,
became the focal point for the convergence of medical and aesthetic practices
that shared the common desire of making inaccessible domains visually accessible:
{EXT}The body was intimately tied to the establishment and upholding of ethical
norms for ugliness or beauty. It could be minimized or magnified, reduced or
aggrandized, cleansed or cosmeticized. It provided a surface for the play of
invisible yearnings and visible emotions. It was a site for the display of purity
and pollution. {/EXT}
Throughout her analyses, Stafford repeatedly identifies direct evidence of the
relationship between art and medicine in the Enlightenment’s desperate
need to make visible all aspects of the invisible while reinforcing the binary
exponents of surface and depth. And, while Enlightenment systematization in
art, medicine, and philosophy sought to make visible that which did not appear,
psychoanalysis poses a certain critique of such a gaze as it posits the notion
of the unconscious, calling into question the conclusions of every empiricist,
realist theory based on the faith in the ego, and a system of rational perception-consciousness.
Psychoanalysis has consistently adopted a stance of suspicion in relation to
the realm of the visible, intimately bound to the register of consciousness.
The psychical layer is deceived, caught by unconscious forces which evade its
gaze but which are far more determinant in the constitution of subjectivity.
And, it would seem, such a psychoanalytic laying bare of the superficiality
of the visible is profoundly dramatized with the technological impact of plastic
surgery.
This ethical convergence of philosophical with medical and aesthetic practices
persists in the discourse surrounding the bodily transformations performed in
plastic surgery. Themes of identity and difference continue to resonate in popular
and academic treatments of cosmetic surgery, invoking the contested terms of
identity politics and the poststuctural assertion of non-identity. And, significantly,
the interrogation of women’s involvement in cosmetic surgery has been overwritten
by discourses of addiction and rhetorics of recovery. Plastic surgery has most
explicity been described in terms of addiction for the wealthy and the famous
as a writer for TV Guide attests: "it’s become Hollywood’s latest
addiction." The emergence of the cosmetic surgery "craze" in
the US conjures visions from the early ‘80s of Beverly Hills surgeons with
their own publicity firms and their fawning celebrity patients known as "surgical
junkies." The celebrity’s "surgical fixes" were reported
to include respites in lavish clinics where chauffeured limousines escort patients
to private suites and where they enjoy gourmet food along with face lifts, breast
jobs, and liposuction. Significant talk show air time was also given to "scalpel
slaves" who indulge in plastic surgery compulsively "undeterred by
the cost, pain, or terrible bruising, those who are pathologically addicted
to having their bodies remade or beautified through surgery cannot be stopped."
Even these tabloid treatments uphold a "natural" that presumes a moral
form of superiority/inferiority.
Technological advances in aesthetic and reconstructive surgery, reducing costs
and recovery times, have made cosmetic surgery an option available formerly
to the chosen few. Such increased availability has destabalized conventional
understandings of what is "natural" and prompted panicked reconfigurations
of social realities and relations. If "sex" can be "reassigned"
and race can be "e-raced," what are the implications for the regimes
of sexual and racial discrimination? Such a categorical crisis has prompted
numerous recovery rhetorics that seek to reconfigure social relations. Panicked
interpreters of plastic surgery imagine that medical technology will eventually
eradicate all visible signs of difference and fear the consequences of such
a future as either too democratizing or too fascist. And many of these panic
discourses have been displaced variously onto a demonization or veneration of
technology. The possibilities of such new technology wreaks havoc on a liberal/Christian
rhetoric that includes the competing notions of individuality forged out of
the image of a single God and hence, threatens to expose the contradictions
that inhere in American ideology.
Writing for the New York Times Magazine, Charles Siebert understands this cosmetic
surgery phenomenon to be a violation of such western ideological precepts and
a sign of the way in which technology threatens the moral face of liberalism:
{EXT}Cosmetic surgery has long been considered a willful violation of not one
but two basic Judeo-Christian precepts: that which forbids tampering with the
body, desecrating its temple, and that which preaches against the kind of excessive
vanity thought to motivate such a desecration. But in recent years, as the cost
has grown less prohibitive and trauma less severe, and as we have begun seeing
more and more flesh—and judging it by standards set by magazines, movies
and the like—cosmetic surgery has come to be seen as a kind of condoned
cheating. {/EXT}
The cover of the July 7 issue of The New York Times Magazine in which Seibert’s
testimonial appears, features a stylized, studio-lit, portrait photograph by
artists Rimma Gerlovina and Valery Gerlovin. Drawn on the face of Rimma Gerlovina
herself, are pointing fingers inked in black referencing the pre-op markings
of a prepped plastic surgery patient. The article chronicles the author’s
visit to the Institute for Aesthetic and Reconstructive Surgery in Nashville,
the country’s first all-purpose plastic surgery center. Seibert suggests
that there is a growing "democratization" and acceptance of cosmetic
surgery. As a function of the increasingly automated, digitized, media saturated
world, Seibert argues that "we are witnessing a fundamental change in our
thinking about the body" characterized by an increasing disengagement with
our own bodies. He offers a dystopian future where people regularly avail themselves
to the most radical reconfigurations. Seibert refers to cosmetic surgery as
"real-life morphing" and an "information age palliative."
He wonders at the growing level of comfort with such operations accompanying
the increased discomfort with "our own skins" and whether we are "whittling
away at something deeper than creases and wrinkles and layers of fat?"
On the one hand, to demonize the technology of cosmetic surgery as the decay
of Western values recovers a "natural" and reconstitutes what plastic
surgery has revealed to be mutable and non-essential. The recovery of a natural
essence circumscribes the political possibilities that such practices necessarily
force open and stabalizes the visible signifiers of race and sexual differences
that naturalize racist and sexist conclusions. On the other hand, to "read"
advances in plastic surgery as a democratizing utopian promise just as insistantly
reinscribes the addiction/voluntarism dyad and reconfirms idenititarian logic.
This latter position suggests that cosmetic surgery creates a space for creative
self-determination and agency by allowing subject with limited possibilities
to renegotiate identity through their bodies and reshape their conditions of
existence by reshaping themselves, constructing new identities, experimenting
with multiple subject positions, and crossing social and economic boundaries
that exclude or oppress subjects. But, again, such a position recovers the trope
of "choice" in the self-identical intending subject who controls the
meaning of its acts and reconstitutes a binary system of differences.
While popular journalism has long been fascinated with cosmetic surgery and
its links to celebrity and scandal, the question of plastic surgery also became
vitally interesting for feminist theory and politics as women’s involvement
in cosmetic surgery appears to concern themes of identity, agency, and morality.
Feminist discourses of choice in "elective" surgeries compel questions
about the degree to which such choice opens the possibility for liberation,
oppression, or both. Such a conception of choice raises additional questions
concerning power as coercion and control or liberating and enabling. Furthermore,
the topic of elective surgery is situated within a larger feminist analysis
of the cultural norms of femininity and oppressive beauty ideals. Such ideals
have also prompted feminist concern about the controlling technological (male)
gaze that subjects women to invasive forms of surveillance and punishments and
asserts the right of law over women's desires. As cosmetic surgery increasingly
becomes normalized in Western culture, questions concerning women’s pathology
and deviancy are invoked and the fear of a certain eugenic ideology with regard
to women’s bodies is instilled. Echoing Siebert's fear of a changing set
of standards wrought by the availability of medical procedures, Kathryn Pauly
Morgan warns:
{EXT}Not only is elective cosmetic surgery moving out of the domain of the sleazy,
the suspicious, the secretively deviant, or the pathologically narcissistic,
it is becoming the norm. This shift is leading to a predictable inversion of
the domains of the deviant and the pathological, so that women who contemplate
not using cosmetic surgery will increasingly be stigmatized and seen as deviant.
{/EXT}
Feminist appraisals that recognize plastic surgery as a question of identity
also implicate plastic surgery in a certain identity politics. And, following
this assumed connection between cosmetic surgery and identity and in the name
of a representational economy and identity politics, underrepresented communities
have rebuked the practice of cosmetic surgery as a disempowering act that further
limits the visibility of its own disenfranchised members. Presuming that identities
are visibly marked, and given that aesthetic reconstruction have traditionally
reworked women’s bodies closer to an Anglo ideal, progressive cultural
activists have disapproved of the practice among racial, ethnic, and sexual
"others." The operation is thought to connect members of marginalized
populations to Western ideals of beauty and take them away from membership in
their own group. It is assumed that such visible compliance to a dominant ideal
will decrease the pride and strength of hithertil underrepresented identities.
The desire for Anglo features and youthful appearances is a mark of internalized
racism, misogyny, ageism, and classism. Additionally, such acquiescence to a
white, bourgeois, masculine medical institution and beauty ideal is thought
to further reify the power of the dominant patriarchal social order.
In contrast to these critiques that understand cosmetic surgery's damage to
identity as disabling, a psychoanalytic/deconstructionist mistrust of visibility
as the source of unity or wholeness has retooled plastic surgery as a practice
that proves the decentered instability of identity, subjectivity, and embodiment.
According to these critics, plastic surgery exposes the non-fixity of identity
and calls into question empiricist theories based on the self-identical subjects.
As feminist applications of the insights of psychoanalysis for a cultural critique
have been particularly attentive to the convergence of aesthetic, philosophical,
and medical practices, the topic of plastic surgery presents an interesting
case for such feminist psychoanalytic considerations. The visualization of identifications
that seems to be highlighted in the practice of plastic surgery is explicitly
linked to several psychoanalytic theories including the notion that the sexually
differentiated subject is consolidated through the misrecognition of its mirror
image as more perfect than it really is and the primal "discovery"
of the female subject's lack. But the application of psychoanalysis for feminist
studies of patriarchal culture and its misogynist consequences has been implicated
in a recovery discourse where such analysis has therapeutic designs and universalizing
impulses. And such a recovery has also been the limitation of psychoanalytic
applications for the interpretation of cosmetic surgery.
Feminist applications of psychoanalysis for the interpretation of patriarchal
cultural configurations in various cultural narratives have been charged with
constructing a community of adherents who share identities and a commitment
to sexual difference as the "master" difference, passing over significant
vectors of power like race, sexuality, nationality, and class. In particular,
psychoanalytically informed feminist theory has been taken to task for its inability
to theorize racial differences between and among women. Jane Gaines notices
that, as a framework for a feminist interpretation of Hollywood cinema, "the
psychoanalytic model works to block out considerations which assume a different
configuration, so that, for instance, the Freudian-Lacanian scenario can eclipse
the scenario of race-gender relations in Afro-American history, since the two
accounts of sexuality are fundamentally incongruous." In other words, the
intersecting matrices of race and gender when read through the lens of an African
American history of slavery, social subjugation, and the interdiction of micegenation
reveal a very different psychic history than the one provided by psychoanalysis.
Hortense Spillers confirms this necessity for a shift in focus and argues that
the question of race might also expose the gaps and the underlying ideological
commitments that founded psychoanalysis itself, while she doubts that psychoanalytisis
could offer much to an analysis of race:
{EXT}Little or nothing in the intellectual history of African Americans within
the social and political context of the United states suggests the effectiveness
of psychoanalytic discourse, revised or classical, in illuminating the problematic
of "race" on an intersubjective field of play, nor do we yet know
how to historicize the psychoanalytic object or objective, invade its hereditary
premises and insulations, and open its insights to cultural and social forms
that are disjunctive to its originary imperitives. {/EXT}
Furthermore, Linda Hart suggests that the problem of applying psychoanalytic
formations to race is not simply a matter of insufficient attention or disregard;
rather, it appears that inherent in psychoanalysis is a blind spot when it comes
to racial difference. Psychoanalytic feminist theory, in fact, has been alleged
to operate in an active tension with an analysis of racial difference insofar
as psychoanalytic studies have constituted certain races as lacking a repression
or neurosis and hence "outside or beyond the territory of psychoanalytic
endeavor."
Many more excellent studies have challenged the way psychoanalytic feminisms
too often reproduce an uninterrogated concept of "women’ that is white,
middle-class, and heterosexual and have highlighted the intersection of complex
indentificatory constellations which psychoanalytic concepts alone fail to account
for. Judith Butler, for example, contests the claim that sexual difference is
more primary or more fundamental than other kinds of differences, including
racial difference. She writes:
{EXT}It is this assertion of the priority of sexual difference over racial difference
that has marked so much psychoanalytic feminism as white, for the assumption
here is not only that sexual difference is more fundamental, but that there
is a relationship called "sexual difference" that is itself unmarked
by race. That whiteness is not understood by such a perspective as a racial
category is clear; it is yet another power that need not speak its name. Hence,
to claim that sexual difference is more fundamental than racial difference is
effectively to assume that sexual difference is white sexual difference, and
that whiteness is not a form of racial difference. {/EXT}
Butler suggests that we find heterosexualizing prerogatives taking place through
a complex set of racial injunctions. The reproduction of heterosexuality might
be understood as taking different forms when race is thought through sexuality
and sexual difference. The blindness, or the conceptual "blank spot"--to
use Gloria Anzaldúa’s term--to racial difference has convinced cultural
critics--particularly those working in queer studies, African-American and postcolonial
studies--to be more skeptical of the possibilities in psychoanalysis for a theory
of social change. As Gayatri Spivak writes:
{EXT}I have always felt uneasy about the use of psychoanalysis in cultural critique
since it is so culture-specific in its provenance. . . . For the use of feminist
psychoanalysis in understanding sexual difference and gendering I feel some
sympathy because it is so actively contestatory. But general cultural critique
has always seemed to me to be quite another matter. Without the risks or responsibilities
of transference, at least implicitly diagnostic and taxonomic, ignoring geopolitical
and historical detail in the interest of making group behavior intelligible,
and not accountable to any method of verification, the brilliance of psychoanalytic
cultural criticism has always left me a bit suspicious. {/EXT}
According to these and many other critics, psychoanalytic feminist approaches
tend to reinscribe the invariability of heterosexual injunctions in the service
of the normative laws that feminist cultural critics would presume to interrogate.
Hence, such criticism charges psychoanalytic feminism with reproducing a recovery
rhetoric that sutures a sexually differentiated subject and passes over the
multiplicity of difference. Such recovery tendencies must be checked especially
at the sites of categorical crisis aggravated by the drama of plastic surgery
and its denaturalization of identity formations. It is such a "check"
that I will perform as I consider the critical treatments of Orlan with respect
to suture and passing and their implications for the racialization of sexual
difference.
Orlan™: Synthetic Identity, Self-Naming, and the Politics of Passing
Passing in America is historically associated with the discourse of racial difference
and especially with the assumption of a fraudulent "white" identity
by an individual culturally and legally defined as "black." But, "passing"
has also been applied to other accidental or deliberate alterations and affectations
of physical appearance and behavior that disguise an individual’s presumed
"natural" or "essential" identity (including class, ethnicity,
and sexuality, as well as gender). Enactments of gendered and racial tropes
of difference are culturally policed and bounded, and to pass over such boundaries--indeed
to trespass--is to escape subordination and oppression and to access the privileges
and status of "invisibility." The promise of being unrecognizable
as an "other" is the hope of the successful pass and hence, passing
becomes a sort of idenitity politics that aspires, not for increased visibility,
but for "invisibility." Since visibility has been inextricably linked
to identity formations and trades in the reproduction of normative forms of
representation, identity politics has rallied around the call for more visibility
for the hithertil underrepresented. The crudeness of an agenda that equates
increased visiblity with increased power has been critiqued by Peggy Phelan
who suggests that visibility politics is not merely ineffectual as a means for
social change, but it in fact reinforces the unmarked power of the straight,
white, male norm, whose dominance depends precisely on its unremarkability and
the visible representation of an other. Passing, then, actively accessing the
privilege of the unmarked and of invisibility and seems to challenge a number
of problematic and even antithetical assumptions about identities presupposed
in identity politics, exposing the ambivalence of all identity fictions. However,
Phelan also notes that as a critique of identity, passing may also misfire since
passing trades in visibility and invisibility:
{EXT}The paradox of using visibility to highlight invisibility is complex and
quite often misfires. Passing performances in general seek to use one form of
invisibility to highlight a usually privileged form of visibility. . . . The
one who passes then does not "erase" the mark of difference, rather
the passer highlights the invisibility of the mark of the Same. {/EXT}
It is within the context of the "problem" of identity that feminist
critics have offered reading of Orlan. What the majority of these reading reveal,
however, is not the false promise of the visible as epistimological guaratee,
but the reconstitution of identity's essentializing link to a physical body.
Orlan is herself an invented identity, as she baptized herself "Saint Orlan"
in 1971. Her fuzzy background and enigmatic past projects a "star quality"
even as she insist that "being and appearance do not coincide." In
a similar exercise of "choice" performed at the end of Suture when
Clay decides to live with the name Vincent Towers, Orlan is a name chosen by
the artist. This name is doubly synthetic--both as the fabrication of the artist
and as the brand name for a manufactured material. Orlan’s name is a homonym
for the manufactured polyester product, Orlon™ and a signature of appropriation
and synthetic signification.
This conceit of choice, voluntarism, and autonomy, is precisely the one that
Orlan performs in her self-naming. In her attempt to obscure her past and to
dissociate herself from a personal history she also depends on its insistence
by those who would seek to wield its injurious powers. It becomes the frantic
work of her critics to retrieve and piece together a coherent history that makes
her present articulations make "sense." As critics struggle to write
her "real" history and discover her "real" meaning, her
work functions to mobilize the "necessary error of identity" and in
so doing, highlights the way such operations work in racist and misogynist discursive
regimes.
Orlan has been performing her project, The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan (1990-
) to interested crowds of artists, art critics, art appreciators, and curious
by-standers who gather to watch the artist undergo plastic surgery via satellite.
Orlan began her "Reincarnation" by using a computer to create a composite
image derived from her own face and the old master paintings. Her goal it to
achieve an "ideal" female face through surgical alterations that approximate
isolated features of several mythic women including the nose of Gerard’s
"Psyche," the lips of Moreau’s Europa, the chin of Botticelli’s
Venus, the eyes of the goddess Diana (painted by an unknown Fontainebleau artist),
and the forehead of Leaonardo da Vinci’s "Mona Lisa." In an ongoing
series of cosmetic surgeries, Orlan is transforming her face to conform to this
composite image. The surgery rooms in which this transformation is performed
literally become operating theaters; multimedia spectacles orchestrated by Orlan.
Orlan’s on-camera, satellite broadcast surgeries, transmits images of her
skin being cut away from her face, laid open and inside-out, whereupon implants
"lift" the skin and pull it taut. There’s blood everywhere, and
in fact, Orlan will pause the surgery to request that the surgeon display the
bloodied sheet beneath her head. Orlan is awake, submitting only to local anesthetic.
The medical team is costumed in designer robes and Orlan is surrounded by sterilized
‘props’ including bowls of grapes, a skull, and scantily clad dancing
men. While prone on the operation table, Orlan reads the writings of French
philosophers like Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Antonin Artaud (in addition
to her own philosophy/poetry). Between surgeries Orlan raises funds by selling
photo and video images of the surgery process and carefully preserved viscera
that she refers to as ‘Reliquaries’--small pieces of her flesh imbedded
in panels with text. Supposedly, when the total self transformation is complete,
an advertising agency will select a new name consonant with her new image.
In addition to feminist psychoanalytic theorists and critics, Orlan's work has
been commented on by diverse communities including the medical establishment,
transgender and body modification advocates, as well as visual and performance
art communites with whom she seems to share more direct affinities. In general,
both detractors and defenders of Orlan’s work focus on several axial questions:
whether her body is indeed art, whether her art is pathological, and whether
her message is feminist. Orlan has been criticized as suspiciously publicity
oriented and aesthetically uninteresting. But she is just as vehemently defended
and highly regarded for making an authentic attempt to expand the perimeters
of performance and for raising questions about the relationship of identity
to the body and of life to art. Orlan’s work has been understood both as
dangerously participating in the very male-dominated institutions that she might
critique and as an epic feminist polemic on the self-inflicted mutilation of
women’s bodies in the name of beauty. Clinical communities have focused
on Orlan’s mental health and posed the questions of whether she is producing
art or acting out of pathological impulses as mutually exclusive realms of inquiry.
Her repeated surgeries and her desire to completely remake her own image has
been considered hysterical, addictive behavior. In 1991, A French journal of
psychoanalysis, Revue Scientifique et Culturelle de Sante Mentale, devoted an
entire issue to the relationship of Orlan’s work to psychopathology and
aesthetics. The issue contains articles by psychologists as well as critics
and artists, generally concluding that her surgery projects are "indeed
art" although she may suffer from pathological body dismorphia.
Orlan’s work also invited appraisal from transgender advocates by calling
herself a "female to female transsexual." Her assertion, however,
has by and large been rejected by the community she associates herself with.
Artist, critic, activist, and male to female transsexual Susan Stryker, has
proposed to have a short film made about the process of castration (her own)
as she offers to theorize the formation of the gendered subject from the situation
of a castrated MTF (male-to-female) transsexual body. Stryker affirms that her
"Anarchorporeality Project" is explicitly linked to poststructuralist
feminist psychoanalytic theory and uniquely situated to examine the intellectual
terrain that such theories contend with. Stryker notably rejects Orlan’s
project as a transsexual operation, and argues that her own project would necessarily
entail a critique of Orlan: "I want to show how the kinds of fleshly alterations
Orlan undertakes uphold rather than undermine dominant standards of embodiment—she
is not contesting the regulation of the most heavily policed regions of the
body."
Orlan’s message has also been appraised in terms of other bodily transformations
including tattooing, cutting, piercing, scarification, stapling, corset-body
shaping, and branding. But again, while the "radical aesthetics" community
recognizes its affinity to Orlan’s project, Orlan is again suspected of
conspiring with a conformist beauty ideology driven not by a politics, but by
a pathology At the Illustrated Woman conference in San Francisco in February
(1994), Orlan was not received well at all. The audience was comprised of "the
cutting edge" in modern aesthetics, and would indeed be expected to welcome
Orlan’s work. But, as Linda Kauffman describes it, instead of finding a
receptive audience in San Francisco "the response was near hysteria":
{EXT}Confronted with the graphic video images, people groaned, booed, fainted.
Many were not only agitated but hostile, accusing her of sensationalism, violence,
aggression. Significantly, many felt she had maligned the medical profession
(merely by exposing its labor). {/EXT}
Another critic in attendance at the conference recalls Orlan appearing on stage
preceded by a signer and translator with a video projection showing one of the
surgeries running behind her:
{EXT}Close-ups of her flesh being pulled from her face made difficult viewing
for many in the audience. Yet I found the difference between the Orlan pictured
in this documentation and the Orlan on the stage before me even more disturbing.
Of course her features were altered, but she seemed physically fragile, and
older than the woman on screen. But most sensational were the two large, lima
bean shaped lumps above her eyebrows, which caused whispered speculation throughout
the audience. {/EXT}
Again, as these accounts suggest, Orlan is suspected of acting out of pathological
compulsion rather than performing in the interests of artistic experimentation.
Art and cultural reviews of Orlan’s work have been far more numerous and
generally even more explicitly dismissive of the project’s critical and
artistic worth. But, like the medical, transgender, and body modification communities,
art criticism of her work has focused on the psychological state of Orlan herself:
as sensationalist and sick. Sharon Waxman emphasizes Orlan’s seeming imperviousness
to pain and disregard for the practical limitations of plastic surgery. Waxman
suggests that Orlan’s pathology lies in her affectless confrontation with
pain as "physical suffering does not interest her." The "normal"
reaction, produced in the viewer however is, according to Waxman, repulsion
and simultaneously attraction:
{EXT}Still, it is hard for an observer to get over that first, instinctive reaction
to Orlan’s work, which is, of course, nausea. There’s no way around
that--on the second floor of her apartment, which also serves as studio, the
artist has slides of her different operations, ready to be worked into photos
or posters that help pay for her performances. They show the surgeon’s
knife cutting into a thigh like so much rump steak, you don’t really want
to look too closely, but then, of course, you end up staring in a sort of horror.
{/EXT}
Waxman accuses Orlan of idealism, investing in technology as a way of "looking
at the body as a tool" that must be modified despite risks. Waxman is skeptical
as she suggests that it "may be an interesting concept, but in the absence
of any alternative to the human body, is it realistic?" Waxman finally
dismisses the critical impact of Orlan’s work as self-promotional hype,
producing ‘experts’ in the irrelevant questions she generates. Citing
both Barbara Rose’s appraisal of her artistic merit and the French psychiatric
review, VTS, devoted to analyzing Orlan, Waxman writes:
{EXT}Squeamishness aside, Orlan’s work provokes several other reactions.
You wonder: Is it art? You wonder: Is she a nut? Happily, both of these questions
have been answered by the experts. . . . If the analysis doesn’t prove
she’s sane, it certainly proves that the artist knows how to attract the
press. {/EXT}
Waxman claims that after six operations, Orlan has "become a kind of addict
of the surgical theater." Finally, Waxman finds her work thought provoking
but pathetic and bound for failure. Waxman polemically concludes that there
must be more to identity than the skin, and maintains that there is such a thing
as the self that exists interior to the skin that cannot be altered from the
outside.
Roberta Smith, reporting for the New York Times, is more direct and dismissive
in her judgment of Orlan and invokes the feminist content in her work as she
writes:
{EXT}The French performance artist Orlan is proving that there’s more than
one way to suffer in the name of art, and make a spectacle of yourself in the
process. Her material is her own body and skin. Her medium is plastic surgery,
usually performed on her on camera. Her work represents a small step for Conceptual
art, and a big step for feminism--both in the backward direction. {/EXT}
While Smith admits to being affected by Orlan’s graphic documentation of
the surgery, she refuses the impact of its presumed critical intent. Smith situates
Orlan’s work in a tradition of art that involves "extreme invasions
of the artist’s body or privacy" ranging from Chris Burden’s
performance where he was shot in the arm, to Jeff Koons photographs of himself
having sex with his Italian porn star wife. Smith asserts that on a purely aesthetic
terms, Orlan's work is sloppy and amateurish and in terms of a feminsit critique,
there is little real substance and its sensationalism is finally uninteresting.
In anticipation of Orlan’s seventh surgical operation, and first to be
performed in the United Sates, Margalit Fox describes for the New York Times,
the planned procedure:
{EXT}In the operating room, the surgeon, Dr. Marjorie Cramer, will inject a
local anesthetic into Orlan’s face and neck. With a scalpel, she’ll
make an incision sweeping from Orlan’s hairline to the front of her ears.
Over the next five or six hours, Dr. Cramer will insert silicone implants into
the face: one into Orlan’s nose to make it longer, another into her chin
to make it more prominent and two above the eyebrows, to duplicate the oddly
protruding forehead of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa.’ {/EXT}
Fox focuses her criticism on a subjective critique of Orlan’s personal
appearance, implicating her as a ‘legitimate’ candidate for cosmetic
surgery. Fox describes Orlan as "a slightly plump woman of average height."
When she removes her sunglasses in the gallery, she reveals her face which Fox
describes as a "pleasant, high-cheekboned countenance, made striking by
a studied application of makeup." The effect of surgery is visible but
has failed in enhancing her youth or beauty and again, Fox emphasizes Orlan’s
affectless responses to both pain and to her uglifying transformation:
{EXT}Previous operations have already altered the contours of her face, enlarged
her lips and reshaped her eyelids. Slight scarring around the perimeter of her
mouth, left by the lip surgery, was concealed with broad strokes of crimson
lipstick. She appeared tired; her features seemed to sag a little. ‘I think
that since I’ve been doing the operations, I’m much less pretty than
before,’ she said matter-of-factly. {/EXT}
Fox also seems particularly distressed by Orlan’s uncertain biography and
tries to recover it by tracing her known history and artistic resume. Fox’s
panicked effort to recover Orlan’s given name, her birthplace, and her
artistic past indexes the threat of a woman severed from patriarchal moorings.
In fact, all of these art and cultural reviews of Orlan insist on the pretense
of an author behind the work of art and of the artist’s subjectivity guaranteeing
a particular meaning. The proliferation of offended and dismissive discourses
about Orlan’s work are compelled to recover the oppositional logic that
underwrites traditional interest in the self-centered, sovereign artist behind
the work precisely because Orlan’s performance disrupts the oppositional
arrangement of back/front, inside/outside, and hence challenges the logic that
any claim to the inventing, intending artist relies on. And while many of her
commentators presume a feminist message in her work, the presumption is exclusively
based on the reductive reasoning that she is a woman engaging obliquely in beauty
modifications and hence, allied with a generalized monolithic notion of feminism.
There is, however, no consideration of what other regimes of difference she
might call into question. Hence, the extent to which Olan's performance might
question identity and its fixity is circumscribed in these art criticisms by
normative criteria for judging the value of art and by recovering sex as essential.
In contrast to the above appraisals, academic feminist applications of psychoanalytic
insights for a interpretations of Orlan’s work embrace the creative possibilities
for transforming the regime of vision and its correspondence to identity. But
such celebrations of Orlan’s work have also perpetuated a recovery of sexual
difference that passes over any other structuring differences--most notably,
race.
Feminist Psychoanalysis and Saint Orlan: The Academic Blind Spot
Overall, the most favorable appraisals of Orlan’s work have come from feminists
working to employ psychoanalytic theories of representation to investigate the
culture’s complex and contradictory psychic investments in the image of
the sexual other. But, while psychoanalytic feminist judgments of Orlan are
markedly more generous with their praise than the popular and art historical
reviews of her performances, the application of psychoanalytic insights for
an elaboration of the feminist possibilities of her work passes over racial
difference in the psychic development of human subjectivity. As such, these
feminist treatments of Orlan participate in a sort of therapeutic recovery of
sexual difference as the autonomous sphere of relations or disjunctions, more
fundamental than other operative differences, suturing the very disruption of
categories, identities, and relations that the same critics cite as the radical
possibility of the work.
Linda Kauffman, for example, virtually deifies Orlan (a distinction "St.
Orlan" has already ordained upon herself) as poststructural feminist theory
in action. Kauffman maintains that Orlan is "both saint and cyborg"
as her art highlights ways in which "Woman" is itself a fabrication
of a power relation:
{/EXT} "woman," Orlan shows, is a projection of male fantasies compiled
through the centuries in myth, art, religion. Orlan exposes the process of projection,
production, distribution, and exchange. She peels away the sedimentary layers
that have made this artificial process seem ‘natural.’ {/EXT}
According to Kauffman, Orlan confronts viewers with their own voyeurism, disturbing
psychic investments in the skin and stages femininity literally as a masquerade.
Kauffman applauds Orlan for "writing the scripts for a whole new psychopathology"
and that "as a result of this radical surgery, neither femininity or sexuality
will ever be the same." Kauffman maintains that Orlan herself functions
"like a psychoanalyst," treating a whole new set of anxiety-producing
human senses and experiences that have been reorganized by new communication
and medical technologies. Orlan's performance replicates the psychoanalytic
session insofar as it involves rehearsal, repetition, and "working through"
of old materials (dreams, fantasies, traumas). And hence, for Kauffman, Orlan
makes visible the constructed nature of femininity and exposes the anxieties
that underlie the investment in representing women.
Parveen Adams’ sustained argument for the importance of psychoanalysis
in the field of representation offers another feminist treatment of Orlan. Adams
finds in Orlan’s work a radical undoing of the "triumph of representation."
Like Kauffman, Adams suggests that Orlan performs a theory of masquerade or
mimicry that has been offered as a critique of the repressive regime of femininity.
According to Adams, Orlan "uses her head quite literally to demonstrate
an axiom of at least one strand of feminist thought: there is nothing behind
the mask." Adams maintains that Orlan’s work demonstrates what is
at stake in the imaging of woman, introduces the psychical to the space of representation,
and hence, changes that space. Adams' project uniquely attempts to locate moments
in Orlan’s performance in which meaning is emptied out in order to demonstrate
"the conditions under which what is emptied out is the definition of woman"
and in order to transform the regime of vision. Adams offers a reading of Orlan’s
project that identifies her as a site of disruption in phallic logic and as
an object of inquiry that compels one to reconsider the question of sexual difference.
While both of these readings importantly highlight the way Orlan's spectacle
challenges the representational field of sexual difference, both Adams and Kauffman
fail to notice the multiple vectors of identity that intersect in any drama
of femininity and the extent to which "passing" as a woman converges
with discourses of race passing, class privileging, and the valorization of
youth. Kauffman’s and Adam’s celebratory remarks on the triumphs of
Orlan’s operations over the tyranny of representation, affirm the primacy
of sexual difference as the singular concept metaphor for all topologies of
the subject. Kauffman, for example, highlights the creative agency of Orlan’s
work and takes intentionality to be Orlan’s feminist prerogative, thereby
mistaking regimes of power/discourse with voluntarism or "choice."
And, furthermore, even as Adams affirms that Orlan’s "woman-to-woman
transsexualism" disobeys the logic that would preserve phallic and castrated
at poles apart, she persists in recovering (hetero)sexual difference as the
only difference that matters. The problem with such a recovery tendency is that
it reconsolidates the very disruptive openings that they credit Orlan with opening
up. In effect, their critical recovery of Orlan re-sutures the gaps of ideological
dominance that they suggest are never fully closed by any representation and,
hence, they pass over the racialization of sexual difference in the reproduction
of heteronormativity. But, the psychoanalytic concept of suture that privileges
sexual difference combined with the racially inflected lens of passing might
also refocus the image of Orlan as a transgressive one while resisting the recovery
of attendant binary pairs, avoiding the reaffirmation of the liberal fallacy
of "choice," and disrupting the asymmetrical addiction/voluntarism
dyad. In this way, rather than valorizing Orlan's intentional "choice"
and thereby committing to a liberal poltics of ressentiment, we might understand
Orlan's performance as enacting a queer agency that sets off a complex set of
contending discourses. And, rather than circumscribing the realm of identity
formation to sexual differentiation, we might understand Orlan's performance
as one that makes visible "whiteness" as a sexually differentiated
(dis)identification. Such an alternative to recovery would again preserve the
ambivalence of her performance and specify both its repressive and disruptive
consequences.
Eye Job to Eye Job: Orlan Meets Connie Chung
Judith Butler argues that "queering" is the term for betraying what
ought to remain concealed and "‘queering’ works to expose and
disrupt the repressive surface of language--of both sexuality and race."
Butler maintains that it is such a queering which poses a radical challenge
to psychoanalysis and requires a rethinking of the social relations that compose
the symbolic as not exclusively under the governing domain of sexual difference.
I take seriously Butler’s radical proposition to consider the symbolic
to be the sum of norms and ideals that govern heterosexuality, taking place
"through a complex set of racial injunctions which operate in part through
the taboo on miscegenation." As Butler redescribes the symbolic as a vector
of gender and racial imperatives, she offers a way to preserve the explanatory
force of psychoanalysis without recovering the heterosexual norm and the symmetrical
logic of identity. Butler goes on to claim that such a convergence of racial
and sexual conflicts-- a "queering" that rallies both racial and sexual
anxieties--takes place in conversation as such queering is linked to the ruptures
in what does not pass as proper conversation. Following Butler’s focus
on performative queering in the event of conversation, my reconsideration of
Orlan and its challenge to the psychoanalytic feminist privileging of sexual
difference takes place in an analysis of Orlan’s contact with the prime-time
national news anchor Connie Chung in the act of conversation: a conversation
that is in Butler's terms unmistakably queer.
In December, 1993, Connie Chung introduced the largest audience yet to the ongoing
performance of Orlan who was, at that time, undergoing her ninth operation in
the Reincarnation project. Throughout Chung’s report on this event and
the artist responsible for it, Chung inserts condescending commentary and reveals
her skepticism about calling such clinical procedure "art." The awkward
contact between Chung and Orlan on this segment of (ironically entitled) Eye
to Eye With Connie Chung becomes a drama of passing or, rather, its failure.
What is significant is the ambiguity of who is passing--Chung or Orlan--exposing
whiteness as marked by racial ideals and heterosexual norms. Like the film Suture,
the conversation fails to suture the viewing subject in a 'proper' position
that would conceal the absent field of Law and the controlling patriarchal gaze
that confirms a racialized domain of heterosexuality. The absent field is revealed
in the Orlan/Chung conversation and so too is the extra-textual information
about Chung's past that would properly be kept outside the frame: that Chung
has, allegedly, undergone double eyelid surgery to approximate the Western/Caucasian
eye; Chung’s family history as daughter of Chinese nationalists; her proto-feminist
stance as the first woman to hold the position of co-anchor on national news
(since Barbara Walters’ held that position briefly in the ‘70s); her
inter-racial marriage to Maury Povich and her conversion to Judaism; and she
and her husband’s highly publicized inability to conceive a child. Chung
cannot bare identification nor desire for Orlan: disavowing her own cosmetic
surgery, her own "foreigness," her own "feminist" alignments,
and her "mixed" marriage. In other words, what at first may appear
to be a refused identification between Chung and Orlan might more accurately
be termed a disavowed one--an identification that has already been made and
denied in the unconscious. It is a disidentification, following Butler, that
might actually represent "an identification that one fears to make only
because one has already made it." I hope to show that such a disidentification
is the radical possibility of Orlan's performance that coalesces in contact
with Chung.
The Eye to Eye segment opens with a female critic suggesting that Orlan’s
performance is an attempt "to get across certain concepts about femininity,
about technology about the medical profession . . ." Chung interrupts this
explanation with a disclaimer about the unintelligibility of such critical appraisal.
Chung assures the audience, who are assumed to be unable to decipher such 'art-speak',
"don’t worry, if we understood what she was talking about we’d
say so." Chung clearly dissociates herself from such feminist interpretations
of Orlan’s work, including the "respected art critic, Barbara Rose"
who exclaims over the video image of Orlan holding a skull in an operating room:
"I do believe its art, and I’m sorry it has to be that strong and
that unpleasant a signal to get through the mass media, but that’s the
only way that the artist can communicate something at this point." Rose’s
defense of Orlan’s approach is contrasted to the statement of the notoriously
conservative art critic, Hilton Cramer, who rebukes such feminist appraisals
of Orlan’s project as he finds the work "appalling." Cramer even
denies the radical stance of the work in an art historical context as he compares
it to Picasso’s far more audacious portraits of women with two eyes on
one side of the nose.
After Chung provides these "expert" testimonies on Orlan’s work,
the segment features the conversation with Chung in which Orlan is virtually
unintelligible and unable to make herself clear. Chung responds to Orlan with
sarcastic disbelief as Orlan’s French accent marks her as foreigner, unable
to express herself in the language Chung has mastered. Chung echoes the evaluation
of Cramer as she challenges Orlan with the statement, "some say this is
not art." Orlan’s defends herself in broken English, claiming "each
time its new, each time many people said its not art." Chung’s pithy
retort is: "its an operation . . . its plastic surgery" to which Orlan
responds, "all new things is criticized" (sic). Orlan is repeatedly
shown to be unable to participate in "normal," proper, or passable
conversation and impervious to "normal" emotional or physical insult
and Chung highlights Orlan's langauge difficulty with her inscrutable smirks
and unmistakably critical tone.
Throughout the segment, Chung elicits identification with her interpolated majoritarian
white audience, passing as one of "us" and sutured as a subject in
the dominant order of heteronormativity. Chung repeatedly appeals to the implied
audience’s disbelief and disgust by warning the audience in odd moments
of direct address to prepare themselves to be outraged. At the Penine Hart gallery,
Chung explains, "for sale, Orlan operation video, Orlan photographs, and
. . . brace yourself . . . little bits of artist under glass." Again, Orlan
and Chung are seen engaging in conversation as Chung opens with a reference
to Orlan’s critics:
Chung: Some people would
say its . . . sick!
Orlan: Maybe Van Gogh cutting off his ear is sick.
Chung: Van Gogh cutting off his ear would be sick.
Orlan: But he’s very big artist.
Chung: But nobody taped it and watched it, and (laughing) tried to sell his
ear.
Chung finally affirms that Orlan’s work is indeed art, "the art of
self promotion" as is made evident in a video clip of Orlan presenting
a framed piece of herself to Madonna on French TV. But, the inextricable link
that binds sexual and racial conflict in this scene of passing is made explicit
in Chung’s reference to male desire for Orlan. As Butler suggests, homosexuality
and the conflict of female desire can be read in what is almost spoken and in
what is withheld from speech, but which always threatens to stop or disrupt
speech and such is the disruption in the Orlan/Chung conversation.
While a collector of Orlan’s work is portrayed as a dupe for forking over
$4000.00 for a framed Orlan tissue sample, Stephen Napoli is referred to as
the man who "wanted even more of Orlan, he wanted her heart." Napoli
is Orlan’s husband and Chung brings the age difference of 22 years to Orlan’s
attention, even as Chung defensively denies that it is conceptually "a
problem" for her. As Chung turns to address him, Napoli is revealed as
the presence of heterosexual family life just outside the frame of this conversation.
As the camera turns to expose his hithertil concealed position on the floor
near the seated Orlan, the viewer is invited to similarly look outside the frame
of the conversation at Chung’s extradiegetic family life as well. In one
camera movement, the apparatus of lights, wires, false walls, and frantic crew
members is revealed, the operation of suture is exposed, and the spectator's
subject position as passive viewer is confirmed. The viewing subject's unpleasure
of this recognition is simultaneously alleviated with the illusion of plentitude.
We see all that Chung surveys and more as the viewing subject has privileged
access to the "Absent One" that frames Chung herself--the regime of
heteronormativity.
As Butler notes, the dominant heterosexual vectors of power--race and sexuality--also
require the idealization of bourgeois family life. It is through the idealization
of the sanctification of marriage that women assume their place in the family.
Marriage protects women of color from a public exposure of their sexuality which
is vulnerable to racist construction and exploitation and protects aging women
from similar devaluations of the unreproductive female body. The taboo of miscegenation
is implicated in this heterosexual matrix as the convergence of regulations
on both sexual and racial norms. And, in the discourse of plastic surgery, age
is implicated as another vector of power, collapsed into a single binary--youth
and old--privileging youth and its presumption of fertility that is also linked
to the reproduction and pursuit of "the same." Hence, as miscegenation
trespasses across racial boundaries and poses a threat to the reproduction of
"the same," so too does age crossing. Like "whiteness" which
derives its power from its "unremarkability," youth is signified on
the body that is unmarked and smooth and acquires the power of invisibility.
And youth takes on greater significance as the mark of difference implicated
in the intersecting regimes of racial and sexual difference within the discourse
of plastic surgery.
Bearing out this convergence of youth, race, sexual difference in the idealization
of bourgeois family life is the Eye to Eye segment where the church wedding
of Orlan and Napoli is shown as they exchange vows in French. But while Chung
claims she has no problem with their 22 year age difference, it is Chung’s
own difference that has made her own marriage a problem as her infertility frustrated
her place in a heterosexual matrix, thus provoking her announcement to cut back
her schedule on her own news magazine show in order to "take a very aggressive
approach to having a baby." Chung’s "feminist" stance as
the first woman to co-anchor the national news; her singularity as the only
Asian- American TV star; her marriage to the white popular talk show host and
their publicized "failure" to become pregnant attributed solely to
her infertility, fail to be subdued and muted in conversation with Orlan even
as such ‘facts’ about Chung must be out of public speech in order
to repress the social constraints on the sexuality of women of color. Nevertheless,
in conversation with the disfiguring Orlan, Chung's extra-textual disruptions
are implicated and the queer exchange ensues.
The next operation shown in the Eye to Eye segment is described by Chung as
the "first operation since the wedding." In the operating room Dr.
Marjorie Cramer, Orlan’s plastic surgeon, and "amateur sculptor"
(seen earlier in segment sculpting a clay bust) is heard telling Orlan that
she wishes to stop the surgery, that Orlan appears exhausted, and that she is
worried. Chung narrates the event, concluding that "Dr. Cramer decides
Orlan has suffered enough for her art." At the conclusion of the segment,
Chung shows before and after photos of Orlan after she went back for the rest
of her surgery. Chung perkily evaluates the "improvement" again directly
addressing the audience she identifies with: "so far so good, right?"
Orlan’s literal performance of ‘coming out’ (out of the skin)
exposes the pass and confirms the necessary failure of passing. By entering
into a conversation with Orlan "which presumes whiteness as the norm without
contesting that assumption," Chung herself is "passing" as unmarked
and performing the dissociation from the raced body and the hegemonic function
of whiteness. Such disavowal is required in order to sustain racial borders,
but it is the uncertainty of the border that is eroticized in this conversation,
performing the "racialization of sexual conflict." Orlan is not only
the disruptive reminder of the sexed body, but also of the constructedness of
racial difference. Whiteness produces itself as the unmarked, universal term
by projecting the burden of difference onto other bodies. But, Orlan’s
marking of her own whiteness reveals the marks of Chung’s own surgery and
the "blank spot" of race in psychoanalytic interpretive frameworks.
Chung’s pass is recognized by her interpolated in-group--the audience--who
must also "pass" in order to recognize Chung as "not white"
and making visible that Orlan herself is "passing’ as a white woman.
As Phelan writes, the performance of passing represents that which cannot be
seen and succeeds by underlining that which is seen. This deployment of the
unseen is disturbed by Orlan’s spectacular performance and this "queer"
conversation, bringing Chung’s "whiteness" to crisis as well
as her television audience’s. What Orlan makes visible is the unmarked
nature of "whiteness." The reaction of Chung then appears as a strange
disavowal of what is "given to be seen" and her own function as a
disruptive element in the dominant discourse of heterosexuality; a performance
not immediately available to the field of vision.
Outside the visible field of this conversation is Chung’s own physical
"improvement." When Chung confronts the press herself, it is her own
difference, especially with regard to her race and her sex, that is repeatedly
called into question by popular journalists. In an interview for Ladies Home
Journal, Chung is described as making one "feel that she’s not much
different from anyone else . . . But of course, she is different." The
statement follows an account of Chung’s beauty routine and the extremes
that she goes to in order to maintain her polished look despite her self-deprecating
appraisals:
Her demeanor and appearance defy her words. Impeccably dressed in a pale lemon-colored suit, her graying-at-the-temples hair in perfect place, Chung looks calm, relaxed, as if she’s just come away from a week at a spa. . . . It’s the makeup," she says, motioning with her impressively manicured fingers to the space under her eyes. "Rings. I’ve got dark rings." She leans forward and earnestly insists that without makeup--and her shoulder pads and her to-die-for wardrobe--she’d be very ordinary indeed. "I’m scary, I swear. I look like a twelve-year-old boy."
Chung reveals that her polished look is indeed a mask, all makeup, padding,
and costume and indeed a transsexual operation (from 12-year-old boy to anchor
woman). Just as Dr. Decartes' disavowal of Clay's racial difference implicates
her own transsexual nomination and codes their relationship "queer"
in Suture, Chung's disavowal of Orlan's racial difference and Chung's admitted
transsexual operation makes their conversation queer. In conversation with Orlan,
Chung repeatedly dissociated herself from the acts Orlan makes visible. Throughout
the conversation, Chung interrupts her report on Orlan with satiric remarks
and visual jokes. But, Chung’s contact which Orlan, and their mutual experience
with "making themselves over" causes Chung to "criminalize"
Orlan as the racial trespasser, as disloyal to family and its institutions of
heterosexuality and as a threat to her own ability to pass. Such a disavowal
on Chung's part catches her in the double bind: being free from the deprivations
of "race" on the one hand, and participating in the violations of
white racist exoticizing of Asian women's sexuality, on the other. Chung's own
trespassing across the boundaries of race in a regulative heterosexual matrix
compels her to disidentify with Orlan. But, it is disidentification that opens
transformative possibilities for the conflict of passing. As Butler writes:
Although the political discourses that mobilize identity categories tend to cultivate identifications in the service of a political goal, it may be that the persistence of disidentification is equally crucial to the rearticulation of democratic contestation. Indeed, it may be precisely through practices which underscore disidentification with those regulatory norms by which sexual difference is materialized that both feminist and queer politics are mobilized. Such collective disidentifications can facilitate a reconceptualization of which bodies matter, and which bodies are yet to emerge as critical matters of concern.
Disidentification, in Butler’s terms, might be read between Chung and Orlan
as the unlived political promise of critical performance and of the way certain
bodily performances may interrupt and unsettle binary logic. To replay intersecting
terms of gender, race and sexuality within the collective dramas of disidentification
might transform the possibilities for solidarity in a politics of affiliation
without recovering fixed identities. The constitutive failure of suture and
passing in this "queer" conversation then suggests a performative
critique that does not recover the addiction/voluntarism dyad or the ascendancy
of sexual difference.