... and I've been exercising it by writing. This is the introduction to the current incarnation of my PhD proposal:
Before I started making live performances I had never actually used my voice in my work. I had performed alone in front of a camera and lip-synched to appropriated soundtracks from TV shows; used my muscles to mimic other people’s body language or to match Hollywood choreography; I also re-enacted iconic gestures from feminist performance art. When I look back at my evolution and the steps I took to become a performance artist, I see it as a succession of escalating risks taken in order to build up the confidence to be me. I see a parallel in my motivations to become a performer and the intentions behind much of what I define as feminist performance art; to ensure that a woman’s voice is heard, that her perspective is made visible and her story is told. Likewise, the narrative of my career, as I like to tell it – that I have been transformed into a new and improved, more confident and poised, performance-artist version of me[1] – also bears a striking resemblance to the phenomenon of the makeover, which is ubiquitous in the mainstream culture industry geared at women.[2] In my conceptualisation of my work and my understanding of both feminist performance art and the pop cultural narrative of the makeover, there is an appeal to a notion of agency and an authentic inner self which should be analysed.[3] My research project therefore entails locating and evaluating the concepts of agency and selfhood inherent within feminism/feminist art and the self-transformation narratives of popular culture in order to propose a novel theory of feminist agency and an accompanying code of ethics.
[1] Recently I was invited to give lectures on my work at Sheffield Hallam University and Nottingham Trent University, but instead of providing a straight-forward artist’s talk, I delivered my performance-art lecture “Performance Art Can Change Your Life For The Better”. This motivational speech conveys the story of my personal transformation through various identifications with role models such as Judy Chicago and Sex and The City protagonist Carrie Bradshaw. Borrowing conventions from pop culture makeovers, my powerpoint presentation includes two self-portraits showing me ‘before’ and ‘after’ I became a performance artist.
[2] Theorist, Rosalind Gill argues that “a makeover paradigm constitutes postfeminist media culture” and that “to a much greater extent than men, women are required to work on and transform the self, to regulate every aspect of their conduct”. Gill, Rosalind, “Culture and Subjectivity in Neoliberal and Postfeminist Times” in Subjectivity, 25, 2008, p. 441 and p. 443.
[3] I like to claim that I’ve stripped away layers of shyness, timidity (and citation) to get at the ‘real’ me on stage or, more accurately, in the gallery. Likewise I often think of feminist performance art as women expressing themselves genuinely without having to play a part written by a man. And, as Cressida J. Heyes has elucidated, mainstream self-help culture relies on the false premise that working on the self through dieting, plastic surgery and other disciplinary routines makes visible on the flesh the beauty and goodness of one’s true inner self. Heyes, among many other feminist theorists also elaborates on how problematic this notion of a fixed self is because of its ties to essentialism and its lack of historical and social contextualisation. Heyes, Cressida J., Self-transformations: Foucault, Ethics and Normalised Bodies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 4-5.