Pointed Out Like the Stars: Women and the Avant-Garde

I was 21 when I entered graduate school for the first time, and while it was mostly a psychological and academic disaster for me, one very important thing happened that affected me for the rest of my life. I discovered Dada. I can’t remember what precipitated my discovery of Dada. Something in my memory tells me that it was just an accident of “surfing” the library stacks. What I do remember is my first book of Dada that I came across and checked out: 7 Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries by Tristan Tzara . I remember being hooked the first time I opened the book. A little bit later, I came across of one Tzara’s poems, “Le printemps,” or “Springtime,” of which I can still, 30 years later, recite the first line or two in French. I could not tell you what about the work attracted me, but it made me happy, then, as now. It was delightful in its esoteric non-sense and at the same time, made me feel liberated. To a very young graduate student in English, an artistic and literary movement that could inspire playfulness in literature, as opposed to weighed down with assignments that felt oppressive, made me rediscover and remember my love for literature. Even now, 30 years later, picking up a book about Dada or Surrealism, going to an exhibit, still has the same ecstatic effect on me.

At that time, I wasn’t thinking about women in the avant-garde. I didn’t think about the fact that women were not highly visible among avant-garde movements. Frankly, women were not highly visible in most literary movements. The women involved in literary movements were anomalies. That was what made them special—a woman among so many male writers. Moreover, this was the middle 1980s. Growing up female in the 1970s, in the midst of second wave feminism, which I was also oblivious to at the time, I was raised to believe that I could do anything, participate in anything. When, years later, I did enter the fray of discussions about women in the avant-garde, I would initially assume that, sure, women were not represented, but that was then and this is now. Moreover, criticism of the lack of (visible) women that were made, either historically or in the present, did not apply to me. I did not see myself as frivolous, I was not a “girly-girl.” I was a young woman who could hold her own with any boy or man, especially when it came to intellect. I was special, like those other women. If there were not very many women historically in the avant-garde, that did not affect the women of today who could do whatever they chose to do. It would not be until years later that I would question where the women of the avant-garde were and why no one seemed to be talking about them. It seemed some of them had to become visible to me before I could ask where the rest of them were.

Fast forward to November 2016. I attend a 100th anniversary of Dada celebration at a small gallery in Chicago, where I meet Penelope Rosemont herself, the legendary American Surrealist from Chicago who had, by all accounts, met Andre Breton and received, along with her husband Franklin, Breton’s blessing to start a Surrealist group in the United States. As this is the last weekend of the exhibition, attendance is slight. The four people in the room at the time, myself included, look and comment on the irony that 100 years later, it is a group of women exclusively that are celebrating Dada. The tide has turned.

The Avant-Garde: A Man’s World?

When you think of Dada and Surrealism, the “first” major avant-gardes, what names come to mind? Number one is probably Andre Breton. Marcel Duchamp. Tristan Tzara. Man Ray. Salvador Dali. It is only once we have used up most of the male names that we might remember Leonora Carrington, or Dorothea Tanning, Kay Sage, Frida Kahlo, Mary Laban, Sophie Tauber, Baroness Elsa, or Mina Loy. When we think about contemporary scholarship on women in the avant-garde or any literary movement, we can look at the numbers and who gets published in major anthologies, how the women get counted and talked about in that movement, and who the scholars are that are “writing women back into the canon.”

Surrealist Women by the numbers

In 1998, Penelope Rosemont published a very influential volume entitled Surrealist Women. The anthology includes a total of just under 100 women, although she drew from a much higher number. Many of them are the most prominent names in Surrealism, Nancy Cunard, Meret Oppenheim, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, etc. Rosemont describes her method in detail:

I consulted a vast number of surrealist journals, exhibition catalogues, and other publications. Whenever I came across the name of a woman, I noted it on a file card. According to these cards, some three hundred women—at one time or another, to one degree or another—have taken part in the international Surrealist Movement. (xxxvi).

Three hundred women, and yet at best, most people even in the know could probably only name about 25 women from Dada and Surrealism combined, maybe 50 if they are really knowledgeable.

In that volume, organized chronologically, there are 11 women from the 1920s and 24 different women published in the 1930s, (vii-x) the period when according to Mary Ann Caws, women began to become more visible within Surrealism (Surrealism and Woman, 2). There were 17 unique women in the section before the end of WWII, and 27 unique women listed as post-War, from the end of the WWII to 1960. In period of the 1960s and 70s there are 24 unique women published, and 16 in the final chapter, that goes up to the 1990s (Surrealist Women, x-xx).

Contrast this with Willard Bohn’s 1993 anthology, The Dada Market: An Anthology of Poetry, which contains only 4 women out of 42 poets: Celine Arnauld, Baroness Elsa von Freitag-Loringhoven, Emmy Hennings, and Mina Loy (vii). Arsenal: Surrealist Subversions, a journal which was edited by Rosemont’s own Chicago Surrealist Group and was published sporadically in the 1970s and 80s had approximately 15 different women writers and artists in the issue I examined, as well as statements from a number of Surrealist groups worldwide which no doubt (or hopefully) included women, out of roughly 70 entries (1).

Today, there are also any number of Facebook pages devoted to contemporary Surrealist practices. As of February 15th, looking at two different FB pages, Surrealist Revolution and Surrealism and Esotericism, there were 155 women out of 532 members of Surrealist Revolution and 67 women out of 211 total members of Surrealism and Esotericism, which comes to roughly 1/3 in each group (and there is some overlap between the two lists, but there are also some discrete names a well). There were a few cases where the names were ambiguous and not obviously women, and which further had no identifying pictures, so I counted those as men. However, it is the men who are more visible on these lists, whereas the women tend to “lurk” on these particular lists, mostly posting when they have something to share, as opposed to getting involved in discussions. Is this because they have been discouraged in the past? Is it because they are busy being artists and moms and wives and employees—maybe being teachers of art and/or students--all in varying proportions and simply don’t have time? Are they doing Surrealism as opposed to talking about it? Is it something else altogether for some of them?

In fact, when I posted something to these two lists , telling a little bit about my project and asking them to respond to my gmail account, lists which I regularly participate in and which were selected for that very reason, I got no responses at all and only one man “liked” my comment. Is it possible that no women got word of my call to participate? Is it that women don’t want to think about their participation in avant-garde movements or assume, like I did, that the issue is one of history and not a current concern? Are they tired of talking about it? I will never know, of course, why my call failed to generate a single response, but those questions are interesting to speculate on, in and of themselves. I was disappointed. I wanted to know if other women’s experiences were the same as mine were, what their paths were to the avant-garde. For the moment, I will have to defer this knowledge.

There is also the issue of women not wanting to be featured in women-only anthologies. Rosemont talks about this in the introduction to Surrealist Women when she talks about Anne Ethuin, who “declined to participate in one such ‘No Men Allowed’ collection” (xxx). Ethuin responded by writing:

I have never thought that art and poetry could have a sex. On days when I feel the urge to write or create images, I do not decide before I begin that I am going to make ‘a woman’s work. I have lived and worked for forty-seven years in a perfectly mixed milieu and I have no intention of changing now. (qtd in Rosemont, Surrealist Women, xxxi).

Rosemont’s response to a statement like this is that she sees Surrealist Women as being about “reintegration . . . to make it impossible—or at least inexcusable—for student of surrealism to continue to ignore” these women and their writings. This is what Royce and Kirsch would call the work of “historical rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription” that feminist scholars engage in (20).

Men in the Avant-Garde: Oppressors or Champions of Women?

There is some disagreement among scholars about how complicit the Dada and Surrealist men were in suppressing the history of that/those movement(s) . Some, like Penelope Rosemont, say that the men deeply respected the women in the movement and supported women’s rights. Others say that the men used the women as sexual beings (or objects) to show how sexually liberated the male artists were, while still not affording the women their own independence and sexuality. In the introduction to Women in Dada, Naomi Sawelson-Gorse has some fairly biting things to say about the male attitudes towards women, as expressed in their own writings and manifestos. Sawelson-Gorse discusses New York Dadaist Paul Haviland, who talked about machines as female in not-so-flattering terms:

Man made machine in his own image. She has limbs which act . . . a nervous system through which runs electricity . . . The machine is his ‘daughter born without a mother.’ This is why he loves her. (xi).

She also cites Francis Picabia, who, writing in a similar vein, that “the machine is yet at a dependent stage . . . she submits to his will but he must direct her activities. Sawelson-Gorse sees the irony here, declaring that “this movement of absolute rebellion was also one of oppression” (xii). She also cites a manifesto by Tzara (my man!) as embedded in binary difference: female concerns are superficial, bound in commodifications of bodily vanity (such as skin creams and nail polish) in direct opposition to those of the male in the innovative sphere, particularly the innovative. (xi)

There are a number of books and articles that detail and debate the Dada’s and Surrealists’ attitudes toward women, and so my intention here is not to write the “definitive” account of those attitudes by any means, nor do I intend to significantly rehash those debates. And if feminist scholars have taught us anything, it is to pay attention to the particulars, rather than the broad brushes that movements are painted with. No doubt, there were men who truly championed women, those who saw women as frivolous and not worth their attention, and those men who thought they were being liberatory and open-minded, but who missed the mark. My intention here is simply to bring up those issues as a part of the reason that women have been excluded from the canon of the avant-garde for many years. The lack of support and champions of women’s work, either consciously or unconsciously must be mentioned.

And yet, there were still a number of women who chose to be a part of Dada around the world, in New York, France, Zurich, and Berlin. Perhaps like me, they assumed that the men who wrote things like Tzara, Picabia, and Haviland had written were not writing about them. They were different, liberated, artistic. Many were suffragists . These women deserved the liberation that Dada and similar movements promised. Perhaps these women, faced with no real alternative in men’s perceptions of them, decided to cast their lot with Dadaism, which was at least politically and artistically liberating.

In the 1970s, French feminist and Surrealist Helene Cixous wrote that she “has no right to write within your logic: nowhere to write from.” Because she is a woman, she has “no fatherland, no legitimate history. No certainties, no property. ” With no “fatherland,” no history or tradition, a woman has no “genre,” she feels an allegiance to. It is all up for grabs for her to make her own history, her own traditions. What better place, then, for women in the early 20th century than in the Dada movement, even if the men didn’t totally support them. The women in and affiliated or associated with Dada were liberated, despite these male attitudes, including Baroness Elsa, Mina Loy, Sophie Tauber, Emmy Hennings, and many more. Being liberated does not always equal visibility or acceptance. I was told by someone online, for instance, that Emmy Hennings, girlfriend and later wife of Hugo Ball, who wrote poetry and participated in the Cabaret Voltaire, was not an artist and was simply a prostitute. This despite the fact that she appeared in plenty of anthologies and wrote the introduction to Ball’s memoir Flight Out of Time.

Another aspect that the Hennings story brings to light and that also threatens to obscure women’s recognition within these movements is the fact that very often the women participants were the wives or girlfriends of the men involved in the movement. Thus seen as “appendages” of the men, their participation is subsumed into the man’s artistic participation, at least in the eyes of critics, if we are to accept Rosemont’s story. Elise Breton, Suzanne Duchamp, Jeanette Tanguy, Nadja, and Gala Dali are just a few of the women who are often noted as wives and girlfriends, as “muses,” but rarely recognized as artists in their own right.

Mary Ann Caws contends that this is part of the problematic history of Surrealism itself, when she says that “although the work is praised, the woman is not granted autonomous artist powers” (2). Caws also notes that women “joined Surrealism through personal relationships with male members” (2). Was it that the women actually participated because their husbands or partners were Surrealists, or was it that the men were attracted to the women because they shared similar interests in art and attitudes toward creativity?

By the numbers: contemporary redux

The erasure of women from avant-garde and experimental histories continues with contemporary movements of today, feminism notwithstanding. I remember reading a quote by Gregory Corso of the “Beat Generation” who said (and I paraphrase) “sure there were women there [among the Beats] and someday people will write about them.” I had talked to Maria Damon, professor at the University of Minnesota and a beat generation scholar/apologist about that quote and she told me “Gregory Corso is such a mess. He is not one to be responsible for that kind of scholarship.” The point is not that Gregory Corso himself should be responsible for bringing those writers to light, but as Angela Davis famously said, “Lift as you climb.” In other words, male authors could or should stop allowing the story of the “holy trinity” of the Beats – Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs—from being the only history of the Beat movement and take greater pains to mention some of the women writers, besides Dianne DiPrima, who were there and worked with them, read by their sides, and did much more than sleep with them, cook their dinners, etc. As the men are lifted up, they should also be mentioning and lifting up the women with whom they built the movement, not waiting for someone else to “discover” those writers, who should have already been “discovered” by virtue of their participation.

The Language Poets, inheritors of the Dada tradition, do a slightly better job, with about a dozen women writers out of a 280 page anthology, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, in which most articles, poetry, and fiction run from 1-3 pages (v-viii). Being generous, this means that there is approximately 36 pages worth of women’s writing in this book. At a Conceptual Poetics conference that I attended in 2007, which featured many prominent Language Poets, nearly half of the attendees were women, yet we were still having discussions about gender, since the then-upcoming Conceptual Poetics anthology, which ended up being published in 2011 under the name Against Expression and was edited by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, was not going to reflect women’s participation and the nearly equal participation of women to men at the conference. And as usual with discussions like this, most of the men got defensive . Marjorie Perloff sided with the men, saying something to the effect that it wasn’t their job to ensure equal participation of men and women. The finished anthology has approximately 100-110 pages of women’s writing, representing approximately 25 women, out of a total of 593 pages (vii-xvi).

Women as Scholars of the Avant-Garde

Many women have been written back into the histories of the avant-garde, and this is, no doubt, due to women becoming scholars of the avant-garde as well. One of the most prominent and prolific of these is Mary Ann Caws, who has edited and translated dozens of books by and about avant-garde writers, has edited or contributed to more than a dozen books specifically about women in and around the avant-garde, including the 1991 critical edition of Surrealism and Women. In addition to Caws, there are a number of other women scholars of the avant-garde, including Whitney Chadwick, who has written about Frida Kahlo and other women of the avant-garde, or scholar Patricia Allmer, who is almost as prolific a writer on the avant-garde as Caws is. As more women not only enter the academy, but show an interest in the avant-garde, we learn more about women of the avant-garde. Thus, it is important to know the names of the scholars who are unearthing women buried under the mounds of male artists that have obscured their own contributions. After all, if, as Comte L’autremont is endlessly quoted in Surrealist book after Surrealist book, “poetry must be made by all,” then that must include women, as part of that “all.”

Echoing Cixous’ comments about how women have “no fatherland” and no stable place from which to write, Jacquline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch argue in Feminist Rhetorical Practices that women “need to claim a space for research at the edges (rather than the center) of the field, to claim an interdisciplinary space in the field” (6). Thus, it seems that to be female is to be inherently avant-garde, whether you are an artist or a scholar. What we are doing is inherently revolutionary and liberatory.

In addition to publishing the anthology Surrealist Women in 1998, Penelope Rosemont, a member of the Chicago Surrealists, has brought women like Toyen to light in her own memoirs and manifestos, as well as casually mentioning other women, as if to say that their participation in Surrealism should not be seen as shocking or separate, but to simply be recognized as being in the room. Of course, another way that women make themselves known, both in and outside of avant-garde movements is to write their own memoirs. Penelope Rosemont has written several autobiographical books, including Dreams and Everyday Life and Surrealist Experiences: 1001 Dawns, 221 Midnights and a co-authored a book entitled The Forecast is Hot! Tracts and Other Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States, all of which talk about Rosemont’s own experiences with the Surrealists in Paris in the late 1960s and beyond. Yet Rosemont’s own participation in Surrealism has been questioned in the behind-the-scene discussions of her Wikipedia page, in which one person kept taking down references to her having met Andre Breton and having Breton's blessing for a Surrealist Group in Chicago, claiming there is no evidence that she and her husband Franklin had ever met Breton. I, personally, have never heard of someone’s memoirs being questioned in such a manner, unless it is proven that the memoir is false. This incident is emblematic of the struggles that women face to be included in the canon of the avant-garde. There is no such discussion on Franklin Rosemont’s page.

Scholarship of Women in the Avant-Garde: Who “Counts”

Even now, in 2017, when I went to the Documenting Dada Exhibit at the University of Iowa, there were two pages from the Dadaist journal 391 that had artwork done by women. It was mentioned in the program, but the women’s names were omitted. This despite the fact they were clearly visible on the pages and that someone could have investigated further and written about them. (The names were not as visible/legible through the class that contained the pages.) Were they anomalies in the Dada movement, only published or participating once or for a very short period of time? Or were they actively involved? As of 2017, apparently we do not know the answers to that question.

Rosemont contends that “until very recently most of the literature on women surrealists was written by other surrealists, male and female.” She goes on to note that “if these women remain little known to the larger reading public it is because critics and scholars have been shirking their responsibilities” (xxx). In fact, canon development is and remains a significant issue for women writers of all kinds, as has been documented by feminist scholars for approximately 50 years. Who is left in the canon are usually the “founders” of movements and the most visible, through the writing of their memoirs. Those are often men, as well. That said, even Andre Breton’s 1966 volume Surrealism and Painting has 52 discrete chapters on painters, of which 5 are about women (Breton, np). In a book entitled Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism by leading Surrealist Philip Souppault, translated from the French and published in the US in 2016, there is not a single chapter on any woman. Despite that, it was hailed by many, including Paul Auster, Pierre Joris, and Andrei Codrescu who has taken up the modern cause of Surrealism and published the literary journal called Exquisite Corpse. It would seem, then, that omission is not just errors on the part of critics. The men of Surrealism have failed to mention the women who worked beside them. It is up to female scholars to look back for their heroes and bring them into the light of day.

Conclusion

As more women enter academia, more women get showcased and added to various canons of writing. There is no “one canon,” but rather many. There is an avant-garde canon, and because that canon is so new, it is also easily expanded to include women. However, we cannot count on men, as seemingly sympathetic as they may be, to include women—their writings, their biographies, their existence. Even recent history shows us that despite improvements over the past century, there are still blind spots that will be largely corrected by women scholars in the foreseeable future, unearthing these women.

Post-Script: Note on Method

I have chosen to use my own memories and knowledge in places and often to use that to compare what other women’s experience of the avant-garde might have been or might be. There are several places where I talk about my memories of conversations I have had with scholars, with people through Facebook, etc., as back up information, as another way of talking about what I have experienced or have talked about or have known about the avant-garde over the years.

I have also conflated Dada and Surrealism. I could add to this Italian Futurism and Russian Formalism, but I am not as familiar with the latter two movements. Dada led directly into Surrealism and a number of Surrealists, including Breton and Dali, among many many others, started off in Dada. If the transition was not seamless, it was relatively smooth and in many ways, the goals of the two movements were similar. These two movements are also considered among the first avant-gardes, from which later avant-garde and experimental literary movements would take inspiration.

Finally, I used Wikipedia here to show attitudes towards the people and subjects that I am talking about. There is a time and a place for traditional scholarship, and there is also a time and a place to talk about what is commonly known or understood in the popular imagination. I can think of no better place to trace the history of those attitudes combined with scholarship than Wikipedia.

Works Cited

Andrews, Bruce, and Charles Bernstein. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Poetics of the New. Carbondale Ill.: Southern Illinois University P, 1984.
Bohn, Willard. The Dada Market: An Anthology of Poetry. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University P, 1993.
Breton, Andre. Surrealism and Painting. Simon Watson Taylor, trans. New York, NY: Icon Editions, Harper & Row P, 1966.
Caws, Mary Ann, et al, editors. Surrealism and Women. MIT P, 1991.
Cixous, Helene. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Translated by Deborah Jensen. Harvard UP, 1991.
Dworkin, Craig and Goldsmith, Kenneth. Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2011.
Facebook. “Member List,” Surrealism and Esotericism. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1586657041590569/members/
Facebook. “Member List,” La Revolution Surrealiste. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1578166949079758/members/
Rosemont, Penelope. Dreams and Everyday Life: Andre Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker, SDS, and the Seven Cities of Cibala, a Sixties Journal. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. 2008.
---. Surrealist Experiences: 1001 Dawns, 221 Midnights. Surrealist Editions, Black Swan P, 2000.
---. Surrealist Women. Austin, TX: University of Texas, 1998.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones and Gesha E. Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literary Studies. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University P, 2012.
Sawselson-Gorse, Naomi, editor. Women in Dada. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1998.
Shipe, Timothy. Documenting Dada//Disseminating Dada. Exhibition Guide. Iowa City: University of Iowa Libraries, 2017.
Souppault, Phillipe. Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism. Alan Bernheimer, trans. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2016.
Wikipedia. Penelope Rosemont, Talk Tab. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Penelope_Rosemont

Death of the Author: God and Mother, A Parable

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the text, the word, is sacred. We cannot seem to get out of the tradition. For all of their post-modernism and the agnosticism that frequently comes with that, Barthes (and Derrida) also come out of a French tradition which was very very Catholic. Thus, I am going to make the story of the death of the author, male and female, into a comparative parable.

In Christianity, Jesus (the author) must die and be resurrected so that believers (readers) can have safe passage to heaven (the text). This is the male-centered conception of the author as the all-knowing keeper of the text and of meaning. And in fact, Barthes speaks of “the ‘message’ of the Author-God” and says that “to refuse to fix its meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law."

Women, however, have historically had a different relationship to birth and death, with many medieval women dying in childbirth. In this model, the woman (author) dies so that her child (the reader) may be born, but that child will be orphaned, with no one to guide her through life (the text). There is a “death/not death,” a voluntary withdrawal that happens here that can be seen as Cixous’ metaphor for the author. Cixous also talks about the (female) author as continuing “to have what she has eternally, to not lose having, to be pregnant with having is . . . the text, already in the child, in the woman . . . ” The woman is birthing the text, bringing it into being, and like giving birth, some of herself with leave her along with the text. But that text will not necessitate a death for the author. If the reader is a co-creator in meaning, as with Barthes, the author-mother will do so in conjunction with, not opposed to, the reader and the text.

“I Must Be Boring Someone: Women in Warhol’s Films” from Sex Objects by Jennifer Doyle

This is a review/summary of Chapter 4, on the Films of Andy Warhol, from Jennifer Doyle's Sex Objects.


The Queer, the Pornographic, and the Boring

In Sex Objects, Jennifer Doyle asks us to rethink several things, including queer theory, feminism, the relationship of pornography to art, and what it means to be bored by a work of art or literature. She relies on many of the seminal figures in each field, including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jose Munoz, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Douglas Crimp from queer theory. She also turns to a variety of critical and academic sources including art critic Michael Fried, performance theorist Amelia Jones and literary theorist Roland Barthes for examples of how the various media are received and created as visual art, performance and literature.

Using several artists as points of study, including Herman Melville’s epic work Moby Dick, artist Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic, the visual art and films of Andy Warhol, the drawings of Tracy Emin, and the performances of Vaginal Davis as Vanessa Beecroft, killing two birds with one stone, she explores the way that queer theory and feminism can work together to, if not erase, lessen the impact of the “male gaze” in art by decentering women in the picture as well as the way that claims of “pornography” can be mitigated by boredom in “art” and “literature,” those “highbrow” terms that are used to defend texts of all kinds against the charge of pornography. In fact, Andy Warhol a seminal figure in this regard, is so queer, so pornographic, and so boring, that he merits two chapters: one for his painting and visual art and one for his films.

Chapter Four of Doyle’s work, “I Must Be Boring Someone: Women in Warhol’s Films” is the second of her chapters on Warhol. In it, she talks about such Factory staples as Edie Sedgwick, Brigid Berlin, Nico, Ingrid Superstar, and Valerie Solanas, whose main claims to fame are that she published the SCUM Manifesto and that she shot Andy Warhol around the same time. Solanas had also given a copy of her own play, Up Your Ass¸ to Warhol and also appeared in Andy Warhol’s film I, a Man (73). Warhol’s films were “frequently shut down by the police for obscenity” and Solanas’ play was even shocking in the Factory context, leading Warhol to suspect that her play might have been a form of police entrapment. Warhol did, however, give Solanas a role in his film I, a Man.

I, a Man, according to Doyle, “was loosely inspired by a Swedish sexploitation film, I, a Woman.” Solanas plays a woman who is sexually aggressive towards the male character, played by Tom Baker, and one who has total control. In fact, she reminds Baker of this when she says “Look, I got the upper hand, let’s not forget that.” To which Baker responds, “I haven’t forgotten it for a moment” (77). She is the sexual aggressor in the film, grabbing Baker in an elevator, but refusing to take it any further than that, despite his assumption that they are going to go home together. There is a good Later on in the dialogue, Solanas and Baker have an exchange about instinct, with Solanas asking what Baker’s instincts tell him to do. “Your instincts tell you to chase chicks, right? My instincts tell me to do the same thing [so] why should my standards be any lower than yours” (qtd. in Doyle 79). What makes scenes like this feminist or at least pro-feminist in Doyle’s view, is not the overt way that Solanas takes control of the situation. In fact, Doyle recognizes that to some, “there is no place for feminism in Warhol’s films because their dominant erotic economy is gay (authored by gay men, aimed at largely gay male audiences” (72). However, in her queer feminist analysis, Doyle points out that in many of these films, it is precisely “because she is framed by a gay male context, she gets to be something other than the straight sex object” (72).

Doyle compares Solanas’ performance in I, a Man to that of Katherine Hepburn, “whose quick tongue could turn Spencer Tracy or Cary Grant inside out, bringing him to the limit of frustration and desire” but, as Doyle further points out, Solanas is an out lesbian with no interest in Baker, and without any of the glamour of Hollywood (80). There is no danger that she will be taken for a sexual object in this film, despite the sexual situation and despite Baker’s assumptions within the film. Solanas is in fact, framed as a sexual predator in I, a Man, saying that she is “a sucker for a squishy ass” (qtd. in Doyle 80). She and other women in Warhol’s films are able to “literalize, halt, and sabotage the heterosexual imperative” (80).
Doyle takes on Wayne Koestenbaum’s reading of Valerie Solanas and her attack on Andy Warhol. Koestenbaum “equates a feminist reading of Solanas with an attack on [Warhol]” (74). She goes on to describe Koestenbaum as implying “that to think as a feminist is not to think at all but to emotionally and uncritically identify with whatever female counterpart is on the screen” (74). Doyle describes this as indicative of the “anxieties raised by the specter of women (lesbian or not, crazy or not) in gay places” (75). Here she is able to talk about some of the points of abjection and negation between queer theory and feminist theory and about how, despite the homophobia inherent in it, many gay men still participate in a patriarchal culture as well that “might make women crazy” (75).

Koestenbaum’s critical lens notwithstanding, Doyle notes the number of women in work by gay male artists, citing Jack Smith, Gus Van Sant, and Werner Fassbinder and the way in which women represent “crucial allies” in the struggle to make a meaningful and “livable life out of a world organized against the minority sexual subject” (75). The women in these films are not incidental to the subject matter, but have an inherent place in them, a place where they don’t share in mainstream representations of gender and sexuality. In this way, Warhol’s films that include women “reveals that the sexual radicalism of Warhol’s work is pinned to the troubling presence” of women (75). The women are not merely fag hags or overbearing mothers, and they do not merely represent campy versions of women. Despite the fact that they are “unnecessary” to gay men sexually, that excess allows women like Solanas to stay outside the center of the frame and to consequently be decentered as sexual subjects.

In Bike Boy we encounter the idea of boredom in Warhol’s films. The title of this chapter as well as the book’s cover photo come from a potentially erotic but ultimately boring encounter between Joe Spencer and Ingrid Superstar. This scene comes in the middle of the film, after nearly an hour of homo (and it would seem possibly auto)erotic encounters with a naked Spencer stepping out of the shower and drying off, taking an extended look at the camera, and then going out to try on skimpy bathing suits “while two queeny shop clerks prattle on about their customers” (87). Doyle describes Spencer’s encounter with Ingrid Superstar as “sandwiched in between the happy homoerotics of the first half and the disastrous heterodynamics of the second . . . the first of the (failed) heterosexual seduction scenes” (90). Superstar sits topless, having slipped out of her bra and the top half of her dress, on a kitchen counter while Spencer stands looking away and leaning against the wall. In the middle of logorrhea, an excess of speech that does not amount to any kind of conversation, Superstar announces “I must be boring someone” (qtd. in Doyle 91). She does ask him once, “What do I have to do to get your attention? What are you, a faggot or something” (qtd. in Doyle 90). Then, unable to get his attention, she prattles on with recipes, some of them nonsensical, killing time “emptying out her speech until the viewer can hardly stand it because the dynamics of the scene have become so perverse” (91). Superstar asks Spencer if he likes roast beef and then receiving no answer, she continues. “Well, I don’t care if you like roast beef, because I like roast beef” (qtd. in Doyle 91). Both Spencer and Superstar have become superfluous in this scene. She is of no interest to him as a sex object and his presence as an interlocutor is not necessary to any of her dialogue. His indifference to her allows her attention and her speech to drift, to wander wherever it will without worrying about its effect on another. This, according to Doyle, is where “the postmodern readings of Warhol’s films converge with their potential as feminist texts” (93). Boredom here functions against the imperative to be interesting, as well as a refusal of the capitalist imperative to be productive.

Spencer’s lack of attention toward Superstar also decenters her as a sexual object and therefore, like Solanas and other women in Warhol’s films, she is free to be something else entirely. She sits outside of the frame of male desire, a frame which women usually occupy in films. According to Doyle, “the juxtaposition of Superstar’s nudity with her pointless speech traces the ludicrousness of the woman’s position on film—that she hold our interest without becoming narrative’s agent” (95). By not responding to the demand to be interesting, Superstar takes a subject, rather than an object position. She has to “entertain” only herself with her speech. If the audience takes a voyeuristic position to Spencer in the first half of the film, watching him step out of the shower and following him while he shops, they are also mere voyeurs to this scene, to Superstar’s unexcitable speech, as well.

Doyle’s take on Warhol and the other artists in this book seems to be a unique one, one that makes us rethink feminist and queer theory, which in art sometimes seem diametrically opposed and rethinking the very notion of boredom – both in life and in art. Warhol himself once said that they would figure out how much they thought the audience could take and then would go about 10 minutes beyond that. “Leave ‘em wanting less was always our motto.” Doyle seems to not only understand that, but in an odd twist, to make that interesting. 

Work Cited

Doyle, Jennifer. Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Notes

Solanas' play was lost in Warhol’s factory, only to be found decades later among Warhol’s personal belongings. It was never performed in Valerie Solanas’ lifetime.

Having done much work on Solanas, including a recent conference paper, I know that in fact, many people do react negatively to reading Solanas’ work through a feminist lens, as if doing so weakens the movement or is an affront to “real” and “non-crazy” feminists. Solanas is a divisive figure for feminists.

Same Shit, Different Decade: Heterotopia and The Disruption of “Ladylike Speech” in the SCUM Manifesto and Hothead Paisan

I will be presenting this at the SW/TX Popular Culture Association this February. I also presented it at the EGO (English Graduate Organization) at Western University this past November.



ABSTRACT

A great deal has been written about woman as the abject subject, about woman’s ability or inability to speak, to speak truth to power, etc. In this presentation, I am going to discuss Foucault’s idea of heterotopia, as a space outside of social control, offering a place that is both liminal and carnivalesque, not merely as a “safe space” for women’s speech, but for women to be truly transgressive. I will look at Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan as two sites for not only women’s unpopular speech, but moreover, for “unladylike speech,” for cursing and scatological references as well. Finally, I will use Foucault’s heterotopia to talk about the resistance of the two authors and their work by not only patriarchal culture, but also from lesbian culture, and therefore the resistance to culture norms on all sides. My research will draw not upon the “usual” feminist scholars like Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, but upon theories of comics, cursing, and upon the notion of heterotopia and the disruptions of carnival. In this way, it fits with the panel’s theme of both “Sequential Art,” providing a history of women’s comics in particular through the highly influential Hothead Paisan, but also the tie of Hothead to feminist history through her obvious connections to Solanas.


Background

In 1968, a treatise called the SCUM Manifesto was published by a radical young feminist named Valerie Solanas, whose primarily claim to fame at that time was that she had shot the artist Andy Warhol. The shooting was in no way related to the manifesto, but her publisher jumped on her sudden “fame” in order to sell more copies of the manifesto. The manifesto was all about her belief that the male was the inferior of the human species and had projected all of their own inadequacies onto women and then convinced women, through ideology, that all of this was true about the genders.

In 1991, there appeared a comic book named Hothead Paisan. Hothead travelled through the world as an angry dyke, fed up with most men as well as what she called “spritzheads,” those women who were inimically tied to their husbands or boyfriends, who did and considered only what they wanted. She went around killing and maiming men who were considered a threat to her and her fellow women. Her main target: white men in glasses and ties. Diane DiMassa, creator of Hothead Paisan describes her avenger in the first issue like this:

Her brain just totally shit the bed one day and she starts believing everything she sees on t.v. . . . She’s going about her daily queer routine and all this t.v. crap is seeping in and she’s getting psychotic, and like she needs therapy really bad, but she doesn’t know it. I bet her boundaries would be really fuzzy. I bet she’d be a lot of fun to be around. I bet she’d be a real . . . HOTHEAD PAISAN. (1)

Thus, we are brought into the world of Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, an avenging fantasy. Cartoonist/author DiMassa, in a way, gets to play Diana Prince to her own Wonder Dyke alter ego.

With the SCUM Manifesto, on the other hand there is some ambiguity about whether Solanas meant the manifesto as a call to action or simply a critique of patriarchy, DiMassa makes it very clear that this is a fantasy world, for herself and her readers, a place where you can vent your feelings safely and fantasize about those who hurt you, who disempower you, and who stand in the way of full personhood. Compare the opening of Hothead Paisan with the opening paragraph of the SCUM Manifesto:

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there reminds to civic- minded. Responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex. (1)

This is a call for revolution in a revolutionary time. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries had seen a number of similar manifestos, including the Communist Manifesto, the Futurist Manifesto, which was ostensibly an art manifesto but also had fascist leanings and political content, and most frightening to white men in power in the 1960’s, a number of writings by the Black Panthers talking about self-defense. They had heard Malcolm X talking about the “chickens coming home to roost.” To have these kinds of writings by women and blacks at a time of social upheaval, it would have been difficult for many not to take this as a literal call to action.

In “Shooting Solanas: Radical Feminist History and the Technology of Failure,” Dana Heller gives details of Solanas’s past that might read straight out of Hothead Paisan:

“A childhood friend recalled that she frequently played by the boardwalk where, once, she beat a boy severely for harassing a younger girl. On another occasion, she was expelled from Holy Cross Academy for striking a nun. And in high school, where she was often mocked and made fun of by other students, she once hauled off and punched a boy whom she believed had placed a tack on a chair. It turned out to be the wrong boy.” (173)

In fact, Hothead Paisan owes a huge debt to the SCUM Manifesto, for without it, there would likely not even be a Hothead Paisan, nor would there be such a large audience for Hothead. In issue #21 of Hothead, published in 1999, there is an excerpt from the SCUM Manifesto reprinted on the back inside cover along with pictures of middle fingers (22).

Heterotopia

Foucault describes the concept of a heterotopia as a “sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live” (24). They may be linked to the mode of festivals and to the Bakhtinian notion of carnival, a time that allows for inversion of social roles for a short period of time, allowing the “marginalized” a brief taste of power. Heterotopias are always separate from the usual spaces of society. One of the more uncomfortable aspects of heterotopias include not ever having the feeling of being at home. They can disrupt the history of yourself, of your identity; they may shake things up in a way that you might not be prepared for. There is also a sense of transgressing space, going where you are not allowed to go. They are often associated with the liminal state of ritual, the process of becoming, of transformation. There may at the very least, then, a stage of disorientation as you are between states of being. There are any number of women, for example, like authors Dana Heller and Diane DiMassa, who have stated that the SCUM Manifesto changed their lives. To encounter something which makes you question everything around you, however exhilarating, often comes with a state of severe disorientation that can make you “shit the bed,” as DiMassa says.

Comics as Heterotopic

Kristi Lynn Abrecht’s master’s thesis, Illustrating Identity: Feminist Resistance in Webcomics talks about heterotopic space as occurring online. But with the mimeograph “revolution” of the 1960s and the “desktop publishing revolution” in the 1990s, making mass copies of your manifesto, zine, or comic became possible for the masses and it became very feasible to make and distribute your own artwork, which meant that commerce, and hence censorship, need not be a part of getting your art and your message out to the public.

The heterotopia of a comic strip is, in my mind, more complete than that of a manifesto, or a text, which can represent in words and typography, the layout and placement on the page but does not have the added representation. Scott McCloud calls the cartoon “a vacuum, in which our identity and awareness are pulled . . . an empty shell” (36). No matter how realistic or unrealistic, just drawing a simple smiley face in a cartoon box, McCloud tells us, is enough to represent someone. It doesn’t matter how good the representation is, just that there is a more or less human figure that the reader can identify with. This is not to say that text cannot also offer a heterotopic space. In fact, anything that tells a story can involve people in a very distinct way. Thus, either normative or non-normative fiction has a great deal of potential. In the “The Science of Storytelling: How Narrative Cuts Through Distraction Like Nothing Else,” Jonathan Gottschall says that “While the brain watches a story, you’ll find something interesting—the brain doesn’t look like a spectator, it looks more like a participant in the action.

So while text can do a great deal to involve the reader, or spectator, in the action, when you combine the identification of the reader in a text with the identification of representation in a comic, you have something very powerful that can add up to a “space” where the reader becomes a participant, and actor in what is going on, and when you add a place of the unthinkable, a denaturalized space in which things like language and power are not taken for granted, then you have what Foucault describes as a heterotopic space, one where the author and the reader are free to try on other identities and to operate outside of social control.

Hothead Paisan and the SCUM Manifesto

For Valerie Solanas and Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan alike, this heterotopia allows them to speak outside of the normal rules of decorum. To have a space where women can say what they want, including shit, fuck, scum, without having to care about being seen as vulgar, unladylike, particularly in 1960s America, let alone 1990s America, to be outside of social control, was a very liberating thing. Even in the 1990s, Hothead herself is still reacting against feminist and lesbian norms.

“The last thing I need is some lesbian Rambo . . .” comments a character in comic #5 (6). “I find Hothead disgustingly violent! She acts just like the men she’s bashing! We, as women, must set an example and act in a peaceful, NON-VIOLENT WAY, GODAMMIT!” She then adds that she “doesn’t like seeing male genitals and blood and gore!” (7). This allows DiMassa the chance, as cartoonist, to intervene and explain that this comic book is satire. In issue 2, Hothead gets lectured by her blind lesbian friend Roz for eating meat. Roz says “Do you know what they do to cows?” to which Hothead replies, “DON’T. I can’t bear it” (7). We see that hothead cannot deal with anyone’s ideas, men or women’s, about who she is supposed to be and how she is supposed to behave. Hothead cannot cater to this expectation of being a caring nurturing person who would not harm any living being, which was perpetuated both inside of the lesbian movement, as well as within the culture at large. She says to Roz that she should come with a warning:

Caution: Socially bizarre dyke, not quite up to political snuff; eats meat likes sex toys, has never protested in D.C., prone to raving and episodical behavior, including vicious mood-swings! Into ambushing, farting, and hanging upside down! Consider carefully before befriending! (7)

There is, here, not only a disdain for heteronormativity, but homonormativity as well. Hothead longs for a space in which she can be herself, outside of any norms at all. And in fact, like the liminal or ritual space often associated with heterotopias, she often has private spiritual moments as well where she has alternatingly affirming and let us say “curative” moments with elements of the universe, including the moon and the mother goddess, the latter of which is represented by a common lamp.

Possibly the most telling commentary on Valeria Solanas’ work comes from reviews of the film about her, I Shot Andy Warhol. Heller brings up the review in Ms. Magazine in which Jennifer Baumgardner “insist[ed] that Solanas's writings and actions were by no means the work of a committed activist but of an abused crackpot who was never a part of any legitimate feminist community” (qtd in Heller: 171). She writes of Baumgardner’s “handwringing expression of angst over Solanas's newfound celebrity status as misunderstood lesbian avenger du jour. Baumgardner” she explains, did “elaborate back flips to discount the film's closing claim that the SCUM Manifesto has become "a feminist classic.(171)" Rita Kempley, a writer for the Washington Post referred to Solanas as an “obstreperous, male-bashing, pain in the patoot” (qtd in Heller:169).

Rejecting Feminine Language

One of the ways in which both Solanas and Hothead transgress against society in general and against feminism is in their use of language. Both are completely unabashed in their use of scatological and sexual terms, which are completely taboo for women. It is one thing for women to talk about penises and vaginas in clinical ways. But to talk about dicks and pussies and shit in those very words, to refer to women as whores and sluts, is to subject yourself to censorship and censure. The SCUM Manifesto, for example, states:

“To call a man an animal is to flatter him: he’s a . . . .walking dildo. . . . he’ll swim a river of snot, wade in nostril-deep through a pile of vomit, if he thinks there’ll be a friendly pussy awaiting him.” (2)

Even an anarchist bookstore currently selling the SCUM Manifesto in 2015 says “It’s a bit of weird one. I’m not sure why we’re selling it. I find it quite offensive. But maybe you want to buy it as a horrible birthday present for some you don’t like” (http://freedompress.org.uk/store/products/scum-manifesto/). Solanas is not afraid to use the vernacular, vulgar words to get the point across and that, especially in the 1960s, could have great impact or could be incredibly shocking for readers. Or both. For Solanas, words were her weapons and these words were not chosen by accident. They were chosen exactly to shock people into awareness, even revolution. For Solanas, the written word, the space of the text, was her heterotopia.

The culture of the 1990s may have been somewhat different, but for Diane DiMassa to show severed penises, which she did routinely, or to show a “cross-section of the penile brain” as she does in issue #5 (4) and #6 (8) adds another element to women’s censored speech acts. In issue #10, we see Hothead talking Fig. 9 or thinking to herself (the balloons are not 100% clear on this) “Holee shit! It’s like eight feet long. Chicken [her cat] will never believe it!!” (8).

Shortly thereafter, in issue #10, a man says to Hothead, “I know I can make you come” (14) and after a few more choice words, she puts a stick of dynamite in his mouth saying “I’m just gonna shove this foreign object into this hole where it’s not wanted . . “ (14). Later, in issue #17, Hothead herself gets schooled by a group of crudely drawn “liddle girls” (sic), drawn as if they themselves had been drawn by little girls. Hothead says “You’re so cute, but where did you come from?” to which the girls respond “not cute! not a toy! don’t trust no one. Daddy ruined everything men are pus rockets . . . .useless pieces a shit (sic) . . .” (6). Thus, all women, young and old, need a space in which to speak and to be able to speak in language that is not sanctioned or pleasing.

The Poetics of Cursing

In “The Poetics of Cursing,” Brown and Kushner assert that “the scandal of cursing stems perhaps less from its obscenity than from the way that the obscene refutes notions of linguistic and bodily self-possession,” two things that have been traditionally required of women in “polite society,” ie, regulated space. Remember that the space of heterotopia also includes the space of rituals and of carnival. In “The Derelict Playground: A Bakhtinian Analysis of the Graphic Novel Medium,” Rick Hudson says that “The carnival revels and delights in ‘the language of the marketplace’: oaths, curses, and obscenities; their appeal lies in the fact that they are ‘forbidden’ and themselves highlight the grotesque body – referring to defecation of sexual acts – or the willfully profane” (36). This is particularly applicable to women, who are not supposed to have grotesque bodies, let alone talk about them, which makes it all the funnier when in issue #8, Hothead, in “spritzhead disguise,” takes aim (literally) at the “feminine hygiene” aisle of the grocery store, shooting at products like “Yeast Garde,” “Borne Blonde,” “Daisy Razors,” and , “I Live to Scrub” (4). Hothead is eliminating all products that do not allow women to be themselves, but impose patriarchal ideas of how women should look and smell. Think about the continued proliferation of these products and you will see that this is as much an issue now as it was in 1994 or in 1968, when both Diane DiMassa and Valerie Solanas were creating. Regulating the “grotesque body” of women never goes out of style, it seems. The ability of women to talk about such things, particularly in “mixed company” is also regulated. If you don’t believe me, walk into a room full of men and talk about “that not so fresh feeling.”

Conclusion

Much scholarship exists on women’s speech, but it is useful to think of writing, comics, and the self-publishing revolutions of the past 40 years as helping to create not merely “safe space,” but an alternative space, sometimes liminal and ritualistic, and at other times, carnivalesque, a heterotopia where women are not only able to talk about difficult subjects, but also to transgress normative functions of all kinds and to talk about bodies in vernacular, vulgar, and grotesque ways, as both Valerie Solanas and Diane DiMassa have done, each transgressing social values in their own ways.


Works Cited

Abrect, Kristi Lynn. Illustrating Identity: Feminist Resistance in Webcomics. Thesis. San Diego State University, 2012. Web. 3 September 2015.

Brown, Kate E. and Howard I. Kushner. “Eruptive Voices: Coprolalia, Malediction, and the Poetics of Cursing.” New Literary History. 32. (2001): 537–562. Web. 24 Mar. 2009.

Cross Yr. Stitches. Blog. 30 July 2008. Web. 19 September 2015.

DiMassa, Diane. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 1, 1991, 1992, 1993. Print.

-----. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 2, 1991. Print.

-----. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 5, 1992. Print.

-----. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 6, 1992. Print.

-----. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 8, 1992. Print.

-----. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 10, 1993. Print.

-----. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 15, 1994. Print.

-----. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 17, 1995. Print.

-----. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 18, 1995. Print.

-----. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 21, 1998. Print.

Foucault, Michel and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics. 16:1 (Spring 1986): 22-27. JSTOR. Web. 29 Nov. 2005.

Gottschall, Jonathan. “The Science of Storytelling: How Narrative Cuts Through Distraction Like Nothing Else.” Fast Company. 16 October 2013. Web. 9 Sept. 2014.

Heller, Dana. “Shooting Solanas: Radical Feminist History and the Technology of Failure.” Feminist Studies, 27: 1 (Spring, 2001): 167-189. Web. 5 Sept. 2015.

Hudson, Rick. “The Derelict Playground: A Bakhtinian Analysis of the Graphic Novel Medium.” The CEA Critic.72:3. (Spring-Summer 2010): 35-49. Western Online. Web. 3 September 2015.

“Karaj: Feminist Leisure Series.” Tumblr. 8 Apr. Web. 19 September 2015.

LesPress. “Wonderful World of Lesbian Pop Culture: Fe MUH- NIST & Vampires- lesbians in the US Independent Comic: Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist.” Popkultr. Bonn. 2002. Web. 21 Sept. 2105

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Collins. 1994.

Pinterest. Web. Date and original source no longer available. 20 September 2015

“SCUM Manifesto.” Freedom Anarchist Media Publishing and Bookshop. Adam Lawrence Bar, ed. Web. 19 Sept. 2015.

Solanas, Valerie. SCUM Manifesto. London: Phoenix Press. 1983. Print.

Solanas, Valerie. SCUM Manifesto. Pat Earl, Reprint from the Matriarchy Study Group, UK and Phoenix Press. 1983. Print.

The Unknown History of MISANDRY. Blog. 20 July 2011. Web. 20 September 2015.

Review of Mina Loy on Goodreads

The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy by Mina Loy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Mina Loy was an early feminist and an avant-garde poet and writer. This book features Loy's amazing poetry as well as her manifestos on futurism and feminism. My favorite poem is Songs to Johannes. It is basically just an edifying book for any woman working in the avant-garde who has been led to believe that the avant-garde had been a largely male domain until the 1960s. As more and more collections of poetry and biographies emerge on Loy, Baronness Elsa, and a host of other women, our contributions to the avant-garde and to poetry and art in general are being acknowledged and our stories told.



View all my reviews

The Liberation of the Imagination: From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry (Part II)

It has to be said, lest it sound like I am proscribing something equally restrictive and repressive . . . I am not arguing against any type of poetry per se. I do not want to create a monolith of styles, themes, as restrictive as a Marxist-Leninist insistence on social realism. I do oppose the stilted reification that much slam work has fallen into, both stylistically and thematically. There is a certain sound that poetry slam audiences and judges have come to expect, a rhythm to the words that isn’t necessarily organic to the poem and therefore it becomes a contest of style rather than of performance, of doing justice to the words.

Also, it is a time worn cliché now that a slam poem needs to be about either the poet herself (her deep feelings, a break-up that he just went through, a situation that the poet is confronting) or about a social condition (a homeless mother and child, a junkie, someone that the poet knew of and/or read about), or both (about the poet’s identity as a woman, as a Puerto Rican, an Asian, a gay man or a lesbian, a Latina lesbian, etc. etc.). When I competed in poetry slams, it was always what I call my “bitch feminist” poems that won rounds, not my more interesting and complex poems that I had worked on to perform well as well as to craft in the first place.

In 1986, I was at a writer’s conference in Illinois and I heard several poets, including Carlos Cumplian, talking about these poetry contests in which people showed up in costume and performed poetry and I realized about 10 years ago that what he was talking about where the early days of poetry slam. This is a far cry from the sense of “authenticity” and the singular voice of the poet with the poem itself that I have heard poetry slam participants talk about today. In the initial days of the slam, as described by poets working in Chicago in 1986, it was merely about providing a sense of excitement to the audience and performing the poem as best as you could.

At around the same time, I heard other poetry slams in the Quad Cities, about 3 hours from Chicago on the Iowa/Illinois border. There, slam was already becoming entrenched as a style, with the poets reading their poems very fast, almost like a race to poetry. Yet there were no set themes to the poems. It had not yet merged with rap music to develop the style and had not yet merged with identity politics, which had not really become widespread, moving out of the academy, until the early 1990s when activists and artists around the country started to pick up on that aspect.

I do want to honor and acknowledge the word of identity formation, community building, and progressive values that many forms of poetry can participate in. I do want to acknowledge the role that poetry slams have played in building an audience for poetry. From their inception, they sought to bring the excitement of sport to poetry, a spirit of fun and of not taking oneself as a “Poet” so seriously. All of these things are good things. But poetry slam has been around officially for a quarter of a century and is now an institution.

I want to ask, then what? NOW what? Where do we go? After at least a century of searching actively for a revolutionary function of poetry, (why) have we given up? (why) have we abandoned the incomplete experiments of the past? Where and how can poetry function uniquely, in other words, what are the unique functions of poetry, as a revolutionary practice? And how can poetry slam fit into this without providing a known form, which is antithetical to the imagination that it should be releasing?

If the term avant garde, where avant garde falls into elitism, is in its very accepted (if perhaps unofficial, naturalized) definition that the avant garde is ahead of, “anticipates” and in many ways, is therefore, more advanced and “better” than mainstream art, culture, society and art, culture, and society need only to “catch up,” then of course, in the catching up, the mainstream has then co-opted the avant garde, misusing it for commerce or entertainment, for style, failing to recognize the true substance, the original intent (as contemporary Surrealists are and were famously wont to lament).

I prefer instead to think of the avant garde as the “first wave,” the ground work of consciousness, preparing the field. The change of consciousness, overused and virtually emptied of meaning as that idea may have become, is what necessarily must predate genuine social change. It is not up to poets (or even activists, politicians or “leaders”) to proscribe where that change needs to go, but to empower the imaginations around us to imagine something new, to dream our way out of the current world, which works only for a very few people. And this means that the avant-garde will always be the avant-garde, will always be changing. Even as we feel that we “know” surrealism, that is because surrealism has been associated with a style, which can be painted, written, and then put away in a box, rather than being a “technique” for opening the imagination, which it can do over and over again, without repeating itself, for each iteration of the surrealist techniques for getting to the imagination will yield different results, different images, different juxtapositions, especially with literature, which was a field that Andre Breton, the so-called “pope” of Surrealism, contended.

Education is the watchword and it has a very important role to play, but as an instrument of “instruction” and propaganda, it is subject to the same pitfalls that all other forms of discourse and communication fall pretty to. Religious missionaries often (almost always) accompanied or came fast upon the heels of conquerors to ensure that hears and spirits were converted while trying to enforce a new culture and a new rule upon the conquered. Poets must see themselves as missionaries of the imagination, not as propagandists.

To restructure language is to restructure thought, to restructure possibilities. To scramble, if not permanently, which is impractical and will not lead to the world we want, but temporarily, the world as we (think) we know it, the language that binds us to the now, to put new ideas, new juxtapositions into play, new planets into orbit. This is the revolutionary work of the poet.

To then take this and bring it to the people is what poetry slam can do -- to take literature off the page and bring it to those who would not normally pick up a book of poetry, for example, or to bring that alive with performance, to reach a larger audience that is hungry for something real, something surreal, something unknown. This is the lure of science fiction and it could also be the lure to poetry. Not to write science fiction into poetry, but to perform possibilities never before imagined. Some people who know me think that I am especially hard on poetry slam and perhaps I am, but only because I think there are so many more possibilities that poetry slam can bring to the world, rather than giving it simply a different type of institutionalized, reified poetry.

The Liberation of the Imagination: From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry (Part I)

The Liberation of the Imagination: From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry

In the introduction to Feminist Critique of Language, editor Deborah Cameron cites a quote by Shoshona Feldman on language that particularly resonates with me and my work on poetry, language and liberation.

Shoshona Feldman (1975)

“The challenge facing women today is nothing less than to reinvent language . . . to speak not only against but outside the structure . . . to establish a discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of male meaning.” (In Feminist Critique of Language, ed. Deborah Cameron, p. 8)

Cameron elaborates further upon Feldman’s idea, discussing briefly the work of French Feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous and a search for a “feminine writing” and “women’s language.” (By the way, I highly recomment Cixous. I have not delved much into Irigaray, but to me her work seems very much grounded in some rather complicated Freudian and psychoanalytic theory. Cixous is lively and quite readable.) Cameron also raises the other side of the debate, citing Elaine Showalter’s position that the issue for women is not so much a male-based “prisonhouse of language” (props to Jameson) but the very fact of access and entitlement for women to speak. The issue is not the inadequacy of language, or as Judith Butler would point to, the way in which language performs, enacts, speaks into being our condition (from the moment the declaration is made, “It’s a girl” Butler tells us, a whole universe of implications is set in motion.). Others reject an essentialist strain that says that women need different language than men to express their lives, their realities, their psyches, their thoughts, etc.

To me the core issue here is that all marginalized, disempowered people, need access to a language of imagination. Not a replacement language per se, but a paralanguage, a language that works, functions on a completely different level than the ordinary, the quotidian, the banal, the mundane, and (consequently) the hegemonic uses of language. The language as it is now practiced, even if it is not inherently structured to protect and maintain power, it has certainly been subverted to that use, propagated in contemporary life, by the constant onslaught of mainstream media—advertising, news, the normative values promoted by almost all television programming and many movies (look at the glorification of the police not only through shows like Cops, but through shows like CSI that glamorize police work, or the nuclear-family centered values of most sitcoms, etc.). In insidious ways we are constantly being told what to believe, what to buy, how to act, how to be moral, how to be patriotic, how to look a certain way, how to fit in and belong in American society, etc. etc. How is one to rethink the world, remake the world, the government, the neighborhood, the culture, the communities we come from and live in, our own very daily existence, among the onslaught of images that perpetuate someone else’s vision and serve up to us only the world as we already (think) we know it?

Resistance is possible through the remaking of language, of finding new, creative, imaginative linguistic practices to sustain us, to help us move toward our visions, to help us have visions we never even thought possible. I am talking here about a language that speaks outside of the dominant discourse, whether racialized, patriarchal, class-based, etc., an un-discourses or non-discourse, a paradiscourse, that brings with it the chance to step outside, run alongside, that does not attempt to use the tools of power that already exist, but to forge new tools that could create new structures, new edifices not previously imagined. The techne, the tool, in many ways proscribes what can be built. We know that with new technology new ways of thinking emerge. So why would we not want new mental and imaginative linguistic tools of our own? As Sol Lewitt says, rational thoughts repeat rational thoughts. The way we think perpetuates itself, we continue to think only in the ways we’ve always thought. I’m not looking then for a feminine language per se, except insofar as it might offer a resistive language, a paralanguage that we can frolic in and search for something unknown, a Dada language a non-sense that leads to sense a zaum a de-formed formalism that will birth new forms.

(To be continued . . . .)

The Liberation of the Imagination: From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry

In the introduction to Feminist Critique of Language, editor Deborah Cameron cites a quote by Shoshona Feldman on language that particularly resonates with me and my work on poetry, language and liberation.

Shoshona Feldman (1975)

“The challenge facing women today is nothing less than to reinvent language . . . to speak not only against but outside the structure . . . to establish a discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of male meaning.” (In Feminist Critique of Language, ed. Deborah Cameron, p. 8)

Cameron elaborates further upon Feldman’s idea, discussing briefly the work of French Feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous and a search for a “feminine writing” and “women’s language.” (By the way, I highly recomment Cixous. I have not delved much into Irigaray, but to me her work seems very much grounded in some rather complicated Freudian and psychoanalytic theory. Cixous is lively and quite readable.) Cameron also raises the other side of the debate, citing Elaine Showalter’s position that the issue for women is not so much a male-based “prisonhouse of language” (props to Jameson) but the very fact of access and entitlement for women to speak. The issue is not the inadequacy of language, or as Judith Butler would point to, the way in which language performs, enacts, speaks into being our condition (from the moment the declaration is made “It’s a girl” Butler tells us, a whole universe of implications is set in motion.). Others reject an essentialist strain that says that women need different language than men to express their lives, their realities, their psyches, their thoughts, etc.

To me the core issue here is that all marginalized, disempowered people, need access to a language of imagination. Not a replacement language per se, but a paralanguage, a language that works, functions on a completely different level than the ordinary, the quotidian, the banal, the mundane, and (consequently) the hegemonic uses of language. The language as it is now practiced, even if it is not inherently structured to protect and maintain power, it has certainly been subverted to that use, propagated in contemporary life, by the constant onslaught of mainstream media—advertising, news, the normative values promoted by almost all television programming and many movies (look at the glorification of the police not only through shows like Cops, but through shows like CSI that glamorize police work, or the nuclear-family centered values of most sitcoms, etc.). In insidious ways we are constantly being told what to believe, what to buy, how to act, how to be moral, how to be patriotic, how to look a certain way, how to fit in and belong in American society, etc. etc. How is one to rethink the world, remake the world, the government, the neighborhood, the culture, the communities we come from and live in, our own very daily existence, among the onslaught of images that perpetuate someone else’s vision and serve up to us only the world as we already (think) we know it?

Resistance is possible through the remaking of language, of finding new, creative, imaginative linguistic practices to sustain us, to help us move toward our visions, to help us have visions we never even thought possible. I am talking here about a language that speaks outside of the dominant discourse, whether racialized, patriarchal, class-based, etc., an un-discourses or non-discourse, a paradiscourse, that brings with it the chance to step outside, run alongside, that does not attempt to use the tools of power that already exist, but to forge new tools that could create new structures, new edifices not previously imagined. The techne, the tool, in many ways proscribes what can be built. We know that with new technology new ways of thinking emerge. So why would we not want new mental and imaginative linguistic tools of our own? As Sol Lewitt says, rational thoughts repeat rational thoughts. The way we think perpetuates itself, we continue to think only in the ways we’ve always thought. I’m not looking then for a feminine language per se, except insofar as it might offer a resistive language, a paralanguage that we can frolic in and search for something unknown, a Dada language a non-sense that leads to sense a zaum a de-formed formalism that will birth new forms.

*************

It has to be said, lest it sound like I am proscribing something equally restrictive and repressive . . . I am not arguing against any type of poetry per se. I do not want to create a monolith of styles, themes, as restrictive as a Marxist insistence on social realism. I do oppose the stilted reification that much slam work has fallen into. But I also do honor and acknowledge the word of identity formation, community building, and progressive values that many forms of poetry can participate in. But I want to ask, then what? NOW what? Where do we go? After at least a century of searching actively for a revolutionary function of poetry, (why) have we given up? (why) have we abandoned the incomplete experiments of the past? Where and how can poetry function uniquely, in other words, what are the unique functions of poetry, as a revolutionary practice?

In the term avant garde, where avant garde falls into elitism, is in its very accepted (if perhaps unofficial, naturalized) definition that the avant garde is ahead of, “anticipates” and in many ways, is therefore, more advanced and “better” than mainstream art, culture, society. And art, culture, and society need only to “catch up” Then of course, in the catching up, the mainstream has then co-opted the avant garde, misusing for commerce or entertainment, for style, failing to recognize the true substance, the original intent (as contemporary Surrealists are famously wont to lament).

I prefer instead to think of the avant garde as the “first wave,” the ground work of consciousness, preparing the field. The change of consciousness, overused and virtually emptied of meaning as that idea may have become, is what necessarily must predate genuine social change. It is not up to poets (or even activists, politicians or “leaders”) to proscribe where that change needs to go, but to empower the imaginations around us to imagine something new, to dream our way out of the current world, which works only for a very few people.

Education is the watchword and it has a very important role to play, but as an instrument of “instruction” and propaganda, it is subject to the same pitfalls that all other forms of discourse and communication fall pretty to. Religious missionaries often (almost always) accompanied or came fast upon the heels of conquerors to ensure that hears and spirits were converted while trying to enforce a new culture and a new rule upon the conquered. Poets must see themselves as missionaries of the imagination, not as propagandists.

To restructure language is to restructure thought, to restructure possibilities. To scramble, if not permanently, which is impractical and will not lead to the world we want, but temporarily, the world as we (think) we know it, the language that binds us to the now, to put new ideas, new juxtapositions into play, new planets into orbit. This is the revolutionary work of the poet.