The Explicit Body in Performance

Front Cover
Routledge, Jun 17, 2013 - Art - 256 pages

The Explicit Body in Performance interrogates the avant-garde precedents and theoretical terrain that combined to produce feminist performance art. Among the many artists discussed are:
* Carolle Schneemann
* Annie Sprinkle
* Karen Finley
* Robbie McCauley
* Ana Mendieta
* Ann Magnuson
* Sandra Bernhard
* Spiderwoman
Rebecca Schneider tackles topics ranging across the 'post-porn modernist movement', New Right censorship, commodity fetishism, perspectival vision, and primitivism. Employing diverse critical theories from Benjamin to Lacan to postcolonial and queer theory, Schneider analyses artistic and pop cultural depictions of the explicit body in late commodity capitalism.
The Explicit Body in Performance is complemented by extensive photographic illustrations and artistic productions of postmodern feminist practitioners. The book is a fascinating exploration of how these artists have wrestled with the representational structures of desire.

 

Contents

Introduction
1
Twisting the map
7
Logic of the twister eye of the storm
43
Permission to see
66
The secrets eye
88
After us the savage goddess
126
primitivism and the performative
141
Literal primitives
149
returning from the dead
176
Notes
185
Works cited
213
Index
225
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2013)

Rebecca Schneider lectures at Yale University is Visiting Assistant Professor of Drama at Dartmouth College. She is a contributing editor to The Drama Review and has published essays in a range of performance anthologies.

Bibliographic information