FAE ROSS
DOI 10.20933/100001379
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Abstract
Through an intersectional feminist and queer lens, and in correlation to Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1980), this dissertation will examine the artwork of Marianna Simnett, Kira O’Reilly, Wynnie Mynerva, Janine Antoni and Anna Ting Möller. Each artist creates from their fluids or through the motion of expulsion. This written work aims to address casting off from the body as a disobedient act in a violent, masculinised landscape – the symptoms of which stem from patriarchal mythologies. In these mythologies, a monstrous, feminised wetness is feared and cauterised. Through the entropy engendered by the women and queer artists, they are found to carve out a new mythos for their bodies. The possibility of rupture – of a slit, a bite, a drip –allows them self-sovereignty.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my dissertation advisor Dr Helen Gorrill for her guidance throughout my studies, for both her care and her knowledge base, which galvanised my research and writing. I am also grateful to all the other lecturers and supervisors who have nurtured my ideas along the way.
I owe a big thank you to my whole family. However, I especially must thank my mum for being of continual emotional support to me – for always being a voice of kindness and reason and love. Even though, in her words, she only feeds birds, she does a whole lot more than that. Her partner, Robin, has also been a grounding influence for me throughout the writing of this dissertation – I thank him for that. Also, a thank you to my cat-loving sister for her long-distance support.
List of Figures
Positionality Statement
Growing up in the Northwest Highlands of Scotland, I was surrounded by the beauty and gore of farmland. In this sense, I have always been exposed to the abjections of animal bodies, of wool matted with mud and embryonic jus, of bones collected on the beach, and bleached stark white. My mother was a nurse, so I grew up hearing about the shifty nature of human bodies too. When I was in my early adolescence, I developed anorexia nervosa. I was hospitalised, and tube fed against my will. I believe this started my fascination with the internal which informs my practice today.
My interest in issues of gender came later, formed from the experiences of sexual violence that both I and many of my women and queer friends had experienced. Paralysed from what I felt was a longstanding lack of bodily agency, I began to create mythologies where I could give my inner systems more autonomy. These mythologies metamorphosed into drawing, painting, writing, moving image, and performance – where my body could feed, drip, and expel what it needed to. The boundary between inner and outer, and the gendered dynamics that accompany this, has been a prevalent theme in my life. In wilful transgressions and queerings of this borderland, I have found release and a sense of care that I could not have anticipated. My research is driven largely by examining other artists that work in a similar way and what their work means within the context of a patriarchal society.
I now identify as a queer, disabled femme-person living with c-ptsd, anxiety and autism. Also, as a witch, a bone-collector, a kombucha-surgeon, an artist, and a survivor.
Introduction
From grease-slick, half-eaten lard to rejected ribs to septic milk ducts, women and queer abject artists cast off from their bodies, adopting the form of creator through their shed fluids and expelled matter Christianity and its ancestor Greek mythology are of anathematic persuasion when it comes to women’s bodies and their frequent leakiness. Acknowledging that these myths have drip-fed into contemporary patriarchal culture may inform our understanding of symptoms of such hegemonic systems. Each chapter of this written work will probe these symptoms.
The first chapter, Milk, will examine Marianna Simnett’s (b.1986) short film The Udder (2014) staged within an infected mammary gland, exploring fleshly microcosms for a vaster misogynistic society. This will be dissected through the lens of Elizabeth Grosz’ (b.1952) book Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (1994) which discusses theories of a feminine body through its channels and flows.
The second, Blood, will explore the work of performance artist Kira O’Reilly, (b.1967) focusing on Bad Humours/Affected (1998) in which leeches suck at her body while the audience sups red wine. The texts of St Augustine of Hippo (b.345AD) declaring women’s bodies as ‘putrid’ (Gorrill, n.d) will serve as catalyst here, along with the writings of the Ancient Greek surgeon Galen (b.129AD). The medical and the mythical manifestation of fluids will also be divined at this stage with reference to receptacles and the story of Pandora.
The third, Discharge, will address Wynnie Mynerva’s (b.1992) surgically excised rib from their body of work The Original Riot (2023). The pertinence of agency in expulsion will be thus contrasted with pervasive rape culture.
The fourth, Saliva, will orbit Janine Antoni’s (b.1964) performance Gnaw (1992) in which she devours a human-sized block of fat. This artwork will be posited beside anorexia and concepts of auto-cannibalism.
The final chapter, Skin, will explore Anna Ting Möller’s (b.1991) performance In Progress (2024) in which she slithers into a cocoon of stitched kombucha skins and washes the yeasty tissue. This will be examined in correlation to the writing of Donna Haraway (b.1944), thus probing digital membranes and their ramifications for the endemic sexual violence of our society.
These symptoms are that of a harsh, masculinised landscape. Such a landscape necessitates the making of abject art. If agency in what enters a body is compromised, it follows that agency is moulded and poured from the space remaining. This written work will be underpinned in its entirety by the work of philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (b.1941). Her seminal text Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980) conjures a bodily topography, invoking the boundaries of self and other, inside and outside (Kristeva, p.114). The abject confounds these borders, it is that which strays from its proper place (Grosz, 1994, p.192). Castaway fluids and cells pose manifestations of the abject in its most literal sense. The abject in its most complete form appears as the corpse – the ultimate othering – however it also encompasses the body in states of metamorphosis, food-loathing and illusions of flesh or speech (Kristeva, 1980, pp.1-4). The abject is considered to lean towards the feminine (Legg, 2022, p.28). Women, and those assigned female at birth, are ‘othered’ from infancy – cast as slippery, lesser entities – and face the brutality of patriarchal symptoms due to this othering. Thus, the wilful expulsion and abjection of women and queer artists’ bodies will be dissected and the meaning divined.
We open with a septic milk duct, a liminal space between inner and outer. Marianna Simnett’s (b.1986) short film The Udder (2014), set inside an infected cow udder, centres the swollen teat as a site of gendered conflict (Eastham, 2015). Simnett conjures a shifty borderland as pertinent to Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1980), where expulsion of bodily fluids and matter elicit feelings of both odium and infatuation. Except, in this matter, the body (albeit of the bovine variety) is not leaching milk as the dairy farm bids (Harrison, 2018). There is a blockage – an unerupted milk canal. Both cows and women can suffer from mastitis and Simnett immediately parallels their reproductive systems (Garletti, 2022). In the film, boy cells, played by children, hunt a rogue girl cell, threatening her with infection and plotting her murder; the subject of purity at play – a motif in Simnett’s work (Fact, 2024). Meanwhile, the girl is forbidden to venture outside due to her beauty, and the milk curdles and poisons, unlet. It may be pertinent to note that bodily fluids, often viewed as vile, only become vile when they remain stagnant in the body (NHS, 2023). After all, milk is a fluid of nourishment (Salvo, 2021, p.58), it is arguably the treatment of it that taints it. The pasteurisation that milk undergoes to remove microorganisms is analogous to the purification rituals endured by women (Fact, 2024). Women are often raised to dress modestly, to keep legs closed, to be virginal (Klement, 2022) – all to maintain a pristine system. The rogue girl cell in The Udder is allegorical for this (Garletti, 2022). After lamenting the functioning of the mammary system through a musical number, the girl repeatedly smears red lipstick off her face as an eroticised double of her reapplies it – a reference to purity culture. She takes off her stain, only for it to be re-administered, and for her to be blamed for it. In The Udder, Simnett unspools the tale of St Æbbe (Lenkiewicz, 2019). In the legend, Æbbe mutilates her face to maintain her bodily agency when threatened with rape from Viking invaders and bids her nuns sever their noses too (Blud, 2014). They chose bodily sovereignty over corporeal wholeness – a theme that
will be returned to throughout this text – even though their actions were reinforced by purity culture’s expectations. This culture condemned women for their rapes (St Augustine, 2009, p.38) and this filters down into contemporary society (Taylor, 2020). Simnett parallels this threat of sexual violence and these operations of purity with that of inter-body pathogens (Garletti, 2022). The girl cell alludes to cutting off her nose, as Æbbe did, at the end of the film. She tries desperately to ward off infection and rape (from her corrupting twin, the contagion to her chastity, and from the more ambiguous, sinister threat of her murderous brothers). Historically, women have been cast as the bearers of bodily contagion (Grosz, 1994, p 197) as will be explored in chapter two, and Simnett toys with this trope (Harrison, 2018). Through conjuring a pathogenic hunt, in a musing on the mythical and medical, Simnett attributes this agent of contagion as pervasive to our society. However, she is only cast as menace by the masculinised forces at play internally and externally. This glandular struggle constitutes a miniature, allegorical summation of our misogynistic landscape – of purity culture and of rape culture. Through opening and closing this swollen sphincter, Simnett provokes the forces of domination and control at play in our society – a small victory for the macrocosmic girl.
Feminist philosopher and writer Elizabeth Grosz (b.1952) judges the body as a site of contestation – a site that bears the mark of sexual and political conflict (Grosz, 1994, p.19).
Grosz comments in her book Volatile Bodies (1994) on the male/female and mind/body dichotomy, that represents a traditional philosophical pillar. The body is historically entangled with the female – deemed a feeling, leaching receptacle prone to illness and hysteria, unlike the masculinised mind or soul which has been judged to be on a higher plane (Mehuron, 1996).
Grosz understands that the devalued body and the devaluing of women are intricately linked (Mehuron, 1996). She thus seeks to elevate the status of the body. Marianna Simnett animates Grosz’ theory in The Udder as she crafts narratives from the body’s micro-struggles (Harrison, 2018). Adopting Grosz’ microcosmic viewpoint of the body and subverting the woman as receptacle narrative, the udder in Simnett’s film could also be deemed a receptacle of sorts as it is explicitly linked with the feminine and with contagion. However, not a vessel passive or maternal, but one withholding – a burgeoning, inflammatory container, threatening a sense of propriety in its putrescence. After all, bodies can be receptacles of dreadful magic and defiance (Federici, 2023, p.37). Grosz argues for the meaningfulness of the body and hence the meaningfulness of women/feminine bodies (Colebrook, 2000). By that logic, she stresses that their fluids are meaningful. Thus, if we judge this bovine experience as a feminised one (which it inherently is due to the masculinised governing of its seepages) (Guenther, 2024), Simnett subverts the disvalued feminine and the disvalued body by venturing inside it and queering its systems (Fact, 2024). Consequently, she allots agency to this internal landscape – its own voice if you will (Harrison, 2018). All the while, the artist mirrors the patriarchal forces that make bids for control of inner and outer systems (Lenkiewicz, 2019). The Udder is microcosmic for current society in which women’s bodies are regulated in various ways. Grosz directly references the microcosmic nature of the body to society, instilling that,
Bodies are fictionalised so that they can be seen as living narratives, narratives not always or even usually transparent to themselves. Bodies become emblems, heralds, badges, theatres, tableaux, of social laws and rights, illustrations and exemplifications of law, informing and rendering pliable flesh into determinate bodies. (1994, p.118)
Grosz understands that the body is imprinted with the power structures and social beliefs that exist within society. Thus, the corruption experienced within the infected, sexualised teat in The Udder is an apt re-production and re-staging of sexist culture. In an era where women are followed home, abused, restricted, encouraged to starve and murdered, the body assumes the same outlook from a cellular standpoint (Harradine, 2000) Simnett’s film suggests an abject landscape, with a gland of dark fluid that swells underneath, running parallel with our own. This metaphysical fluid pocket remains closed, the cask unopened, unless in certain contexts – such as in contemporary art.
Blood
Blood, particularly menstrual blood, has been deemed a pollutant (Newton, 2016); these clots of crimson fluid dubbed both besmirching substance and curative elixir. Religious thinking and texts have been the driving force behind this liquid’s anathematic perception (Rosenberg, 2024). Saint Augustine of Hippo (b.354 AD), in his texts Confessions (397-400 AD) and The City of God (413-426 AD), was a founding influential figure in the development of Christianity. He viewed sex as sinful and corrupting, braiding his writings with metaphors of disease in Confessions, yet something he could not forego (Augustine, 2003). Women were perceived as vile temptresses; he judged their bodies, and thus their fluids and expulsions, as ‘putrid’ (Gorrill, 2024, n.p.). Biblical references to women’s discharges resound with the same message – in Leviticus for example (Rosenberg, 2014) – that women are dirty. Religious views have permeated into culture over centuries, with women sent to bleed in separate huts in some countries (Salvo, 2021, p.69), and with high school girls hiding their period products on the way to the toilets (Lee, 2009). Blood, as a signifier of the menstrual (Oliver, 2019, p.1713), is perhaps deemed the most putrid of the fluids, carrying a stigma of danger and defilement. This fear of women’s wetness is also contained in Greek mythology, predating Christianity’s distaste of women’s bodies. Drawing a comparison between Pandora (arguably the Eve of Greek myth) and Galatea, Pandora’s body is described as ‘humid’ and ‘oozing’ (Popescu, 2021, p.94). As she is sculpted from clay, her flesh remains porous, prone to leaking (Haynes, 2020, p.12). It may be pertinent to note that in some versions of the myth, Pandora does not open the jar – she is the jar. In other scholars’ views, the opening of the jar represents Pandora’s sexual transgressions (Popescu, 2021, p.94). This deviates from the widely known version in which Pandora, moulded by the gods to punish mankind for Prometheus’ theft of fire, opens a box brimming with all the world’s evil (Haynes, 2020). However, it is apparent that sexual transgressions and evil are comparable in ancient religious
texts. Galatea, on the other hand, sculpted by Pygmalion, is formed from ivory and, in some versions in wax (James, 2011, p.61), but not before she is filled with Pygmalion’s semen and forever sealed up (Popescu, 2021, p.98). She is deemed ‘perfect’ partially because she contains solid, masculine fluids (Grosz, 1994, pp.199-200) and cannot rupture or spill. Pygmalion’s sculpture can be likened to notions of an idealised partner (James, 2011, p.30) – a static being that does not speak or bruise, and which does not swerve an unwanted embrace. These notions of dangerous feminised fluids and innate passivity have engendered blood reprisals, in the form of contemporary art (Hartnell, 2023).
Contemporary performance artist Kira O’Reilly (b.1967) is well-known for her blood-letting performances. In Bad Humours/Affected (1998) leeches suckle from her flesh, a common treatment for female hysteria (Linsley, 2015). Sometimes leeches were placed directly onto the vulval area or inserted into the cervix during these torturous medieval procedures (Ussher, 2011). Historically blood has been considered the bodily humour most linked with corrupt behaviour –especially with lust (Bumke, 2015) – thus bloodletting was an attempt to control women rather than curing them of an affliction. O’Reilly, in her work, relived this phallocentric treatment of leeching to subvert it (Heddon and Klein, 2012, p.190). She was not romanticising hysteria and its accompanying treatments/punishments but allowing it to be witnessed through the lens of contemporary performance art. Through this looking glass, these masculine forms of medical practice manifested as less of an antidote and more as misogynistic abuse (Zerihan, 2010). Further, O’Reilly endeavoured to negate the effect of polemics on women’s fluids, and whole bodies, as contagion (O’Brien, 2014). Grosz explains that blood is viewed not only as a signifier of the menstrual, as described by Kristeva, but of the excremental, due to the concept of uncontrollable flow – blood being unable to be held in like bowel movements during toilettraining in infancy. She states that,
The representation of female sexuality as an uncontainable flow, as seepage associated with what is unclean, coupled with the idea of female sexuality as a vessel, a container, a home empty or lacking in itself but fillable from the outside, has enabled men to associate women with infection, with disease, with the idea of festering putrefaction, no longer contained simply in the female genitals but at any or all points of the female body. (Grosz, 1994, p.206)
Women’s bodies have been judged as pathogenic through comparisons to vessels and the excremental. This has been used as a patriarchal tool for suppression of women throughout the ages. O’Reilly acknowledges this, her performance becoming emblematic of this struggle. As she outpours, she does not do so passively. She does so with this plethora of gendered myth behind her, to experience catharsis and reinscribe these liquid labours within her body (Zerihan, 2010).
The audience of Bad Humours/Affected (1998) supped at red wine while O’Reilly’s blood was extracted by leeches (Zerihan, 2010). Through the lens of Roland Barthes’ (1915-1980) Death of the Author (1967), an essay that states that once an artwork leaves the studio its meaning is interpreted and formed by the viewer, the artist’s original intentions sacrificed, it could be argued that O’Reilly’s whole body took on the quality of the vulva/cervix affixed with leeches as previously described – especially as the blood flow was suggestive of menstrual uncontained-ness (Grosz, 1994, p.206). The female reproductive system, or O’Reilly’s body, thus adopts a porous aspect, flowing out and into the audience in the channel of red wine in an act of queer vampirism. The audience suckled at O’Reilly, as is the nature of vampirism (Creed, 1993, p.69), to adhere to her abject plane. The idea of a porous vessel could be compared to the myth of Pandora, considered a calamity to men (Haynes, 2020, p.13), who opened a cask of ambiguous evil – for all anyone knows, it may have been filled with feminine fluids (considering how feared these fluids were and remain) (Ross, 2024). Perhaps more fittingly however, O’Reilly’s performance could be likened to the tale of the vestal virgin, Tuccia, who was made to carry a sieve of water from a river without spilling it to attest to her chastity (Augustine, 2009, p.796).
Porosity is thus linked to impurity in this legend. The female reproductive system was also considered akin to a spurting, fermenting waterskin in some ancient communities (Salvo, 2021, p.64) and as ‘wandering’ in archaic Greek medical texts, meaning it could migrate around the body causing disruption (Faraone, 2011). The famous Greek surgeon Galen (b.129AD), founder of the theory of the four humours, also held views of women being infectious, asserting that women were cold, leaky, and existing in mole-like mutilation (Galen, 1968, pp.629-631). It is thus clear how both mythological and medical standpoints regarded women as dangerously prone to seeping some kind of monstrous wetness. O’Reilly’s performance and the audience’s imbibing of the red wine, metonymic for her haemorrhage, could also be read as a Christian ceremony. Blood can be considered a fluid of empowerment in some strains of contemporary art (Hartnell, 2023) and if people are drinking of O’Reilly, that elevates her to divine status. It is in the same vein as
drinking the blood of Christ in Holy Communion. O’Reilly has also been known to make biblical allegories of her body, adopting the pose of a crucified Christ in the arms of Mary in another blood-based performance Untitled Action (2005) (Linsley, 2015). Thus, O’Reilly’s references to the phallocentric practice of leeching take on new meaning. She is not a hysteric. She is not powerless. She becomes Christ-like in people drinking the essence of her – sacrificial perhaps, not powerless. To coagulate this, Jesus’ body has been described as fluid and porous by scholars and thus correlated to the longstanding allegations of women as spongy, soft, and contagious; his flow of power is compared with the flow of the bleeding woman he heals (Moss, 2010). This insists that bleeding can be a powerful, magical device for reclaiming feminine or queer bodies, even through the lens of Christianity, and should not be perpetually viewed in the crude role it was originally cast.
The supposed magical nature of blood dates back thousands of years, strongly agitated with witchcraft, with alleged witches alchemising ingredients such as goose grease and reeds and a girl’s first menstruation into potions (Salvo, 2020, p.58). Witches are entwined with the menstrual in contemporary and historical contexts. The witch is considered abject not only due to her affinity with bodily fluids and strange beasts, but as consequence to her boundarycrossing, natural sorcerous inclinations and propensity for destruction (Creed, 1993, p.76). It is also pertinent that witches and leeches share a dyadic history. In European countries, witches were considered blood-sucking and were frequently compared to parasitic worms or sangsue (Wells, 1999). O’Reilly, by associating herself with leeches, ritual, and female disobedience, could be aligning herself with the ways of the witch. Beliefs of the health benefits of sucking blood were also circulating in the 16th century (Wells, 1999). Notions surrounding the healing properties of blood manifested in other ways. From the 15th century to the 20th century, witch ‘scratching’ became prevalent. Witch-scratchers collected women’s/witches’ blood through
brutal means – most commonly with sharp pins (Waters, 2014). Witches’ blood was believed to be a curative and a remedy for curses. There are records of a case of a woman being scratched with a darning needle in the mid 1800s by a man whose daughters were suffering from a strange illness (Davies and Matteoni, 2017). In many cases, witch-scratchings were performed in micropenetrations, not administered to fatally wound. However, others proved lethal (Waters, 2014). Witch-scratchers desired to possess witches’ blood and its perceived potent magical properties.
This allows O’Reilly’s Bad Humours/Affected (1998) to be plunged into another mythological context. Addressing her blood not as a contaminant or a cause of hysteria, not even as a sacrament, but as a remedial or restorative substance, the performance could be interpreted as a salve on the history of vile acts committed by men against women under the guise of witchhunting. Considering this information, blood in O’Reilly’s work is less of a noxious sludge and more of a panacea, coming full circle, and removing from it the stigma of corruption and disease, and imbuing it with healing characteristics.
Discharge
Viewed within the contemporary context of rape culture, the action of autonomous discharge as seen in contemporary art can present a defiant act. It is worth examining sexual assault statistics in the UK to attest to the scale of the epidemic. Indeed, one in four women have been sexually assaulted and 798,000 women are raped or sexually assaulted annually (Rape Crisis, 2022). In the context of this sexual violence epidemic, where other bodies are so often inserted into women’s bodies non-consensually, it provokes a palpable need to find some outlet for autonomy after this bodily terrorism. The body holds onto that which it has experienced (Van der Kolk, 2014) and thus it must, at some point, expel it, or it in turn suffers and goes septic. The act of rape and the motion of discharge, or expulsion, warrants further investigation. Wynnie Mynerva (b.1992) is a contemporary painter and performance artist working in the realm of trauma, pleasure, biblical mythologies and mythologies of expulsion. They surgically excised their rib for their show The Original Riot (2023), in doing so recasting themself as the great creator. They re-scripted the Adam, Eve and Lilith narrative, Eve and Lilith becoming lovers, their coiled bodies snaking through the flux of canvas and the golden plinth of the rib (Benzine, 2023). Eve offered this rib to Lilith in a loving gesture, crystallising their tenderness for one another. This is a sharp diversion from the original text in which Eve is formed from Adam’s rib (Almond, 1999, pp.143-144). The rib is also colloquially embedded in Mynerva’s Peruvian language as a nickname for a man’s spouse. In twisting this narrative of expulsion, Mynerva makes themself powerful; from a weak creature forged of a spare rib, to a loving and almighty god (Benzine, 2023). Clearly, it is an abject surgical act, Mynerva excising themself from gendered power dynamics. As Kristeva states in Powers of Horror, ‘The body must bear no trace of
its debt to nature: it must be clean and proper in order to be fully symbolic’ (1980, p.102).
Considering the opening of the flesh, the healthy rib being broken and manoeuvred outside of the body, Mynerva epitomises the improper body. They bear the mark of their debt to nature, while also insinuating that the debt is to themselves in referencing biblical creation myth and casting themself as rib-extracting god. The show counters the original myths of the subservience of feminised bodies in Christianity (New Museum, 2024). Lilith who, when expected to lie under Adam for intercourse would not and was thus expelled from the Garden of Eden (Dalton, 2023, p.19), is instead here painted as a queer heroine at the conception of the world – a heroine who flushes with disobedience. Mynerva’s act of rib expulsion could be construed as a form of protest (Rodríguez-Ulloa, 2024). In Elizabeth Grosz’ Volatile Bodies (1994) she details cases of choosing protest over corporeal wholeness, with reference to wasps and dragonflies chewing off their own limbs when trapped. She likens this behaviour to a string of self-mutilations and amputations in prisons that acted as a mode of severe resistance (Grosz, 1994, pp.32-33). This is comparable to Mynerva’s expulsion of their rib. Mynerva, having undergone sexual violence, and existing within the vortex of that trauma, uses their practice to channel it; mutilation becomes a mode of survival (Rodríguez-Ulloa, 2024). This suggests they extracted their rib not solely as a re-inscription of biblical events but to protest the methods of hegemonic systems in which women’s bodies and queer bodies are still deemed inferior and invadable.
Drawing from feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir’s (b.1908) book The Second Sex (1949), which asserts that objects or other bodies inserted non-consensually into feminine bodies can have connotations of a surgical procedure (1953, p.404), Mynerva can be seen conducting the opposite of this motion; it is invasiveness with integrity. While this text does agree with some of de Beauvoir’s writings – for instance that someone is not necessarily born a woman but becomes one by inscription (1953, p.333) – she sees this gendered inscription as almost solely male-
conducted. This text strives to see queer and feminine bodies as inscribed also by themselves, not entirely by patriarchy, and with a more autonomous and queer view on their various fluids and motions. It is also worth noting, while sex is assigned at birth, gender (the way a person perceives themself or identifies and therefore is) and the inscription of it should belong solely to that person.
Mynerva has been known to toy with fantasies of revenge and power role reversals, with just a dash of sadism, as in their show Sweet Castrator (2021). They drew from the well of Artemisia
Gentileschi’s work (b.1593), contemporising the story of Gentileschi’s rape and subsequent paintings through their own fluid tableaux (Shane, 2021). In Sweet Castrator, Mynerva depicted themself in frescoes slaying and castrating their rapist. They bathed in the metaphorical blood of the slain rapist in a live performance during the opening. In this wet, red goo, they sat placid and tranquil – the sublime stillness of their face rebounding from the gory crimson broth in which they liquified – an abject gesture indeed (Rodríguez-Ulloa, 2021). Returning to biblical lore and this time addressing its stance on rape survivors, St Augustine insinuated in his text The City of God (426AD) that women are guilty of taking pleasure in their own rapes and that rape serves as a pre-ordained lesson in humility (Miles, 2012). Augustine is in this sense connoting the abject as, on the surface, he calls rape a violation, stating that the perpetrator should carry the sin, but through his convoluted text he essentially argues otherwise. He implies that if the body becomes aroused throughout rape, and if the mind is implicated by the body, the victim does take on sin; he thus befuddles the boundary between consent and non-consent under the guise of sympathy (Barry, 2020). In Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, she explains the abject as a deterioration of rules and borders and this can be conceived through illusions of speech, where words misalign with their meaning (1980, p.4). This exposes Augustine as an abject figure in himself. Also, it is worth noting that many rape survivors with female anatomy do create arousal fluid during sexual violence, some orgasm, but that does not indicate consent – it is in fact more a bodily betrayal (Levin and van Berlo, 2004). Collating this information, it is apparent that the Augustinian stance has drip-fed into contemporary society and the pervasiveness of rape culture. Wynnie Mynerva’s work becomes even more valuable from this stance, as they twist anachronistic rape myths of Christian origin, and expel from their body of their own accord. Through the motion of discharge, they are rescripting the mythos of their body and beyond.
Saliva
In her performance Gnaw (1992), Janine Antoni (b.1964) carves a human-sized cube of lard with spit and tongue, devouring all in her path. Its rivulets of glycerine-ghee and saliva are melded into contemporary culture in several ways First, the fantasies of devouring within the performance will be explored. Antoni embodies the archaic mother as present in Barbara Creed’s (b.1943) The Monstrous-Feminine (1993). The feminine monster is judged monstrous due to her feminine and reproductive qualities, which are often warped and exaggerated in the horror genre (Ussher, 2005, p.79). The archaic mother face of The Monstrous-Feminine is thus described, ‘It is the abyss, the cannibalizing black hole from which all life comes and to which all life returns…’ (Creed, 1993, p.25). The archaic mother is monstrous precisely because of her cavernous maw, which can bring matter into existence while also manifesting a consuming chasm that annihilates its victim. In the case of Janine Antoni’s Gnaw, the archaic mother is vitalised through the act of devouring. She creates as she destroys, lard sculpted into a final score as spittle and tooth reduce it in size.
Antoni asserts that the lard is a surrogate for herself (Sinclair, 2015). This likens her performance to an act of auto-cannibalism (Ross, 2024) in which she licks at and ingests her own fat-marbled flesh. The eating of human flesh is abject in the extreme (Creed, 1993, p.9). It synthesises the corpse, bodily wastes and the abject nature of food, while overhauling the self/other boundary (West, 2007, p 237) It also invokes an animal impulse largely attributed to women (Oliver, 2019, p.1713). This allusion to auto-cannibalism is culturally relevant in several ways. In its most literal sense, it is a woman eating – a woman eating abundantly of a substance (fat) that has been condemned by society in past decades through media such as magazines, tv, and, more recently, social media (Kyrölä, 2014). Taking a glance at the recent ‘girl dinner’ trend on Instagram and
TikTok, for instance, it may not be as innocent as it appears to be. Adolescents and young women eat bitesize meals, dubbing the toddler-sized meal ‘girl dinner’ in a singsong voice (Fargo, 2023). In this landscape, Antoni’s performance is a subversive act. She ingests that which is vilified. This could be compared to the events of the Garden of Eden in which fruit is ingested by Eve after the garden’s overlord forbids it. Antoni makes the link between religiosity and food through her artist book The Girl made of Butter (2001), which is half-prayer, half-recipe in genre. In Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, the eating of fruit and of blood is linked to apotheosis (1980, p 95). The fruit is an abject thing, a border to be crossed (Creed, 1993, p 9), epitomising the first dietary offence irrevocably linked to feminine temptation. The permitted food sources between woman/mankind and God are indeed different which creates space between these ‘species’ (Oliver, 2019, p.1714). Adopting this stance, it makes the act of eating the fruit not only one of disobedience but one of elevation or transcendence. Furthermore, when it comes to eating the flesh of animals as opposed to fruit flesh, this was also forbidden by divine rule until after the flood (Shemesh, 2006), becoming another barrier between woman/man and God. Eating flesh was deemed trespass, until God decided otherwise (however he kept blood, separate from flesh, and only for himself). Feminist scholar Hélène Cixous (b.1937) linked Eve’s eating of the fruit directly to an act of cannibalism in her book Promethea (1983). She also states in her essay Extreme Fidelity (1988), ‘The genesis of ‘femininity’ goes by way of the mouth, through a certain oral pleasure, and through the non-fear of the inside.’ (p.133) The oral orifice is a conduit of power –its palate and appetite one of generosity and creation – as well as devastation. Cannibalism, while historically seen as a violent masculinised trope of assuming control over rather than of absorbing, has with Cixous been tenderised and regurgitated as a metaphorical feminine economy for the experiencing of one’s sexuality, one’s body and others’ bodies (Foss, 2003). The violence embedded within masculine metaphors of cannibalism, in which feminine bodies are deemed edible in multiple ways (Denys, 2011), are diminished and rescripted again with a lick, a nibble, a bite – as in Gnaw. The cannibalistic culture posed by Cixous also appears at a cellular
level in Karen Barad’s (b.1956) essay On Touching – The Inhuman Therefore I am (2012) in which they describe tissue economies, generating ideas of electrons as inherently queer. Electron and positron annihilate, devouring each other, and in this chaos, generate a photon that is inhaled by the electron (Barad, 2012, pp.5-7). Barad also notes that electrons gain their power from selftouch and are perverse by nature. This motion is solidified in Gnaw as Antoni commits the deviant act of self-touch and self-demolition These theories, when viewed alongside Creed’s, suggest a transcendent and romantic element to Antoni’s devouring maw as well as its destructive impulse – a queering of touch. If the lard is a surrogate for her own flesh, the performance becomes an act of violent love (at a cellular level). This can be a powerful message in a society that is rife with body-shaming and food-shaming: the fruiting bodies of patriarchal myths.
Now, to peer deeper into problematic, patriarchal culture and that which it assists in engendering: eating disorders (Holmes, 2016). Perhaps, on a poetic level, this is result of the feminine bodies as contagion rhetoric – a lack of appetite being a ubiquitous symptom of infection. Many women and femme-people see their bodies and food in the same way: as disgusting or unclean (Warin, 2009, p.130). Antoni’s block of lard could certainly be judged this way. Kristeva describes food-loathing and anorexia as the most ancient incarnation of abjection – that which is refused or repudiated to keep oneself whole or proper, but whose repudiation makes one less whole and closer to the corpse (Squire, 2010). Anorexia is deemed a feminised illness and is considered to be an ancestor to hysteria (Csabai, 2002), patriarchy attempting to colonise even sickness. If we examine anorexia at a cellular level, we find that in the emaciated patient, the body starts to eat itself in a process of autophagy (Kheloufi et al, 2014). In a sense, it auto-cannibalises, eating tissue, muscle, and liver, to sustain itself (Buszek et al, 2024). The same process can be witnessed in other microorganisms such as yeast. Antoni’s Gnaw could be read as allegorical for this microcosmic struggle/cellular trespass. She devours of herself, diminishing, and yet, preserving herself (Ross, 2024). Anorexia, as a subject, is full of such abject dichotomies: hunger and satiation, seduction and revulsion, resignation and revolt (Warin, 2022). Indeed, as Grosz states in Volatile Bodies,
Anorexia is a form of protest at the social meaning of the female body. Rather than seeing it simply as an out-of-control compliance with the current patriarchal ideals of slenderness, it is precisely a renunciation of these ‘ideals’. (1994, p.40)
Conversely to being an extremely dangerous illness (NHS, 2024), while still in full cognisance of this, it can also be a bid for bodily control in conditions where autonomy is starved (Holmes, 2016). It can in fact oppose patriarchal expectations, subverting them by entering an extreme state (Squire, 2010). It is a perverse freedom from the realm of the Symbolic. It is a bid for control and self-governance in an uncontrollable situation – a situation which the misogynistic landscape abets in creating (Holmes, 2016). Antoni, by performing in this context, ingesting and
expelling her own flesh, is seen to be emulating this desire for self-governance. Through Gnaw, she pronounces: I would rather devour of myself, than endure being devoured of by the systems that surround me.
Skin
Anna Ting Möller (b.1991) is a contemporary sculptor and performance artist. There are very few scholarly sources on her work due to her being extremely contemporary, thus her work will be dissected through the lens of two feminist philosophers: Julia Kristeva (b.1941) and Donna Haraway (b.1944). Möller grows her own skins through the process of fermentation, using kombucha as her primary medium (Martin, 2024). The slippery, gelatinous skin that grows on top of kombucha is referred to as a scoby (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) or Mother (Lynch, 2022). Its morphology resembles that of human fat or viscera depending on the ingredients with which it is brewed, and it dries into a leather if tanned correctly (Penciu, n.d.). In her performance In Progress (2024), Möller crawled into a uterine-esque cocoon of stitched wet skins. She proceeded to wash these pale-pink flesh blankets with soap, lathering from the inside out. In this way, Möller directly evokes the abject. As Kristeva states in the first few pages of Powers of Horror,
When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk – harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring – I experience a gagging sensation… Along with sightclouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. “I” want none of that element, sign of their desire; “I” do not want to listen, “I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it. But since the food is not an “other” for “me,” who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself (Kristeva, 1980, pp.2-3)
Kristeva describes the fragile membrane on warm milk as a marker of the mother’s desire and this skin as repugnant to the child. The child seeks to reject it to fend off her disgust and establish herself, but in doing so she is cast into a tempest of self-repudiation, as the mother/child dynamic is twisted and wrung out, the mother ultimately abjected and the child separated from the Semiotic. Möller, in encasing herself literally with Mother skin, accepts this abject film into herself, abjecting herself wholly, until she slithers out, reborn as some expelled, feminised being (Möller, 2024). Möller stresses the importance of a matrilineal system, yet
couples this with notions of the kombucha as a contaminant or parasite (Wang, 2023), evoking how feminine bodies have been viewed through the ages. On a personal note, she also alludes to the absence of her birth mother (Martin, 2024). The shed matter from the kombucha skin is discarded on the floor following its washing. This action crosses thresholds of care and perversity in that this dutifully tended substance, fed and nurtured over weeks, is rejected. Thus, completing the vortex-like cycle of desire and repudiation, abjection, posed by Kristeva.
However, the power of expulsion is vitalised in Möller’s emphasis of the matrilineal heritage of the kombucha, and importantly, in an anti-essentialist way (The Here & There Co., 2024). The organism is, in a sense, parthenogenetic. The Mother/scoby is reproductive and will create layer on top of layer of skin, which is also regenerative, vivifying some kind of monstrous wetness (Lynch, 2022): a skin monstrous because of its feminine attributes. Möller becomes a cast-off substance from this slimy, feminine-powered bodily material; she becomes the skin on top.
In this era where technology is melded into our bodies (Grosz, 1994, p.80), becoming enmeshed in the fabric of our skin. This amalgam of organism, machine, and human, connotes a species in the same form as the cyborg in Donna Haraway’s (b.1944) essay A Cyborg Manifesto (1985).
Haraway’s cyborgs reject the plethora of gendered myth propounded by religious movements such as Greek Mythology and Christianity. Haraway states, ‘The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust’ (1985, p 9). She imagines a state beyond gender inhabited by blended organisms. Haraway alludes to a feminist science, advocating for new mythologies centred in monstrosity, to rewire our imaginations and, in turn, our politics (Harper, 1995). This allusion is useful for examining the case at hand. It is reminiscent of the monstrous wetness of the scoby/Mother. Kombucha is monstrous and unpredictable in its yeasty topography, producing skin on top of skin of regenerative slime, yet it is consistent in its abject nature. Perhaps there is knowledge to be gleaned from the mythologies of its cellulose skin. Its skin is inherently queer (Fournier, 2020). Fermentation is a hybrid pickling of preservation and mutation, which operates on ‘queer time’ – a slower methodology of timekeeping not based on upholding the nuclear family archetype, but a pace of non-traditional bonds and nesting that does not gear towards marriage and children (Stern, 2024). Further, kombucha presents a practice of care – in the raising of the substance and in yeast’s mode of being in that it pre-digests its own matter for us before our consumption of it (Fournier, 2020). The substance and its economies may appear monstrous, but they also present an apt morality to live by.
It could also be said that the layer between the physical world and the digital has become something of a milk skin phenomenon – a weak, almost translucent membrane (Miyake, 2004). This virtual skin suppresses fluid (Valenti, 2015). It is one where the body is often forsaken for the realm of post-truth, distorted social media images, and hatred of women or femmes by contemporary Augustinians such as Andrew Tate (Das, 2022). Violent hatred of women is
permeating into the minds of young boys through the illusory abjection of the internet – a dangerous portent. Haraway’s cyborgs seem idealistic in this light, with digital content posing dangers to women, but there remain ways to manifest them through the electrical pulse of the internet too (Miyake, 2004). So, what does it mean for the slippery scoby, or an organismic Mother, to become entwined with the body in this sexually violent society? In a culture where women’s skin is bruised, wounded and non-consensually penetrated by masculine hands through this digital membrane (Haslop et al, 2024), Möller’s performance is a renunciation of this vulnerable, brutalised skin. It is an abject biology, the forming of a new story and a new body –pushing past the body/mind dichotomy and past the lowly status of the body. It is a fermenting, ever-feminine, ever-queer, ever-thickening, ever-liminal, ever-monstrous, breathing, bubbling organ. Möller chooses this powerful mythology embedded in the kombucha itself – the one of its skin. Its skin – that carries us forward and holds the elements collected so far. After all, containers can be powerful things (Le Guin, 1986).
Conclusion
The body has a voice. Not its vocal apparatus per se, but its fluids, its guts, and its rind. Upon opening it, upon that fateful moment of orchestrated expulsion, it sounds. Its choir rises and falls, as it laments the trespasses committed on it, as it steeps in woeful oscillation, until reaching devious resolution. Thus, a milk droplet, a blood droplet, Eve’s rib, a strand of saliva and a bite of flesh, and the skin of a yeast Mother are cast into a metaphysical vessel. Not one that is contained or moulded for male usage. But one perilous, wilfully brimming with monstrous wetness and septic witchery. A fluid with its own agency. A contaminator with grace, if you will.
This text has found that all the works of the women and queer artists explored have a commonality in that they are rescripting the harmful mythos inscribed upon their bodies by patriarchal practices of religion and medicine and by the symptoms of our sexist society. They achieve this through expulsion. In this world, feminine and queer bodies often have other bodies and objects inserted into them non-consensually. This leaves a trace. The body holds that debt.
The motion of expulsion in contemporary art therefore takes on new meaning, alongside its abject heritage. It is release, it is catharsis, it is a re-writing and a clearing. This text also asserts that these actions are significant in a wider context. Society has been colonised by phallocentric tales of genesis, largely through the hand of St Augustine, and culture has since experienced a fallout from these ideas through rape and eating disorders and a generalised hatred of women.
Through artists such as Simnett, O’Reilly, Mynerva, Antoni, and Möller, the mythos may be updating on a cellular level. Microcosmic mythologies, those existing in the body, can trickle into society. According to Natalie Haynes, author of Pandora’s Jar, ‘Myths are a mirror of us.’ (2020, p.288) If the myths are changing, hope expels from the cask too.
Thus, the body’s ballad draws to a close, while something else opens. Our subterranean waterskin, burgeoning and beading with ichor, is almost spilled.
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