SOMATHEQUE
Biopolitical production, feminisms, queer and trans practices
Beatriz Preciado. Queer theorist and professor of the political history of the body, gender theory and the history of performance art at the Université de Paris VIII and author of important essays such as "Counter-sexual Manifesto”: Feminism is a critical practice of social intervention and political transformation and perhaps one of the most important practices of modernity in my view. But it’s a pluralistic, complex tradition and not a single language.
I’m interesting in thinking about feminism and feminist practice within the broader sphere of somato-political resistance.
We could say that the whole project of modernity has been a project of inscribing political differences on the body, of naturalisation, of the somatisation of political differences. I think that both feminist theories and what we call queer, transgender, transsexual, intersexual and post-pornographic theories are undertakings designed to denaturalise and criticise the processes of inscribing political differences on the body.
Today the body seems like the last stronghold for traditional feminism’s constructivist and critical analyses. I’m interested in putting a distance between the classical idea of the body – the dominant idea from Christianity to the anatomical discourses of modernity – and another idea that I call the somatic apparatus, which does not coincide exactly with the body.
Something interesting and fascinating in political terms about what we call the body and I’d call somatheque is that it’s a living historical and cultural archive. Therefore, it has agency and the capacity for political intervention completely unlike that of other power machines. For example, the museum and the library are biopolitical power machines but they don’t have this quality of being alive.
I think an interesting question is how to position oneself in the museum, in this space that has traditionally been a collective machine for the production of disciplined, normalised subjectivity. How to reposition oneself in this space, this machine, and how is it possible to intervene in this machinery to produce distances of subjectification or moments of denaturalisation or critical distance?
Figures of sexual subalternism, whether queer, dyke, butch…are subaltern figures vis-à-vis sexual normality. Historically, they’ve been represented by two visual and discursive registers. One is anatomical, where they have been overexposed anatomically-speaking using language that is, above all, psychopathological. The second space and representation technique (where this type of fiction almost becomes real) is the world of spectacle, which today does not only refer to classical theatre, but also to spectacle distributed via the multimedia circuit.
In part, these two registers – anatomy and spectacle – are at base normalisation techniques. It’s interesting how critical queer, transsexual and transgender movements today are reappropriating anatomical techniques and the visibility techniques used in producing spectacles to create what I call counter-fictions, to produce dissident representations that essentially question the production of norms and normality. It’s not about giving visibility to the supposedly peripheral or homosexual or indigenous body. It’s about deactivating and questioning the difference between white and indigenous, between heterosexual and homosexual, somehow deactivating the very device used to produce sexuality.
The art world is one of the key places where critical discourses and dissident representations are produced and proliferate, generating what I call counter-fictions of sexuality or sexual identity.
The movements that began in the 1970s were the first to reappropriate video as a light technique for counter-information or for producing counter-fictions. Video was not a very interesting technique for most artists in this movement, but came to constitute the central mode of representation for the whole feminist movement. Think about the work done by Carole Roussopoulos in the ‘70s or projects like Womanhouse by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro.
Feminist representation has become more and more complex, among other reasons because the very idea of a woman, which was so central for feminist representation in the ‘70s, has been questioned. We are witnessing a process of defragmentation of the feminist perspective. Today there’s a multiplicity of practices that cannot simply be reduced to women’s art or to practices that criticise the oppression of women. Rather, there’s a set of cross-disciplinary practices that criticise the devices of racial, sexual, gender and body difference production. Therefore, this almost ongoing proliferation of new critical practices can’t be reduced to what is sometimes called on an institutional level “women’s art” and which has no critical power from my point of view.
