Corporeality and the Rhetoric of Feminist Body Art (Paperback)

Rhetorical Studies has only begun to understand the materiality and corporeality of rhetorical texts. Corporeality and the Rhetoric of Feminist Body Art aims to draw attention to the intersection between visual rhetoric and visual culture. In so doing, I "look" elsewhere---beyond traditional notions of public address and the rhetorical situation---for women's rhetorical accomplishments. The inventional visual rhetorics of feminist body artists point to the ways in which the space and time of the rhetorical situation silences the voices and bodies of women as well as other marginalized groups. The Cartesian mind/body split has historically rendered women speechless bodies, despite their being no voice without the body. The study of feminist body art fruitfully interrogates the sites (or representation new and hybrid media) where marginalized individuals articulate their bodies to counter official discourses and center the corporeality of rhetoric. Chapter one, "Introduction: Feminist Body Art, Space, and Time," lays the framework for the rhetorical criticism of feminist body art. Exploring some of the most famous feminist body artworks and feminist materialist theories of the body, I detail the rhetorical form and functions of feminist body artworks and determine the five main methodological questions researchers should ask when critiquing feminist body art from a rhetorical perspective. Feminist body artworks are invention-memory vehicles---they refuse binaries, deconstruct acts of remembrance, and interrogate the drive toward fixed identity. Feminist body artworks, as visual rhetorics in their own right, substantiate the corporeality of rhetoric by undoing viewer's subjectivities and complicating theories of the gaze. Chapter two, "A Transgendered Gaze toward a Becoming-Body," argues that Nan Goldin's performative photography of drag queens from the 1970s and 1990s breaks down the sex/gender/sexuality trinary. By tracing the changes in drag queen aesthetics and the larger GLBT community's attitudes toward drag queens, Goldin visualizes the plasticity and pliability of the body. In so doing, she also deconstructs viewer's ability to read sex and gender and to name diverse sexualities. Thus, viewers' expectations about the ability to "see" sex are undone by Goldin's tactics of representation, inviting audience members to think of themselves as becoming-bodies, rather than seeing through a knowing gaze. Chapter three, "A Clinical Gaze toward a Becoming-Body," analyses three of Goldin's serials about her friends who died from AIDS-related illnesses. Goldin's works reconfigure the rhetorical work of memorials to open viewers to the problematics of the act of remembrance. In so doing, she counters official discourses about the AIDS crisis and transports viewers directly into the AIDS wound. Through images of objects, others, and spaces Goldin protects her subjects from the voyeuristic and clinical gazes of viewers. Goldin's images are haptic. They rely on viewers' abilities to see-touch the images. Her works invite viewers into a mode of synesthesia wherein their own personal memories work with the artwork to make meaning. Chapter four, "A Terrorist Gaze toward a Becoming-Body," critiques Coco Fusco's A Room of One's Own: Gender and Power in the New America," a rhetorical text designed to invite audience members to become the terrorist Other. In this performance, Fusco plays a military interrogation expert who lectures recruits/audience members about sexual interrogation tactics. Invoking images of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Fusco draws out the connections between the discourses of liberal feminism and the U.S. military's...