Splat!: Death, mess, failure and ‘blue-balling’

Abstract

This article analyzes particular strategies in my recent performance Splat! (2013) that work towards redeploying (pop)feminist structures of trauma and survival. Pop-feminist affirmation-based affects that claim to produce or activate agency, or ‘empowerment’, in the female subject are aggressively sold to women via mainstream media. This model of the empowered woman is predicated on her previous experience of trauma and the subsequent activation of ‘survival’ affects enabling the subject's ‘overcoming’ of trauma. This model of empowered or ‘coherent’ subjectivity, I argue, is one that rejects the possibility of mess, failure, humiliation, or other ‘disintegrative’ affects. Within this ‘successful’ model of subjectivity, these messy possibilities would return the subject to (her previous) victimhood. This article, however, asks whether the enactment of ‘disintegrative’ affects in contemporary women's performance, particularly in Splat!, might not only act as a subversive resistance to the strip mall of female affirmation, but also provide an alternative method of agency production that is not dependent upon the possibly impossible paradigm of the integrated subject.