Editorial

Blood is powerfully evocative. Bloodied and bleeding bodies have the potential to elicit feelings of disgust, anxiety and empathy. David Harradine argues that blood ‘is perhaps the most metaphorically loaded body fluid’ on account of its special qualities as a bodily substance, and its material and metaphoric potential (Harradine 2000: 80). The many meanings of blood are, for Janet Carsten, ‘paradoxically both under- and over-determined’ (2013: S2). Blood may be associated with ‘fungibility, or transformability, as well as essence; with truth and transcendence and with lies and corruption; with contagion and violence but also with purity and harmony; and with vitality as well as death’ (ibid.). Carsten draws attention to the ‘literal uncontainability of blood’ (S4) – its ability to function ‘as a vector between domains that in other contexts are actively kept apart’ (Carsten 2011: 20). It is this unique connecting quality – the inbetweenness of blood and its ability to breach binary markers of inside/outside, self/other, subject/object, symbolic/materiality – that bridges the diverse and innovative readings of blood that this collection offers. On Blood questions dominant ideas and preconceptions about blood, inviting new insights into the material substance of blood and its symbolic and political power.

Blood is polyvalent: it moves, flows, transfers, is pumped and pours, but it also sticks, plugs, clots and coagulates. The visibility of blood exposes the fragility of boundaries and the permeability of bodies, offering both a fluid potentiality and a threat. In an act called ‘blading’, professional wrestlers open self-inflicted wounds on their forehead with otherwise concealed razor blades. In doing so, they bleed for their audience, producing ‘a much more authentic performance’ of pain (Hadley 2017: 158). Chow, Laine and Warden recruit the act of blading to tease out the tensions between theatre and performance, between wrestling as a ‘fake’ contest but the razor blade (and by extension the blood) as real ((2017: 3). For Chow, Laine and Warden, the apparatus used to visibly inflict pain in professional wrestling (the chair, the ladder) ‘move back and forth between the “really real” and pretend’ (4). Items like the chair and the ladder are always a chair or a ladder, but also something more, as they are ‘imbued with latent violence’ (3). Blood has the power to call into question that which is real, really real, and pretend.

Fittingly, On Blood opens with an exploration of the blood of professional wrestling as transdisciplinary optic. In this essay, Claire Warden outlines the possibilities of blood in wrestling beyond straightforward visual signifiers. In highlighting the rich and meaningful potential of blood, Warden’s innovative reading suggests that through a reimagining of history it is possible to explore what truths are made visible through the presence of blood. Indeed, blood as a boundary-breaching polyvalent substance is arguably always something more than just blood. Carsten details how in working towards theories of blood, a recurrent theme is blood as truth-bearing (2013). Processes wherein blood is made visible are believed to reveal a particular ‘truth’ about an individual (moral, personal, political, medical, gendered, racial). The meanings ascribed to blood – how it performs, and how it is received – carry heavy and powerful connotations.

From ‘Bumps, Bruises and Bandages’ we move to an exploration of blood in performance as a vehicle for feminine-feminist meaning-making. Blood and performance have a rich history. From the body art movement of the 1960s and 1970s to work produced in the early 2000s and beyond, artists have engaged with the material substance of their blood as a ‘potent aesthetic and political agent’ (Manica and Rios 2017: 2) and/or to bring into play the biological qualities of human bodies, medical processes and immunology. In making blood visible in performance, these artists expose the fragility of bodies as bounded systems and foreground the vulnerability of these systems (Harradine 2000). For Mary Richards, the staging of the bleeding body as a corporeal reality is provocative because it counters efforts that seek to distance, contain or mask ‘the bloody reality of our interiors’ (2008: 109). While there is a ‘radical fluidity’ within performances engaged with staging blood (Harradine 2000), the exposed bodily borders and messy uncontainable interiors need not threaten subjectivity.

In ‘Congealing the Abject’, Laura Hartnell proposes abjection as a resistive and affective strategy to challenge phallocentric conceptions of women’s bodies. Through three case studies, Hartnell engages Julia Kristeva’s reading of abjection to access ‘a subterranean, feminine realm where bodies make meaning outside of language and discourse’. Citing Braidotti (1994), Hartnell explains how feminine bodies can be understood as neither biological nor sociological categories, but as a point of overlap between the physical, symbolic and sociological. Hartnell’s work on feminine bodies speaks to how authors later in this issue understand blood as a connective substance. Throughout this collection we see how blood and bodies seek, facilitate or symbolize connection. Hartnell’s essay reminds us that the presence of blood in performance marks ‘some kind of breaking-down of the barrier between the body and the world’. For Hartnell, ‘Blood does something to audiences. It repulses us, intrigues us, incenses us. It makes us feel something. It cracks something open within us, helps us feel into the leaky, messy, vulnerable boundaries between our bodies and the world.’

In ‘XX’, Diana Georgiou addresses the work of performance artist Rocío Boliver. Through an exploration of violence, and personal testimony about the demands children place on the bodies of breast-feeding mothers, Georgiou offers a rich performance analysis that invites consideration of the impact of being an audience member witnessing blood in performance work and bleeding bodies. Following this, Andrea Pagnes and Verena Stenke provide the first artist pages for this edition, which evocatively demonstrate the artifacts produced through a series of blood writing performance pieces. Zeynep Sarıkartal’s article focuses on the art practices of Zehra Doğan during her time as a political prisoner. In response to the circumstances of her captivity, Doğan created art ‘out of newspapers, her own menstrual blood, and the bodily fluids of other prisoners’ as a response ‘to the violent and prohibitive restrictions placed on her and her body.’ Read alongside one another, these pieces consider blood within performance art and art practices more broadly. They demonstrate the connective potentiality of blood, without shying away from an understanding of the blood’s ability to represent violence, trauma or oppression.

The three pieces by Sylvia Solakidi, Akhila Vimal C. and Cormac Power engage with symbolic readings of blood in religion. Notably, each piece explores the transformative potential of blood. Solakidi frames her analysis of the artistic practice of Jan Fabre through a reading of how blood, within chapels in Naples, is ‘re-born as a connective tissue’. In this way, Solakadi’s work speaks to Vimal’s focus on the presence of blood in religious rituals in Keralam. Vimal defines the role of blood through the Sanskrit meaning as a substance creating unity and bond. Within the context of the ritualistic practices required to become a Velichappadu, the presence of blood denotes the transformation from human to divine being, connecting and creating unity between two planes of existence. Connection through transformation is addressed within Power’s reading of the notion of real presence as experienced through representations of the Eucharistic rite. He acknowledges how blood has a paradoxical function, both signifying the death of Jesus of Nazareth and the promise of eternal life offered through his blood sacrifice. Through an analysis of the Netflix miniseries Midnight Mass, Power explores the link between the Eucharistic rite and vampires.

Jennifer Dawn Whitney’s article extends discussions about blood and the undead through a focus on the beauty trend of the vampire facial. Whitney argues that given Western beauty ideals are affiliated with consumption, they are infused with a vampiric flavour. The article examines the use of one’s own blood as a beauty commodity as a gothic form of the excessive and deficient. Isabel Burr Raty continues the beauty theme in the second artist pages. In collaboration with the indigenous Rapa Nui of Easter Island (Tepito Te Kainga) Burr Raty has facilitated performance practices working with her own and cooperatively harvested menstrual blood, transforming the blood into antidotes, cocktails and beauty products. Through working with blood, Burr Raty investigates decolonial and anti-extractivist practices alongside biosynthetic colonial processes. Whitney’s and Burr Raty’s work feature a connective thread of examining the commodification of blood and the potential reclamation of one’s relationship to their blood, or the blood of others.

Katleho Ramafalo’s article provides an account of experiencing her first menstrual cycle. Ramafalo describes the shame attached to menstruation within certain communities and cultures by drawing on her own experience. Ramafalo argues that this shame is generational, conditioned by patriarchal order. The piece examines fear in relation to menstruation, which manifests as a consequence of abduction or sale of menstruating women in Lesotho. Ramafalo positions the act of hiding menstruation as a means of denying men the power to use menstruation as a tool of power and oppression. Continuing the discussion about menstrual blood, Alexis Bard Johnson and Raegan Truax present a creative nonfiction narrative about Sloughing: a durational performance that placed ‘multiple women, genderqueer, and non-binary menstruaters in a collective performance of bleeding together for twenty-eight consecutive days’. The piece invites the audience to ‘CELEBRATE our collective nastiness’. Due to the guerrilla-style nature of the practice, the traces of menstruation were not confined to private spaces; ‘menstrual remnants’ infiltrated ‘every aspect of daily life’. Through the political vitality of the work, connections are easily drawn to the piece by Agnieszka Sosnowska, who focuses on the use of women’s blood, specifically blood on sanitary towels, as an instrument of Poland’s pro-choice protests in 2020 and 2021. Sosnowska describes how the protest in Poland provided women with an opportunity to talk about their cycles in public, perhaps for the first time. The act of protest became an intergenerational one, facilitating connection between women who menstruate. Rather than being an act that encourages shame, the protests enabled women to reclaim the narrative and a degree of agency. Here, ‘Women’s blood has become a weapon and a sign of female strength, independence and self-identity’. These three papers carefully navigate the intergenerational and sociopolitical complexities of personal and public readings of menstruation.

The edition concludes with three evocative pieces from Carali McCall, Bryony White, and Tobias Klein and Jane Prophet. Individually, the pieces conceptualize the movement of blood, giving consideration to how blood interacts with other materials, land and architecture. Here, blood serves as a connective substance that flows and leaks beyond the boundaries of geographical and political borders, and between people. The authors show how blood has the potential to reanimate conversations about our connection to the land, to the deceased, and to the intersubjectivity of species. The fluidity of blood challenges the notion of stable systems. In this collection we begin to see how the multiple meanings ascribed to blood are far from stable or self-evident.

Common Datum version 02, 2021 Tobias Klein and Jane Prophet. Photo Tobias Klein, courtesy of the authors