Affective Agency and Transformative Shame: The Voices Behind The Great Wall of Vagina

Abstract

The Great Wall of Vagina, a polyptych consisting of four hundred labial plaster casts, publicly displays women's “privates” through a nine-meter artistic rendering of women's genital difference. On the occasion of the artwork's circulation, this article attends to the narratives crafted by the women who animate the Wall. Centering the women who make the project possible illustrates how affective intensities compel emotive discourses to circulate and to generate opportunities for shared bodily knowledges. The affective expressions of the women participating in the Wall not only invoke a sense of agency but also transform the contours of shame from private to public. To conclude, I suggest making vulvae visible builds contact zones wherein women are inspired to decouple notions of normality and bodily perception. By voicing their bodily affects, these women ask us to think carefully about what sensations, feelings, and matters of private concern might productively be brought into shareable and accessible venues.

Keywords:

• affective agency
• contact zones
• public and private
• shame
• vagina
• visibility
• voicing

Notes

To definitely mark the origin of these intensities is a difficult task. Many of the women express a degree of shame, disgust, discomfort, celebration, and/or love toward their bodies, which compels them to take part in the project. Sometimes that compulsion originates from the idea of the artwork itself in relation to the body. Other times, the compulsion, as expressed in the narratives, is completely unnameable but affectively guided. The way those intensities are mobilized through a practice of rhetorical voicing illuminates not only how emotive expressions inspire action but also how, when affects are made public, shareable, and accessible, they gestate the capacity for women to celebrate their bodies with themselves and others.

The language of “intensity” carries with it a long history in affect studies. Perhaps most notably, Brian Massumi is often credited as the theorist responsible for poaching the Deleuzian concept of “intensity” to express how affect functions as a nonsignifying, nonconscious sensation disconnected from the subjective. Meanwhile Ruth Leys has suggested that Massumi's understanding of affect is not necessarily incompatible with subjectivity-based understandings of affect. Extending these discussions, I draw on Doyle's conception of affective intensity to understand how the sensations that radiate from our bodies are neither entirely psychic/internal nor are they entirely culturally determined (which is to say, affective intensity need not be totally disarticulated from subjectivity, nor for that reason necessarily determined by it). I suggest that recognizing affective intensity in this way allows us to attend to where and how those emotional overloads inspire bodily action. This perspective also resonates with Elspeth Probyn's meditations on the blush (a physiological flushing of the body), which is both biology and biography of the body.

For Weil Davis, the hand mirror (or its modern technological equivalents) no longer functions as a consciousness-raising tactic but instead offers a woman a device through which to locate her normative deficiencies. This shift from invisibility to a kind of univocal visibility signals the danger of visibility, for Weil Davis, and attends to who controls those processes of making visible. But this pessimistic view on vaginal visibility relies on a logic of display that rests exclusively on the duress of norms not always in our favor. What this view occludes, I suggest, is the recognition of the polyvalent forms (like the Great Wall of Vagina project)—the multiplications and intensifications beyond mainstream pornographies and medical imagery—emergent alongside the appearance of just one visible representation of vulvae.

The Great Wall of Vagina project has circulated internationally in magazines and newspapers (http://www.greatwallofvagina.co.uk/press-gallery), and the plaster casts have traveled beyond McCartney's studio to other showings in the United Kingdom. It enjoyed its last public showing in Milan, Italy, between December 2012 and March 2013. The project is also cited within other pussy/labia pride projects.

It is important to note that respondents and audience members at national communication conferences and WSIC reviewers commented on and queried the gender dynamics at work between the male artist, Jamie McCartney, and the women participating in the project.

Foucault writes, “Does this not prove that [sex is] an object of secrecy, and more important, that there is still an attempt to keep it that way? … What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret” (35). Here, Foucault points to the peculiar dual place of sex and sexuality within our culture. For him, sex remains a taboo but, due to its regulation, firmly part of public discussion.

The relationships between reason/rationality and emotion has been further theorized by Jerry Miller and Raymie McKerrow, who maintain there is an intrinsic fallacy in arguing that reason and emotion are contra to each other (43–58).

Importantly, different (and sometimes even similar) disciplinary histories understand these affect/emotion constructions in reverse. Probyn, for example (who earned her degree in communication and cultural studies), suggests that “it could be convenient to say that emotion refers to the social expression of affect and affect in turn is the biological and psychological experience of it” (25). She notes elsewhere that, typically, “a basic distinction is that emotion refers to cultural and social express, whereas affects are of a biological and physiological nature” (11). For her, this opposition is a superficial one, since we ought to understand the two “feelings” together in a “radical cross-fertilization of ideas” (26). Threading both biology and biography of the body, she argues, allows us to understand how psychic feelings are mediated culturally—given meaning, given space for public elaboration (or not).

The implication that those actions unfold relationally fosters both the potential for agency and the underlying impulse of this article. Ahmed indicates that agency arises out of the “interface between individuals and worlds” wherein actions are “shaped by contact with others.” The operative nuance in this claim suggests that the relationship between action and contact is a shaping and not a determination; that is, affectations are not deterministic but instead make room for a decision (190n3).

I mark the possibility of the result as “not always happy” by way of Ahmed's theorization of “happy performatives.” She argues happy performatives are those that follow the orientation lines in such a way that the cultural production “succeeds” and takes hold. Success of a performative is, consequently, always provisional and contingent, meaning not all results will always make the viewer or the participant necessarily feel “good,” as sometimes performatives “fail” (114).

Here a quick caveat is in order: American readers must locate this testimonial within a British context wherein it is more common to colloquially deploy the word cunt than it is in the United States.

Many of the Wall participants cite mainstream pornographies as the only other representation of women's genitalia they have had access to prior to participating in The Great Wall of Vagina.

Importantly, the notion of the contact zone stands contra to Dana Cloud's “affected public.” Cloud posits the risky possibilities of an “affected public,” by which she means “a public artificially constructed in terms of shared affect rather than shared interests or shared reasoning,” which, for her, “is potentially a distorted and imperiled one” (130).

And as Doyle notes of art's circulatory capacities, “Thankfully, museums and galleries are not the only grounds upon which we encounter art. Many artists project their work into completely different social spaces, in no small part because they want to avoid the affective protocols of official culture. Festivals, underground music venues, city streets, fields, deserts, and private homes can all be more generous in terms of the range of affects they will accommodate” (5). This insight also resonates with Probyn's concept of the contact zone. In addition, I use the term flâneur here to denote one who wanders without intention or purpose, following Michel de Certeau's work on walking in the city.

By way of just one recent example, during the June 2012 Michigan House sessions, two Democratic representatives, Lisa Brown and Barb Byrum, stood against Republican lawmakers who curbed their speech when they used the word vagina in the context of antiabortion legislation debate. Huffington Post reported: “Majority Floor Leader Jim Stamas (R-Midland) gaveled Brown out of order on Wednesday afternoon after she told her colleagues, ‘I'm flattered you're all so concerned about my vagina, but no means no” (Bassett).

Although this inquiry does not seek to offer a judgment on these types of procedures, it is important to note the range of complications such elective procedures as labiaplasty may incur. These complications include cosmetic distortion, disfigurement, hyper-/hyposensitivity, infection, excessive blood loss, and intense scarring that often disallows complete penetration (Goodman 1820).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michaela Frischherz

Michaela Frischherz is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mass Communication and Communication Studies at Towson University, Towson, Maryland, USA.