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Abstract
This essay calls for heterosexual feminists in performance studies to engage in theorizing and problematizing sex, its expressions and effects, evidenced in sanctioned and mundane moments in our lives. Sex acts, at their most normative, can be engaged contextually and critically for the ways disciplinary practices and discourses operate more powerfully on women's bodies than on those of men. This essay utilizes Foucault's characteristics of scientia sexualis to critique the constructions of heterosexual women's sex lives in disciplines that study sex. It then turns to three binary constructions—sex and gender, pleasure and danger, and public and private—that must be attended to and negotiated. Three examples of such brave attention in performance studies are featured as libratory technologies of self-crafting and world fashioning.
For their support through many incarnations of these ideas, the author thanks Jay Baglia, Kim Golombisky, and Bob Gonzalez. For this rendition, she is grateful to Michael Bowman and two anonymous reviewers.
Notes
1. Feminist critics of Foucault's early genealogical work offered two familiar, if contradictory, indictments of subjecthood: first, the subject is “de-centered,” fictional, and hopeless; second, the subject is completely determined by discourses and practices (McLaren 214; also see McNay). In both cases, agency is foreclosed. Moreover, much feminist critique challenged Foucault's lack of attention to sexual difference, to the ways that women are differently, and some argue, more powerfully interpolated in and through disciplinary practices than men (Bradiotti).
2. Gay identities as performatively constituted are explored in Peterson (“Narrative” and “One More”); Gingrich-Philbrook (“Refreshment” and “Queer Performance”); Grindstaff; Bennett; Slagle; and Drummond. The intersection of race and queer identity is explored in E. Patrick Johnson and Alexander; disciplinary discourses that privilege and oppress enactments of masculinity are explored in Corey and Nakayama; Nakayama and Corey; Owen; and Gingrich-Philbrook (“Disciplinary Violation”).
3. In her classic article, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” Gayle Rubin draws a “charmed circle” that denotes the sexual value system. At the center of the circle, is “good, normal, natural, blessed sexuality” as “heterosexual, married, monogamous, procreative, non-commercial, in pairs, in a relationship, same generation, in private, no pornography, bodies only, and vanilla.” The “outer limits” of “bad, abnormal, unnatural, damned sexuality” violates each element and falls outside the circle: homosexual, unmarried, promiscuous, non-procreative, commercial, alone or in groups, casual, cross-generational, in public, pornography, with manufactured objects, sadomasochistic” (281).
4. Apfelbaum notes that “frigidity” has fallen out of therapeutic parlance, replaced by the DSM-IV's attention to female sexual desire disorders. “Impotence,” especially with the marketing of Viagra, has been replaced by “erectile dysfunction.” Both nomenclatures seek to shift the focus from “the sufferer” to “the symptom.”
5. Dell Hymes was one of the first folklorists to point out the Neo-Platonic assumptions in Chomsky's view of performance as “a fallen state” from perfection.
6. “Imperfect” performances are no longer considered “contaminated” or “impure,” but they are instead “the focus of postmodern analytical attention” (Turner 77).
7. Two ethnographic projects speak from the “inside” to this feature of sex work, Amy Flowers’ The Fantasy Factory, and Katherine Frank's “Stripping, Starving, and the Politics of Ambiguous Pleasure.” While both these works feature how sex work can be empowering for some women, Lesa Lockford's autoethnographic account of her sex work is particularly painful and disempowering (Performing Femininity 55–105).
8. For other connections between performance theory and woman as performer, see my “Performance Studies as Women's Work.” For details of performance as a key term in pornography, see my “Weddings and Pornography.”
9. Most recent medical research on sexual dysfunction begins by citing a 1978 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Its numbers are astounding: out of one hundred “happily married couples,” sixty-three percent of women had difficulties with arousal or orgasm. Almost three-fourths of the women expressed a lack of sexual interest or an inability to relax during sex (Frank, Anderson, and Rubinstein). The second most frequently cited study was published in 1993 and involved 329 women in an outpatient gynecological clinic. One-third reported arousal problems, and ten percent were anorgasmic, i.e., unable to achieve orgasm (Rosen, Taylor, Leiblum, and Bachmann). In 1994, Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, and Michaels published The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States. According to this work, twenty-nine percent of women reported that they always had an orgasm with their regular partner during sex. Twenty-four percent reported an inability to have an orgasm. One-third reported lack of interest in sex. The most recent data analysis was published in 1999 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. With data collected in the 1994 Social Organization of Sexuality, Laumann, Paik, and Rosen used multivariate analysis techniques to estimate risk factors for sexual dysfunction across several demographic categories. Women who are unaffected by sexual dysfunction constitute fifty-eight percent of their sample. Low sexual desire was prevalent in twenty-two percent, arousal problems experienced by fourteen percent, and sexual pain in seven percent of their sampled women. Black women report less sexual pleasure and lower sexual desire than white women; Hispanic women report consistently lower rates of sexual dysfunction than white women. Physical satisfaction, emotional satisfaction, and happiness are “quality of life” concomitants. The authors conclude: “experience of sexual dysfunction is generally associated with poor quality of life; however, these negative outcomes appear to be more extensive and possibly more severe for women than men” (542).
10. For a more in depth survey of Sedgwick's and Butler's critiques of the sex/gender system through queer theory and performativity, see my work with Daniel Blaeuer.
11. Feminist theory and feminist movement both acknowledge the necessity of the term “woman” for political praxis. The materiality of this problematic category, however, is both overdetermined in institutional discourses of law, medicine, education, and religion that too often prescribe women's bodies as problems, deviant, or lacking, and undermined in political theorizing that refuses to claim women's bodies as ontological or epistemological foundations. The cul-de-sac of “woman” required some theoretical finesse. De Lauretis proposed “taking the risk strategic essentialism” to name and claim alliances among women, based not on the “maternal,” but on the fact that all women are daughters. Across and because of their differences, women can ally with other women based on their shared knowledge of “female symbolic defeat in the social-symbolic world designed by men” (“Essence” 25). Sedgwick counts both high costs and rewards between “identification as (a woman) and one's identification with (women very differently situated)” as an ethical pressure for feminism (Epistemology 61–62). Butler proposed that the political project of feminism is not to foreclose meaning or to censure use of the term “woman,” but “to release the term into a future of multiple significations, to emancipate it from the maternal or racialist ontologies to which it has been restricted, and to give it play as a site where unanticipated meanings might come to bear” (“Contingent” 50).
12. For as important as social justice projects are, some feminists are concerned that the attention to gender studies masks women and dilutes the political power and claims of feminism. For just four feminist works interested the tensions of locating feminism within and against gender studies, see Foster; Baeher; Brown; and DiPalma.
13. Transgender and transsexual issues are beyond the scope of this essay, but the questions raised about dimorphism of sexual bodies, chromosomal and genetic constructions of sex, social constructionism, and biology are the next phase in moving gender theory and feminism to new conceptual and political grounds. See, for example, Sloop; Hird; and Butler's chapter, “Doing Justice to Someone,” in Undoing Gender. These works feature the intense debates surrounding David Reimer's life and body at the hands of medical science.
14. Personal correspondence with the author, 3 January 1995.
15. Taylor includes several footnotes in this passage qualifying her claims in light of critiques of lesbian coming-out stories that I have excluded. Readers are directed to Taylor's essay for her careful consideration of these critiques.
16. Pat Califia's work cited in this essay predates his recent coming out as a bisexual transman. See Califia, “Featured Author” for his powerful account of his journey.