Affective ovation: re-performing the dehumanised woman onscreen

Abstract

The article considers an iconic proponent of embodied, professionally mediated repetition, examining the transnational typology of the telegenic media ‘hostess’ through a close reading of the author/artist’s video artwork Ovation. It provides a description of one feminist artist’s approach to fighting the feminised automaton on its constrained, patriarchal terms, while engaging with the potential pitfalls of such an approach as outlined by Rey Chow in Writing Diaspora. It proposes a metaphoric framework of the performative undead to break the methodological deadlock implicit in post-colonial critiques of mimesis and ‘remimesis’. Co-opting elements of hostesses’ obsessive and hegemonic image-making to affectively reinform the viewer about the particular conditions of this public and ubiquitous form of gendered labour, the artwork and critical analysis intertwine to argue away from the freshness of radical narcissism and towards a performative epistemology of radically enacted, temporal, ideological decay. The article/artwork also makes an experimental case for delegated repetitive labour and, in the case of the onscreen hostess, repetitive consumption, as potentially politically recuperative for the performer.

Keywords:

• Hostess
• feminist methods
• labour
• gender
• mimesis
• performative epistemology

Notes

1. Ovation can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/lull/ovation. I thank Bree van Reyk for her collaboration on the percussive score.

2. Also see Schneider (2014, 23) on the ‘affect economy’.

3. Since making Ovation I have begun working with real gynoid robots, casting them in cinematic scenarios. Edwardes was, at the time of filming Ovation, unaware of my larger project’s focus on more literally artificial women.

4. Due to stakeholder uncertainty about copyright in this image, it cannot be reprinted at this time. To view it, see Smithsonian Magazine, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/robot-vanna-trashy-presidents-and-steak-as-health-food-samsung-sells-tomorrow-22348926.

5. See McNulty (2007, 153, 154) regarding the Roman notion of the person (persona) being derived from the practice of making wax masks of dead ancestors. Whoever physically possessed someone’s wax death-mask could claim to be their descendant. This concept of the persona admits a ‘simulated, artificial or even duplicitous’ presentation of ‘self’.

6. ‘Reverse-enchantment’ is a computer gaming term.