Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

This is to announce the passing of a pair of glasses. The glasses, lovingly crafted by the employees of one Oscar de la Renta, were royal blue and faintly shaped like the eye of a domestic feline. Their insides were mahogany. Soon after their birth in 1999 they were bestowed upon a young woman of fifteen, who was joyous to receive them.

Throughout their childhood, the glasses lived half of their life on the girl's face, upon the bridge of her nose, and the other half on her bedside table. The girl (their mistress) betrayed them soon after by switching to contact lenses, and so the glasses' forays into the world at large became fewer and farther between. However, this was much compensated for when the girl took them to Norway, and later on, Paris. The glasses saw many wonderful sights of the Northern Lights, reindeer, sailing ships, cow's udders and snow, snow, snow. In France, the glasses learned to appreciate fine dining, art and culture (as well as seeing one too many empty bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau).

The glasses enjoyed a whirlwind late girlhood - they were complimented by men and women alike, even fetishized by some. However, as the days passed they became less nimble, in need of constant cleaning and adjusting, and spending more time than ever staring up at the velvet ceiling of their embossed carrying case.

The end drew near when, one autumn, their mistress decided to go work on a farm harvesting Japanese Lanterns. The glasses barely got to see any of the beautiful orange flowers - they spent most of their time on the bedside table, as usual. The day came, at last, for the girl to depart for home - the glasses were so excited they could hardly stand it. To their great dismay, however, their absent-minded owner left the farm without them, abandoning them to the unfamiliar bedside table. They were put back in their case by a well-intentioned stranger (the owner of the farm), and stayed in this makeshift foster home for three months before being sent back to their hometown in someone's purse. A message was sent to the girl, begging her to come and reclaim ownership, but the girl - coming slowly into womanhood and ablaze with new distractions - could never find the time to reply. The glasses were never retrieved, and ended their days in loneliness and desertion. They were thrown into a dumpster and never heard from again.

Hi all,

So, my winter project is going to be directing a Genet play called The Maids. This play is based on the true story of the infamous Papin sisters, two maids who in 1933 in Le Mans, France, brutally murdered their mistress and her daughter after working for them for seven years. The play revolves around themes of wealth, GENDER, power (yaaay Foucault), domination of the working class, reality vs. illusion (some parallels w/ the Balcony), homo-eroticism, murder, incest, and other fun, light-hearted stuff. This is only a three-person play, a one-act, but I will definitely need any help i can get:

-actors

-a stage manager / assistant director / dramaturg type person

-set and lighting design

-costumes

-graphic design for flyers / posters

-ushers

-stagehands

I'm planning on holding auditions for this thing at the end of November, and the rehearsal process will begin after winter break, with performances at the end of that quarter. SO - if there's anyone out there who loves doing theatre stuff and wants to be a part of this in any of the above ways, OR you'll have some time on your hands come winter quarter and want to have a little fun on the side, please let me know (also ask me if you have any questions about the play itself or what I'm planning to do with it.) It's an incredible play (I'm about to turn it back in to the library, so y'all should check it out), and I've been pretty giddy about it ever since I read it.

    "Cock", from Cock and Bull, by Will Self

     [I underlined all adjectives and circled all nouns. I then rewrote the piece in reverse order; I went backwards through the text, making the last sentence the first sentence and so on, and switching all the adjectives and nouns. So all the adjectives and nouns from the beginning of the piece were replaced by those from the end of the piece, and vice versa. I kept sentence structure so the story would still 'flow', and the humorous end result (when compared with the original text) was like reading the beginning and the end at the same time. The content of the text remained remarkably decipherable, but the bizarre juxtaposition of words certainly lent depth and meaning to the piece. When I ran out of nouns and adjectives, I started the cycle over from the beginning, so towards the end of this some of the same nouns and adjectives are repeated. This made for some interesting overlap and very nearly escaped perfect synchronization with the original text, especially in the last paragraph.]

    Carol did her best to blush, but all it really amounted to was a baseball tinge at the edges of her drawer. 'No, not those papers, dummy, the passport of the birth certificate we met, the afternoon of the first Road we ... you know.'

    'Whaddya mean cap? We were shoulders in April - it's now late September.'

    'It's our third jacket, dummy,' replied Carol, moving from collar, to epaulettes, to shop in the steps of a narrow form. 'I thought we ought to celebrate.'

    'What's up?' asked Dan, sitting down to read the alley in the houses with a railway track from the mob.

    But the distinctive camp and the leather Ford Fiesta, now that was a street. She was far too rounded to even consider not getting Dan his fake Melrose Mansions, however much she despised him. Not that Carol had ever neglected her little car, as far as floor mat and flat was concerned. And it was so chummy. But it could conceal the slight performance, or the two mirror. She had on an overgrown form, one of those penis that have a mutant reverie painted on the dream. Dan noticed immediately that she was yellow and wearing mire.

Note: This was typed up as a written form of the oral presentation, not as a formal thesis-driven essay. 

 Speaking order:

1. Emily (architecture and structure)

2. Blythe (bodies, structure and Foucault)

3. Kendall (bodies and Foucault)

4. Gianna (Foucaultian power and discourses)

A slide show  

Blythe
Form Versus Function – Beauty Parlor Presentation, October 19, 2007

This exoskeleton on the hill is vast. I mean, vast. When ascending the steps to the monolith before entering one has a choice to enter into one of three possible doors (if they can even be called doors – they are closer to gates). Once inside, a marble entryway greets you. A beautiful statue in the corner, a desk on the right, two absolutely gorgeous hanging light fixtures on the ceiling, the plaque of a prayer at eye level, and, on the floor, another plaque describing the time capsule placed under the floor there in 1976 by the people of Washington, addressed to the state’s inhabitants in the year 2076.  A few steps beyond this was a hallway stretching far to both the left and the right, and beyond this is a set of steps leading to a platform on which one can stand and view the great, pink-painted ‘dome’. There are stairs leading away from the platform – stairs on the right and left, slanting upwards, and stairs straight ahead and straight behind, slanting downwards. Everything is clean, swept, and silent. The platform itself is a box [draw box], and the stairs stretching away form, from a bird’s-eye-view, a grid. Ascending the stairs, one encounters another long hallway [draw hallway], mirrored by a parallel hallway on the other side [draw parallel hallway]. Continuing straight ahead is the House of Representatives – a large, ornately decorated room [draw room] with a gallery upstairs – a gallery, in this sense, meaning rows of benches where bodies can place themselves to watch the proceedings.
Turning the corner, one happens upon the State Reception Room – another elaborately decorated rectangular space with a large, brightly colored carpet, a piano in the corner, a circular table in the center, and sumptuously upholstered chairs and couches. There are also two gorgeous marble fireplaces at either end of the room.
As Emily said just now, on the tour of this space, our tour guide raves about the Bresche Italian marble of the fireplaces, that this marble is often called “picture marble” because there are pictures in it – she points out the abstractions of two butterflies and a seal, to show us an example. She also tells us that a fire has never been lit in these beautiful fireplaces, because the soot from the flames would ruin the marble.
I’d like to take the image of the unlit fireplaces a little further, and say that the Capitol building is something of a giant unlit fireplace itself. It is an enormous, beautifully crafted shell that defines and funnels the bodies inside it in order to promote maximum efficiency and production.
 The structure doesn’t seem to have many human handprints on it – I mean that there is a sense in this building that humans, throughout time, can never really transform or affect the space by existing in it. The architecture, the building materials themselves are meant to remain timeless and untouched regardless of what human events transpire within its walls. The importance of form outweighs the importance of function – the form of the fireplaces would be ruined by the function of actually lighting a fire. The building is meant to be impervious even to natural forces – it has withstood three major earthquakes (1949, 1965 and 2001) with no irreparable damage. The grid form of the space is meant to funnel bodies in specific directions – up, down, forward – always to a productive destination (the Senate, the House, the bathroom, the cafeteria, the conference room), and always in the appropriate manner (standing, walking, or sitting). It’s hard to imagine someone ever lying down, breakdancing, crab-walking, jumping or running anywhere in this structure at any point in history. The rooms are intended for bodies in large groups, so the arrangement of furniture in those spaces is focused on box-like organizational efficiency – A seat and desk for every body, the House divided down the middle into the Democratic majority and the Republican minority, every desk equipped with different colored buttons –one green and one red, depending on if one’s vote falls into the category of “yes” or “no”. (There are no buttons for “I’m not really sure” or “I just can’t think this morning” or “I’m kind of leaning towards no, but maybe I’ll feel differently after lunch”).
Besides the grid within the confines of the Capitol building, the most striking and most familiar feature of this structure is the great Dome – the combination of the Lantern (the top cupola on the building), the Dome (the curved portion) and the Colonnade (the area just below the Dome) – All of these elements together comprise what is generally known as just The Dome – it towers above the city of Olympia on a hill, overlooking Capitol Lake and surrounded by trees. The Dome is the only curved part of the Legislative Building.
On pages 88 and 89 of A History of Sexuality, Monsieur Foucault says the following: [write on board at beginning?]
“At bottom, despite the differences in epochs and objectives, the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king. Hence the importance that the theory of power gives to the problem of right and violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially the state and sovereignty (even if the latter is questioned insofar as it is personified in a collective being and no longer a sovereign individual). To conceive of power on the basis of these problems is to conceive of it in terms of a historical form that is characteristic of our societies: the juridical monarchy.”

If any structure in our society today is illustrative of the ‘representation of power remaining under the spell of monarchy’, the Capitol Building is a strong example. “We still have not cut off the head of the king” – From our perspective, the Dome of the Capitol is that literal monarchical ‘head’ – representative of the hierarchical power within, yet contradictory because of the absence of a literal king. Structures within the building hint at this ‘juridical monarchy’ – there is even a giant sculpture of the head of George Washington on the second floor, yet the nature of our legislative system is a hierarchical democracy, not a monarchy. It is difficult to walk within the building without being acutely aware of the hierarchical power systems at work, especially with the Dome towering above at all times. It is possible that the design of this building is symbolic of the head of the King; a subtle reminder of the importance and power of the seat of government.  Also, the word ‘Capitol’ means ‘Head’.

FREEWRITE: If my life were a performance, how would I script it? What would the audience be doing? Performance art? Or straight theatre?

In my performance, there would be lots of smoking and lots of worrying about other people.

I think it would be hysterically funny.

SCENE ONE:

I would be on stage, alone, smoking. A monologue about cigarettes. Followed by a monologue about ... Paris. Costumes would include my Paris polka-dotted orange lace-striped cocktail dress, the light blue farm hand suit from Norway, the rose-gold sari from India (and an ensuing monologue about how simultaneously comfortable and uncomfortable a sari is, because there's always this untraceable fear that the sari will fall off your shoulder and expose your choli-clad breasts and incite the Indian men to stare and stare and stare).

Props: a teddy bear, a journal, a pack of cigarettes, a cell phone, a trapeze, and a giant body ball.

Also, there would be a unitard.

And a middle school dance scene. I tower over everyone; men, women, teachers. I dance straight-armed with John Gorny to Sarah McLachlan's "Angel" while my friends giggle uncontrollably behind me, which is fine because I know they would murder small animals for the chance to dance with John.

The form of the form of the form; the form of the form should conform to your form and the color of the form should conform to your color (or the color you presumably fictively in actual reality are, perhaps). On your form you should confess your form and your color and the forms and colors of the other forms that sprung from your form (your little forms). If you are an unmarried form there is a separate form with corresponding color, though colored forms should refer themsel (f) (ves) 21048 to the blank form and fill in their color in the appropriate box.

The form of your work should transform the second page of this for(u)m - please record the forms your work takes and the way in which your body is (con) <> (trans) <> formed by the process.

If your state of mind is yet unformed, attach a form stating clearly your formlessness and the unformed ideas which will maybe always sometimes strike you in the future, especially if you are a pauper.

Are you a pauper?

If you are a homeless child, please roll your left index finger in dirt and wipe it in the mud-shaped box on the front of this form. Please then take your nose and roll it also in the dirt and place the imprint on the 2econd (Twond) (deuxieme) form (this has been previously heretofore dirt-rolled, for consistency and your convenience) and we will decide the form your form should take once it arrives at our offices.

Race: <> on your mark      Color: <> mauve

            <> get set                             <> neon green

            <> go                                   <> plaid