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

Allison

Fashioning the Body

Winter Project Proposal

November 27, 2007

            My winter quarter project for Fashioning the Body is composed of a critical writing element and a photographic work in series entitled The Body as a Machine: a Visual Perspective. By looking at art, especially 19^th and 20^th century photographs, and putting it in a historical context I hope to discover the significance of the body being represented as a machine.  I will be evaluating topics such as  mechanical prosthesis, body imaging and conditioning, as well as the body’s relationship with technology in today’s post-industrial society. I intend on representing my work in a photographic work in series which will be a compilation of portraits of bodies juxtaposed with images of technology and mechanics. This project will be monitored by the Fashioning the Body faculty as well as my project group. I will be presenting my project to the students and faculty of Fashioning Body during week ten of winter quarter.

            My primary theme for this project is evaluating the body as a manufactured entity.  This encompasses topics of how the body is depicted as an automaton in labor practices, the medical field, technology, and politics. I am particularly interested in how the visual arts have used mechanical imagery to discuss the relationship that our bodies have to machines. In her essay Envisioning Cyborg Bodies, Jennifer Gonzalez defines the cyborg body as “the body of an imagined cyberspatial existence. It is the site of possible being. In this sense it exists in excess of the real. But it is also embedded within the real,” (267). All images that depict the body as a machine are straddling the boundaries between current society and the realm of the imagination whether utopian or apocalyptic, optimistic or pessimistic.  It is the relationship that history has with the depictions of the mechanized body that will be the focus of my work for winter quarter.

I looked at personal ads at not only a genre but also as a culture with its own language, norms and counter cultures. The personal ad, surprisingly, has a much older and interesting part in society than one might suspect.  Personal ads began appearing in newspapers became about 300 years ago, and became regular features in the mid-19th century.

It is believed that Helen Morrison of Great Britain was the first person to place a personal ad in a newspaper. In 1727 she persuaded a local newspaper - 'The Manchester Weekly Journal' - to write an advertisement - stating that she was looking for someone nice to share her life with. It was not long before the ad was reported and she was hauled up to face the mayor of the Manchester city who quickly had her committed to a mental institution. The report is documented by the People Almanac and goes as follows: In 1727, Helen Morrison, a lonely spinster, became the first woman to place a Lonely Hearts advertisement. It appeared in the Manchester Weekly Journal. The mayor promptly committed her to a lunatic asylum for four weeks."
~The People's Almanac

Symbols, codes and word choice are the key elements required to create a personal ad. Within the confines of the ad’s space a new, secret language is developed that takes on a life of it’s own as it references codes with body type, sexual orientation, and interests. It is as if the body has been translated into binary code: succinct, but complicated.

Like the picture described by Paul Gilroy in Race Ends Here (254),  personal ads also “point to the unresolved issue of how ‘race’ interrelates with sex, gender, and sexuality; something that is further than ever from being settled and which focuses a new urgent agenda for future work.”

see attachment!

I just watched the fourth Rocky movie, the one where he fights the Russian boxer Drago.  Near the end of the movie when Rocky is training for his big fight with Drago there's a training montage (of the sort Rocky movies are famous for) where Rocky has been placed out in the wilderness of Russia in the middle of nowhere where he has no access to modern training equipment.  The montage is shots of Rocky training by doing things like chopping wood and hauling sleds full of equipment interspersed with shots of Drago using modern industrial equipment, there's a lot of metal and clanging sounds involved.  This serves to humanize Rocky and associating Drago with all the metal establishes him as a cyborg.  During the boxing match at the end of the movie, Drago is starting to lose the fight to Rocky and says to his trainer, "he is not a man, he is made of iron." So there's something going on with shifting the boundaries of the body making a person able to win.

Drago and his wife are never seen being affectionate, and Rocky and his wife are always shown kissing and hugging.  So, the way the two men relate to their wives establishes Rocky as more of a "human" as well.  Drago's wife being de-sexualized also changes (removes?) her gender and establisher her as a robo character.

I was re-watching the NSYNC video for the song "it's gonna be me".  in the video the members of the group are dressed as dolls  and are shown on a store shelf as if they are for sale.  This video was made when there were a great deal of questions about their authenticity as artists or musicians because they were a "manufactured" group- that is they were selected for the boy-band by the record company. 

"it's gonna be me" appears on the album "no strings attached" the album cover for which depicts the members of NSYNC as puppets.  This is another comment on the speculations on group lack of validity due to the fact that their music was created by a group of people and not by the singers alone. 

A line from the song "it's gonna be me" is "all that I do is not enough for you,"  to me this is another comment directed at those who question the singers' validity as artists.

Social Media

The term “Social Media,” as explained by The Economist in an article about Facebook, encompasses web applications that allows individuals to create their own pages- filled with postings, photos, video, and portable applications. The theory is that these networks will create a virtual environment in which like-minded people can find one another.

Facebook: I’ll give some examples of where this social tool is leading, and present some ways for thinking about what kinds of environments these communities can be understood as being, and how the bodies which interact in them shape and are shaped by that environment. This will both parallel and contextualize Second Life, which Ella and Devin will talk about.

Facebook/MySpace/Second Life

“Facebook describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you.” It is a website directory, online community, social calender, and virtual bulletin board.Each individual has their own profile/id page, on which they select their chosen identity from given choices, and pontificate on their likes, dislikes, favorite books, movies, music, and update a one-line entries about their current state. The user can join groups of others interested in similar things, start a group to meet people with a specific common interest, post photos, videos, and music, play games, and share information with others. The profile/id page has your picture(s), sex, age (birthday), hometown, year of graduation from what college, political and religious views, what gender you are interested in dating, your current relationship status, what sort of interactions you’re looking for with others, education history, and personal interests like favorite activites, music, favorite tv shows, and so on… there is also and an ever-expanding array of what are called “applications” created by anyone (much like how anyone can create products for sale and use in the Second Life world.) A large number of them that I saw are about keeping up with sports teams, finding out what people think of you, flirting, sending virtual hugs, smiles and gifts, while others expand the identification constraints- such as one which addresses gender in particular- creating options both binary and non-binary, for sex, transition status, gender identity, gender presentation, orientation, interested in, title, and pronoun, Another of interest is the Facebook Addicts, which is a satirical quiz for those who feel that they no longer know a world outside Facebook, a potentially logical question when Internet Addiction Disorder, which renders a person incapable of taking care of their material body, is diagnosed in 2% of the world’s population.

The Maids: Gender, Ritual and Power

I will be directing a production of Jean Genet’s one-act play The Maids.  I will hold auditions on November 28th, 29th, and 30th. I will orchestrate rehearsals twice a week for two hours at a time, culminating in several final performances to be held at the end of winter quarter.  I will be responsible for providing creative direction to the actors, supervising and planning rehearsal periods, and creating a concept for set, costume, light and sound design.
    The central themes and concerns of this project revolve primarily around gender and power. Genet’s play, taken on its own terms, does not specifically explore gender themes except perhaps in the relation between Madame and Monsieur (a character whom we never see). The three characters in the play are all female. The way in which I propose to enact a discourse on gender is to cast two male-identified individuals in the roles of Claire and Solange. The third role, Madame, will be played by someone who identifies as female.
    What attracted Jean Genet to the theatre was the sheer artifice of the medium. He loved drama because it is all make-believe; it is a deliberately manipulative art form, a false reality designed to deceive, and this deception is perfectly socially accepted (even encouraged). His plays are Brechtian in that they desire to be a vehicle for social change, but depart from Brecht in that Genet was particularly interested in manipulating and sustaining contradictions in the minds of his audience. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his introduction to The Maids, tells us that “For Genet, theatrical procedure is demoniacal. Appearance, which is constantly on the point of passing itself off as reality, must constantly reveal its profound unreality. Everything must be so false that it sets our teeth on edge” (10). It is partly in keeping with this spirit of false appearances that I would like to cast male-identified actors in female roles. The characters of Claire and Solange are identity onions; almost every layer they present to us is peeled back to reveal another underneath, and none of these layers is quite the truth. If the actors are male, the visible fact of their maleness will contribute an added layer of falsehood to the performance that will demand critical interpretation by the audience (by virtue of the audience’s difficulty in suspending disbelief and difficulty in buying into the illusion of the play). Once the characters of Claire and Solange appear to have finally revealed their “true selves”, the viewer will be left to wrestle further with the visual contradiction of a male playing a female role.
    From this inquiry into appearances I hope to generate discourse about what, if anything, lies at the core of human identity. I hope to play with identity as though it were nothing but a series of reiterative gestures, to be put on and cast off at will. Through the theatrical presentation of Claire and Solange’s journey, I hope also to create discussion around gender identity, power relations in gender roles (it may cause dissonance to see men playing a traditionally female role, serving a woman) and cultural anxiety about the spectacle of seeing men wearing women’s clothing. I am just as deeply interested in the social experiment of directing this particular production, the experiment of myself – an identified female – directing identified males playing the roles of identified females. To this effect, I will be keeping a detailed production journal of what occurs in our rehearsals, to be turned in at the end of the quarter. I plan to use this journal as a place for recording and analyzing the production process, as well as a way to remember and share all of the unseen work that goes into a play.
    I am choosing the medium of the theatre because it is one in which I have much experience and interest. I believe that the visceral experience of watching people perform live, in front of an audience, lends a story depth that other mediums do not. It provides a space for humans to gather together and share a common experience, and it breathes life into text that might otherwise remain on the page. The process of staging a production requires intensive emotional and psychological commitment, and forges a tight-knit community of people that must work closely together to bring something wonderful to fruition.  The theatre is also the perfect medium in which to explore identity, because of the established and understood fact that the audience is filing in to watch people pretending to be other people. Since this is a phenomenon that occurs daily in our non-theatre-related lives, it is almost a comfort to come to a place where we know what we’re getting into, and we are willing to accept and embrace the masks that others wear.
    My project is in dialogue primarily with Jean Genet. The Maids is his conception, and I intend to engage with a selection of his other plays and novels, as well as literary criticism of his work. As a supplement to this dialogue, I will turn to various authors writing on the avant-garde theatre (a movement to which Genet belonged), French culture in the 1930s – 1940s (especially of the bourgeois and the working class), and identity politics surrounding gender.
    The skills required in order for me to complete this project are as follows:
- A strong grasp of the technical aspects of staging a production
    - Knowledge of acting and directing technique
    - Leadership skills
    - Strong communication skills
    - Acting ability
        
The resources required in order for me to complete this project are as follows:
-    Performance space (in Evergreen’s Communications Building)
-    Rehearsal space
-    Audition space
-    Access to Evergreen’s Costume Shop
-    Scripts of The Maids (already obtained)
-    Access to materials for set building (wood, paint, tools)
-    Set pieces (bed, vanity, dresser, mirror, furniture)
-    Props (hairbrush, makeup, tea set, broom, gloves, telephone, alarm clock, flowers, jewel case, jewels)

            We will be writing a foundation grant for props, set and supply costs. We will buy used building materials and props from second hand stores. Some of the basic supplies needed are:
·       Wood

·       Door

·       Paint

·       Fabric

·       Some Props

We will also be using many of our own resources as well as borrowing things. Melissa (my stage manager)’s mother is a theater teacher for a high school, so we will have access to their props and costumes if needed. We will most likely not spend money on:

·       Set décor

·       Set furniture

·       Hardware

·       Costumes

·       Makeup

·       Some Props

·       Play bills and flyers

·       Tools

All of our actors and tech crew will be volunteers.

Budget:

Wood: $35-45  -used 2x4's cost about $2.50 a piece

Door: $15-25   -a used inside door costs about $20

Paint: $5-18    - depending on the color, you can buy a mistakenly mixed paint can for $5. About $18 for a new one.

Fabric: $10-30   -used curtains from Goodwill cost about $5 a piece; brand new fabric would be around $30.

Props: $25-40

    Throughout the rehearsal process, I will be looking into any live performances in the Seattle, Olympia and Portland areas that explore related themes from the play: power, gender, French culture, cross-dressing, domestic servitude, etc. I would like us (myself, the cast, and stage manager) to attend a drag show in Portland (Darcelle XV) at some point, to see if any aspects of watching men in women’s clothing will aid the cast in their performance.
    Note on the rehearsals: I want to leave these fairly open, as the rehearsal process is organic and depends largely on the actors. We will work on specific scenes as we need to, and the process will happen however it happens. I will plan for specific things (acting workshops, live performances, etc.) but the rehearsals themselves will be unpredictable, and changes to my personal syllabus will be made as we go along.



Personal Syllabus
FALL QUARTER

November 12 – 16 (Week 8)
-    Reserve COM 209 / 210 for auditions - get faculty signatures and hand in pink sheet (By Tuesday 11 / 13)
-    Complete, get faculty signatures, and hand in green sheet for use of COM building spaces for performances (by Wednesday 11/14)
-     Make audition ‘teaser’ posters & distribute liberally around campus
-    Give Melissa her own copy of “The Maids”

November 19 – 23 (Thanksgiving Break – Week 9)
-    Re-read “The Maids”, choose cold readings for auditions, make photocopies
-    Make up audition information sheets, make photocopies
-    Eat Thanksgiving Dinner

November 26 – 30
-    Hold auditions in COM building
-    Make casting decisions

December 3 – 7
-    Email casting decisions to audition participants
-    Email cast, plan for a meeting this week or next
-    Meet with cast, introductions, distribute scripts, discuss rehearsal times for winter quarter, answer questions, etc.

December 10 – 14 (Eval Week)
-    Time off for eval conferences.

December 15 – January 6 – (Winter Break)
-    Reread play, make outline of major transitions in scenes, analyze text, prepare for first rehearsal


WINTER QUARTER

JANUARY

Week One (1/7 – 1/11)
-    Rehearsal: confirm rehearsal times and locations, read-through, establish deadline for being off-book, theatre games
-    Read Sanford Meisner On Acting
-    Read excerpt from Genet: a collection of critical essays
-    Collaborate with Melissa & Maria to create an “actor’s info packet”, comprised of different perspectives on ‘The Maids’ and Meisner exercises
-    Foundation grant proposal due

Week Two (1/14 – 1/18)
- Rehearsal: Meisner / Stanislavsky / Viewpoints workshop with Venu Mattraw
- Read Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double
- Read “Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty”, from Avant Garde Theatre
- Read excerpt from The Imagination of Jean Genet

Week Three (1/21 – 1/18)
-Rehearsal: Watch Murderous Maids
-Read Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed
-Read “Our Lady of the Flowers”
-Off Book?


Week Four (1/28 – 2/1)
-Rehearsal, work on what needs work
-Read Excerpt from Jean Genet and his Critics
-Read excerpt from Jean Genet: a study of his novels and plays
-Read excerpt from Saint Genet

FEBRUARY

Week Five (2/4 – 2/7)
-Rehearsal: costumes & sets meeting
-Read excerpts from France since 1870
-Read excerpt from Modern France


Week Six (2/11-2/14)
Rehearsal: work on what needs work, costume & wig fittings
-Read The Papin Sisters
-Read excerpt from The Politics of Women’s Bodies
-Drag show in Portland?

Week Seven (2/18-2/21)
Rehearsal: light and sound design meeting, Stumble-through
-Read excerpt from Blending Genders
-Read excerpt from Revealing Male Bodies

Week Eight (2/25 – 2/29)
-Rehearsal 1: Run-through AND work on individual scenes
-Rehearsal 2: Run-through
-Move set pieces into COM building


Week Nine (3/3 – 3/7)
-Rehearsal: TECH WEEK. Dry tech (run-through w/ light and sound cues)
-Rehearsal: Wet tech (run show)
-Dress rehearsal
-Final Dress rehearsal
-OPENING NIGHT MARCH 7, 7 p.m.

Annotated Bibliography

Genet

Brooks, Peter and Joseph Halpern, eds. Genet, a collection of critical essays. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1979. 31-46, 146-155, 172-177, 178-190. This book brings together a selection of essays written on Genet himself, his novels and plays, and the theories behind his work. The essays I will be using are “The Theatre of Genet: A Sociological Study” by Lucien Goldman; “Genet, His Actors and Directors” by Odette Aslan; “Profane and Sacred Reality in Jean Genet’s Theatre” by Jean Gitenet and “I Allow Myself to Revolt”, an interview with Jean Genet by Hubert Fichte.


McMahon, Joseph H. The Imagination of Jean Genet. Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1963. 145-155. This book is a deep and rich biography of Genet that also includes in-depth explorations of his most celebrated works, including The Maids. The excerpt I will be using is the chapter entitled “’Haute Surveillance’ and ‘Les Bonnes’”.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Saint Genet, actor and martyr. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: G. Braziller, 1963. This book is Sartre’s celebration of Genet’s life and work, and Sartre’s own existentialist interpretation of all that Genet did and wrote. He also explores Genet’s status as a symbolic and philosophical figure, and delves deeply into all that Genet’s life meant, both on a personal and on a societal level.

Thody, Philip Malcom Waller. Jean Genet: a study of his novels and plays. New York: Stein and Day, 1969. 25-54, 163-178. This book is also a biography of Genet, with a sizeable chapter on Genet’s philosophy of the theatre and on The Maids. I will be using Chapter Two, “Problems and Themes” and Chapter Nine, “The Maids”.

Webb, Richard C. and Suzanne A. Webb. Jean Genet and his Critics: An Annotated Bibliography, 1943 – 1980. New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1982. 309-354. This amazing work brings together almost every single snippet of critical review of Genet’s work, from 1943 until 1980. Some of them are reviews of his plays, some are of his novels, and some are of the man himself. The portions of this book that interest  me are specifically the critical reviews of various productions of The Maids.  

White, Edmund, ed. The selected writings of Jean Genet. New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1993. This book is a collection of some of Genet’s most celebrated works. I intend to read Our Lady of the Flowers, Miracle of the Rose, and Funeral Rites.

Theatre

Artaud, Antonin and Mary C. Richard. The Theatre and Its Double. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1958. This is a collection of essays on Artaud’s philosophy of the theatre. More specifically, it contains the manifesto of his ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, where Artaud expressed the importance of recovering "the notion of a kind of unique language half-way between gesture and thought." Artaud and Genet are often compared, and my hope is that this book will serve as an aid to understanding Genet’s play and offer a different perspective on how to perform it, as well as the theatre in general as an artistic medium.

Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. Trans. McBride, Charles A. and Maria-Odilia McBride. New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 1979.

Brustein, Robert. The Theatre of Revolt. 2nd ed. Illinois: Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1991. 363 – 411. “In a new edition of this now –classic work, Robert Brustein argues that the roots of the modern theatre may be found in the soil of rebellion cultivated by eight outstanding playwrights: Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Brecht, Pirandello, O’Neill, and Genet. Focusing on each of them in turn, Mr. Brustein considers the nature of their revolt, the methods employed in their plays, their influences on the modern drama, and the playwrights themselves.” I will be reading the section that explores the parallels between Artaud and Genet’s philosophies, entitled “Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet: The Theatre of Cruelty”.

Innes, Christopher. Avant Garde Theatre 1892 – 1992. New York: Routledge Inc., 1993. 108-117, 59-77. This book discusses Genet and Artaud, as well as certain subjects both were obsessed with, such as death, ritual, and illusion. There is also a nice summary of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. The titles of these excerpts are called “Black Masses and Ceremonies of Negation: Jean Genet” and “Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty”.

Meisner, Sanford and Dennis Longwell. Sanford Meisner on Acting. New York: Random House, 1987. This is Sanford Meisner’s acting and directing manifesto. It follows one of his master classes in New York, and explains in detail his acting and directing technique, as well as being sort of a workbook for actors. I will be using Meisner’s acting style as the primary teaching tool for my cast.

Gender

Tuana, Nancy, William Cowling, Maurice Hamilton, Greg Johnson and Terrance MacMullan, eds. Revealing Male Bodies. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992.  This book is something of a reaction to all the literature surrounding women’s bodies. It is a collection of essays on male identity and male bodies, gender norms, the social aspects of the human body, and issues surrounding the specifically male anatomy. I am interested in this book primarily for its sections on the male experience of wearing women’s clothing, and of assuming a female identity. My hope is to be able to understand more of what it will mean to place male actors in female roles. The excerpts I will be using are “Dragging Out the Queen: Male Femaling and Male Feminism”  and “Turnabout: Gay Drag Queens and the Masculine Embodiment of the Feminine”.


Ekins, Richard and Dave King, eds. Blending Genders: Social Aspects of Cross-dressing and Sex-changing. New York: Routledge, 1996. “In Blending Genders international contributors come together in a lively discussion of all those who attempt to blend various aspects of gender, either in respect of themselves or others. In addition to historical, sociological and political analyses the book includes a number of personal and descriptive accounts. Blending Genders is the first comprehensive treatment of the social aspects of cross-dressing and sex-changing and, as such, can rightly lay first claim to an emerging field of transgender studies.” I have interest in this book because of its discussion of ‘historical crossdressing’. Specifically, the article I will read is from “Part I: Experiencing Gender Blending”. The article is titled “In Female Attire: Male Experiences of Cross-Dressing – Some Historical Fragments”.

Weitz, Rose. The Politics of Women’s Bodies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 25-45. “The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance and Behavior, 2/e, brings together recent critical writings in this important field, covering such diverse topics as the sources of eating disorders, the nature of lesbianism, and the consequences of violence against women.” I will be reading the article by Sandra Lee Bartky “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power”.

France

Sowerwine, Charles. France Since 1870: culture, politics and society. New York: Palgrave, 2001. (Chapter 9, France after the War, 1919 – 28. “France since 1870 is a history of France from the definitive establishment of the Republic in the 1870s to the social and economic changes of the 1990s. It brings a fresh gendered and cultural approach to bear on social and political issues. Sowerwine has created a narrative history covering a broad sweep of French history, including such dramatic events as the Commune, the Dreyfus Affair, World War I, the Popular Front, Vichy and the French Holocaust, and May ’68.” I will be using this book to help familiarize myself with the French experience during the time this play takes place. I am hoping to gain insight into the characters, the playwright, the experience of the Papin sisters by studying the experience of working class French women in general during this period. I will be reading the excerpts “Class Struggle”, “The Elections of 1919”, “Gender struggle: Repression” and “Gender struggle: Liberation?”.

McMillan, James, ed. Modern France 1880-2002, from The Short Oxford History of France, William Doyle, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. This book will be another source on the experience and power struggles of working class French women during the period The Maids takes place. I will read Chapter 6: Women: Distant Vistas, Changed Lives.

Edwards, Rachel and Keith Reader. The Papin Sisters. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. This is an in-depth study of the Papin sisters, Christine and Léa. (the real-life women on whose story Genet based his plot for The Maids.). I hope that by having knowledge of their story, I will be able to more accurately understand what Genet was attempting to do with his play.