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“These appearances can never contain anything but what geometry prescribes to them.” —Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics “These things arrived from my grandmothers[.] gra ndmothers[.] [T]hey make me think about where I fit in this odd geometry of time.” —Francesca Woodman, !"#$ &'(")*$)$* +,-$)'") .$"#$-)'$(!
I first saw the American photographer Francesca Woodman’s (1958–81) work in an exhibit titled “The Disembodied Spirit,” curated by Alison Ferris in Brunswick, Maine.2 The scene of this initial encounter intimated some of the central problems of the sublime: the disorienting risk of the sublime, the way that the sublime overwhelms the observer. For, having arrived at Bowdoin College Museum on a bierly cold winter day day,, helping my toddler toddle r from the car, I had bumped my head hard on the car roof and consequently met Woodman’s work not only in a context of nineteenth-century spirit photographs but also, possibly, in a mildly concussed state. A central aspect of the sublime—that it overwhelms the viewer, reversing the power dynamic between the active gaze and the passive object gazed upon—was structured, then, into my introduction to Woodman’ Woodman’ss work. That aernoon, ae rnoon,
1 The phrase appears in Woodman’ Woodman’ss text wrien below two photographs in !"#$ &'(")*$)$* +,-$)'") .$"#$-)'$( , reproduced in Chris Townsend, Townsend, Francesca Woodman (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 2006), 238. 2 Alison Ferris, “The Disembodied Spirit,” The Disembodied Spirit Exhibition /0-01"2 (Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2003), 32–43.
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Angel series, and “Self-Portrait seeing images from the 3"4($ series, the Angel Talking to Vince,” I was struck by the risk entailed in the work. Unlike the photographic records of the “disembodied spirit” in the context of which Woodman’s pictures at Bowdoin appeared, Woodman’s photographs of herself radically disallow the comfort of an easily separated soul and body. Indeed, it struck me that the photographs expressed expre ssed unusual claims in their visual address of ontology ontology.. In their paradoxical blurring and emphasizing emphas izing of the body, body, Woodman’s Woodman’s pictures pose questions about the limits li mits of subjectivity s ubjectivity in materiality. Ferris’s decision to place Woodman’s photographs with nineteenthcentury spirit photographs is itself a fascinating move. Woodman’s work, which oen has been received as biographical revelation, as bare sincerity, sincerity, was here juxtaposed with spirit photography, which can be understood as a trick to make mourners believe the photograph has indeed captured the image of the departing soul. Ferris’s exhibit suggested to me a way to read Woodman’s work not as the visual confession of a troubled psyche, a youthful suicide, but rather as an interrogation of the very terms of photography, an interrogation both of the “tricks” that photography can play and, significantly, of the idea that aesthetics override tricks. Indeed, this placing of photography at the heart of the problem of the aesthetic— the question of whether aesthetic effects are tricks, illusions, or eruptive markers of the real—seems to me Woodman’s stroke of genius. Her pictures remind us that photography in its liminality, historically placed between bet ween sci scienc encee and art art,, bet between ween per person sonal al rec record ord and pub public lic exh exhibi ibition tion,, forces key questions of the aesthetic, and does so by visually invoking the sublime. The role of the frame, which Jacques Derrida’s 5)4-6 ', 70',-',2 argues is foundational to the sublime, is essential to photography in a highly determinative fashion.3 Nothing else determines the photograph’s existence like the frame f rame and Woodman’s Woodman’s mark, I will argue, is her multiply m ultiply approached tilting of the frame. Likewise, questions of power in the gaze coalesce around photography’s necessity of capturing what in an irreducible sense was there, stipulating the gesture of capturing the image as opposed to painting’s gesture of recollecting the image.4 Woodman’s awareness of her medium as a kind of devil’ devil’ss crossroads in aesthetic theory evinced in her orchestrated troubling of the frame seem s to me a source of her images’ power. Indeed, when I first saw her work at Bowdoin, I was unaware of her biography. biography.
5)4-6 ', 70',-',2 70', -',2 , trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod 3 Jacques Derrida, 56$ 5)4-6 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
4 See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography , trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).
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Maria DiBaista provocatively argues for a connection between the woman artist and scandal, and it is true that the scandal of Woodman’s suicide, dead by her own hand at twenty-two, makes its way into many interpretations of her photographs." While acknowledging with DiBaista the power of biography in shaping an artist’s reputation, I also argue for the validity of distinguishing reception history from aesthetic content. In this book, I will be structuring a distance from reception history readings, focusing instead on the connection between Woodman’s photography and the enduring and troubling concept of the sublime.6 Developing from earlier feminist revisions of the sublime, I suggest that Kant’s sublime, theorized in the /)'-'84$ "9 :4*2$#$,as a disturbing and powerful species of aesthetic experience, indeed a limit of the aesthetic, helps us to interpret Woodman’s work, and I also contend that Woodman’s work calls us to reinterpret the Kantian sublime.7 Regardless of whether Woodman thought of her self-portraits as “theoretical objects,” or theory-producing objects (Mieke Bal’s concept, to which I will return), she was interrogating the Kantian sublime by making work that is about the gendered problem of seeing, seeing herself through and as photographic image. Writing of Louise Bourgeois’s !;'*$) , Mieke Bal suggests that the work itself generates and concretizes theory, that it does not passively receive the inscription of theory but instead produces theory.# Although the photograph’s status as object can be contested, I extrapolate from Bal to argue that Woodman’s photographs are not passive receptacles of aesthetic theory but rather interrogate, alter, and generate that theory. Kant’s complex understanding of the sublime, reason’s boundary, offers a useful template for understanding Woodman’s powerful photographs, and in turn Woodman’s photographs revise how we interpret the Kantian sublime. In particular, this revision speaks to feminist concerns with Kant’s aesthetics. Barbara Claire Freeman’s The Feminine Sublime and Lynda Nead’s The Female Nude both significantly ally Kant’s sublime with violence against
5 Maria DiBaista, “Scandalous Maer: Women Artists and the Crisis of Embodiment,” in Women Artists at the Millennium , ed. Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 427–37. 6 I realize that one could raise the question of whether the Enlightenment sublime retains validity at all in our contemporary discourse. My argument is that in terms of Woodman’s work it does—as Townsend makes the point, her work extends from the European tradition. For a larger discussion of the contemporary usefulness of the Kantian sublime, see Jonathan Loesberg, A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference, 0,* 7"(-#"*$),'(# (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 1–13. 7 Immanuel Kant, /)'-'84$ "9 :4*2$#$,- , ed. Nicholas Walker, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 8 Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 5.
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femininity, against the female body, while Patricia Yaeger in “Towards a Female Sublime” also contends with the fraught place of gender in the sublime.$ While Nead’s and Freeman’s understanding of a violent relationship between the frame and the body coheres with my sense of Kant’s aesthetics as steeped in the problem of power differentials, I believe that already implicit in Kant’s sublime is an ungendered space, or a space of such excessive power and force that it exposes and ravels the pretense of gender. I will be departing, then, from more traditional feminist readings of Kant. While honoring the importance of their recognition of the tradition in the aesthetic of violence directed against the female or feminized body, I will suggest that Kant’s influential sublime does not so much thematize violence against femininity as it maps a violence that disrupts and evaporates gender, not destroying femininity specifically but rather broadly effacing gender designations, in the sublime as limit or boundary of the aesthetic. If texts theorizing affect, such as Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings , have appropriated Kant’s sublime as affect, in this book I hope to make clear the work that aesthetics can perform when not subsumed under the rubric of mood.10 Of course, Woodman’s images can evoke moods in her audience; or, as Derrida puts it, in response to the sublime, one appropriately mourns.!! But by inserting, for example, disgust in the place of the sublime, Ngai misunderstands the structured freight of perception that Kant loads into the sublime.12 It is in that terrain of an architectonic theorization of perception that I will show Woodman intervenes. Rather than interpreting Kant’s sublime as affect, then, I engage the /)'-'84$ "9 :4*2$#$,- through its efforts to theorize the aesthetic as structure. The Kantian sublime turns on a declension, or recognition, of the separation between the aesthetic and mood, tone, affect. Woodman’s rigorous work may evoke a mood in audiences, but that affect is not intrinsic to the photographs. Separating the cultic, affective “Francesca Woodman” created by reception history from the architectonic, -6$")$-'<01 "=>$<-( of her photographs is a goal of this study. It aims to recuperate the
9 Barbara Claire Freeman, The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992); Patricia Yaeger, “Towards a Female Sublime,” in Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Theory , ed. Linda Kaufman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 191–212. 10 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 334–35. 11 Derrida, 5)4-6 ', 70',-',2 , 44. 12 Here, I direct the reader to Ngai’s Ugly Feelings , especially the chapter that coins the term “stuplimity” (248–98). Her concept of “stuplimity” is obviated by a consideration of the way that repetition is already fully and indeed even comprehensively considered by the /)'-'84$ "9 :4*2$#$,- itself, in the concept of magnitude, for example (272).
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sublime as distinct from affect. Insofar as we want to meet Kant where he lives and hope to meet Woodman where she lives, in her photographs, we cannot interpret the sublime as a feeling or even as usefully comparable to states of feeling. Rather, as I believe Woodman’s photographs make clear, the work of the sublime as aesthetic category inheres in the way it troubles the conceptual and bodily threshold around the always elusive gesture of seeing. Seeing emerges as a boundary disturbance, a problematic of structural space: the more the subject sees, the more disturbing. Moreover, Kant’s aesthetics and Woodman’s self-portraits throw into relief, place into the gaze, what Teresa de Lauretis calls the -)04#0 "9 2$,*$): a violent moment of vision that ineluctably structurally must precede the subject’s response to it.13 Gender as cultural construct, however notionally correct, is overwhelmed at the crux of the aesthetic, the terrain that Woodman’s disturbing photographs mine. Indeed, this problem of the aesthetic arguably '( the crux of gender. This is not to say that I am arguing for the aesthetic as proof of essentialized gender roles. On the contrary, I am arguing that the troubling remainder of gender (that which resists postfeminist theories of gender undone) surfaces in the problem of the sublime, this problematic interlocking of power and the gaze, of formalization and the impossible to inscribe rules of form. In reading for the problem of gender in the sublime, we yet can interrogate its violence, its capacity to violate the subject. Woodman’s interpretation of the aesthetic through photography aends to Kant’s notion of the sublime as that which paradoxically can be theorized and violates theorization. Woodman’s photographs’ distinctive combination of self-portrait, blur, and de-centering similarly intervene in notions of the centrality of the subject, that watchword of humanism, and significantly interrogate the problem of the gaze displaced from the body through the mechanism of photography. The camera’s eye is the logical extension of Enlightenment privileging of rationality as the clearest vision—the ultimate eye being that glass lens uncannily displaced from the body.14 Woodman’s photographs, signifying key terms of the sublime, play through the problem of the displaced camera-eye and the regressive Romantic trope of the interior eye, the gaze as repository of memory. Woodman’s self-portraits, in their emphasis on the gendered self—reprising, redressing, and troubling the tradition of the female nude—articulate photography as the embodiment of the Enlightenment gaze, a mechanistic
13 Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 21, 23. 14 Even as Geoffrey Batchen persuasively argues for photography’s foundational links with Romanticism, I point out that an understanding of Romanticism itself must include Kant’s historical role with regard to the Jenna Romantics. See Batchen, ?4),',2 with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
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rational gaze, and confront this problematic of vision with the gazed upon apparently female body.!" For Woodman, the female body functions as a kind of lure and collapse, drawing the mechanized gaze of the camera but also implicated in the production of that gaze, the body itself mechanized. Woodman’s virtuosic revelation of the relationship between architecture and the body ties her photography to Kant’s sublime through a shared gesture of founding the aesthetic on the body’s relationship to space as inhabitation, as house.16 As Bachelard makes clear, “No dreamer ever remains indifferent for long to a picture of a house.”17 The dream of the aesthetic inaugurated in Kant’s sublime is a dream configured architecturally, and Woodman both inhabits this configuration and troubles it—showing the threatened status of the female form in the architecture of aesthetic formalization and also, in entering the house of aesthetic formalization, deploying its violent propensities for her interrogations of the gaze. Drawing from Sarah Kofman’s theorization, in The Camera Obscura of +*$"1"2@ , of the camera as metaphor for the gaze, I argue that Woodman’s images interrogate the camera’s gaze as both engendered by and revelatory of Enlightenment notions of perception.!# Concurring with Geoffrey Batchen’s reservations about finding the historical “origin” story of photography, I point to Kofman’s Camera Obscura’s example of refusing to locate a pure or real origin of photography and instead understanding photography as metaphor.!$ When I refer to the camera obscura, then, I am referring more to its work as metaphor than to the camera obscura object. I understand as Kofman does the work and implications of that cultural metaphor which is photography. In such an understanding, the very problem that Batchen highlights of the story of origins—“this historical move, this gesture to an originary moment of birth”— is itself elided.20 In metaphor, of course, there is no origin, but
15 Adorno and Horkheimer, for example, discuss the “operation of the intellectual mechanism which structures perception in accordance with the understanding” in 56$ &'01$<-'< "9 A,1'26-$,#$,-. See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, 56$ &'01$<-'< "9 A,1'26-$,#$,- , trans. John Gumming (London: Verso, 1997), 82. 16 Noting Woodman’s tendency to photograph interiors, I refer readers to Paul de Man’s interpretation of Kant’s aesthetic as fundamentally architectonic. See “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant” and “Kant’s Materialism” in Aesthetic +*$"1"2@ , ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 70–91, 119–28. 17 Gaston Bachelard, 56$ 7"$-'<( "9 !;0<$ , trans. Maria Jolas, 1964 (Boston: Beacon, 1994), 49. 18 Sarah Kofman, Camera Obscura of Ideology , trans. Will Straw (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 19 Batchen, Burning with Desire , 17. 20 Ibid., 17–18.
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rather two terms clarifying and contending with one another. My interest in understanding Woodman’s interaction with the sublime is not to claim that she revises some always unprovable “pure” Enlightenment origin as rather to suggest that she participates in and interrogates the same problems emergent and still unresolved, or tense and intent, in Kant’s approach to the problem of the seeing subject, of seeing the subject, and of surviving seeing and being seen. Woodman’s fame, placed as it is in a troublingly passive position by her suicide, is made scandalously feminine (speaking descriptively not normatively). But the cause of her posthumous approach, like any suicide, bears an impenetrable illegibility and cannot be read as preordained.21 Since her death just shy of her twenty-third birthday, Woodman has been steadily accumulating critical aention and acclaim. Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s 1986 essay “Just Like A Woman,” noted by Peggy Phelan to have introduced Woodman to a national audience, placed Woodman in feminist discourse even as the photographer’s self-portraits reflexively established some of that discourse.22 Solomon-Godeau, Ann Gabhart, and Rosalind Krauss, who collaborated in creating the important Wellesley College catalogue of Woodman’s work, established her as a photographer who informs parameters of self-representation for a subsequent generation.23
21 Recent research in the field of psychology emphasizes the newly emerging understanding of many suicides as impulsive acts—not fated and inevitable but in some real sense random, or at least evitable. See, for a quick but good overview, Sco Anderson, “The Urge to End it All,” New York Times , July 6, 2008. 22 See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Just Like a Woman,” in Francesca Woodman: Photographic Work, April 9–June 8, 1986 , ed. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Ann Gabhart, and Rosalind Woodman Krauss (Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College Museum), 11–35, and Peggy Phelan, “Francesca Woodman’s Photography: Death and the Image One More Time,” !'2,( 27, no. 4 (2002): 984. 23 If Solomon-Godeau’s essay, “Just Like a Woman,” published seven years aer Woodman’s death, effectively implied Woodman’s viability as a canonical artist, a privileging reflective of Solomon-Godeau’s own high standing as a critic, Peggy Phelan’s 2002 “Francesca Woodman’s Photography” in its turn continued the trend of using Woodman’s posthumous oeuvre as exemplary of the problematic of the female artist in the late twentieth century while reflexively strengthening the photographer’s reputation as an artist about whom critics write. Eva Rus has joined Solomon-Godeau in interpreting Woodman as a feminist surrealist (“Surrealism and Self-Representation in the Photography of Francesca Woodman,” 49th Parallel , Spring 2005), while JuiCh’i Liu argues that Woodman’s oeuvre symbolizes a longing to return to the womb (“Francesca Woodman’s Self-Images: Transforming Bodies in the Space of Femininity,” Woman’s Art Journal 25, no. 1 [2004]: 26–31), and Jesse Hoffman is developing an essay tracking the emblems of Ophelia in Woodman’s work (personal communication, May, 2009). Essays on Woodman’s photography have appeared in journals ranging from the Atlantic Monthly to the Nation to Artforum to the Observer Magazine , suggesting
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Woodman’s cult status as a prodigy, literally an otherworldly phenomenon, and the dramatic, self-imposed truncation of her career by suicide haunt most critical readings of her work. As Rosalind Krauss discusses in her essay “Francesca Woodman: Problem Sets,” the bulk of Woodman’s photographs were made while the photographer was still a student at the Rhode Island School of Design.24 Chris Townsend has extended the notion of Woodman as eternal student, insisting that we must “never let go of the fact” of Woodman’s identity as a “schoolgirl” while she was making her photographs, an encoding of gender as diminishment, covertly signaling the trope of the femme-enfant , to which I will return.25 Yet the ramifications of her age, like the interpretive valences of her suicide, are complex.26 While theorizations of Woodman’s age and gender—criticisms that implicitly focus on the history of her reception— may be quite valid, it is important to notice that Woodman herself commented on her role as femme-enfant in a highly self-conscious, allusive, lifelong selfportrait project, work commenting on and shaping the aesthetic. And yet her great topic is the problem of self-consciousness as the vanishing point of the gaze. The virtuosic effect that Woodman achieves in her photographs stems from her images’ interplay between the performance of that cultural icon the “schoolgirl” and the self-possessed gaze of the artist, herself, taking the photograph—a gaze that frames the rhetoric of her performance of femme-enfant. The self-portrait of the artist as a young woman
Woodman’s broad cultural reach—as does her well-supported Wikipedia entry (“Francesca Woodman,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia , rev. August 10, 2008, , accessed August 18, 2008). 24 Rosalind Krauss, “Francesca Woodman: Problem Sets,” in ?0<6$1")( (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 161–77. 25 Townsend, Francesca Woodman , 6. Townsend also claims that “Woodman never understood herself as a fully realized artist,” even though there is no evidence to support the idea that Woodman was ignorant of her accomplishment, and he problematically makes the sweeping claim that Woodman was not in full control of her materials (6). Without question, Woodman was a prodigy, creating her oeuvre between the ages of 13 and 22. However, that does not definitively mean that she was unaware of her accomplishments or not in control of the creation of her art. One remembers, for example, the French writer Arthur Rimbaud as a major poet whose oeuvre was produced in his extreme youth. Indeed, Townsend’s monograph mentions Rimbaud, calling him not a schoolboy but a poet (57). 26 The question raised by Rosalind Krauss of whether Woodman worked in problem sets subtly but importantly differs from Townsend’s use of the term “schoolgirl,” for Krauss implicitly points us toward Woodman’s engagement with mathematics, a concern in accord with the geometry school workbook that signally informed and shaped the one book published during Woodman’s lifetime. I privilege Woodman’s conceptualization of this book precisely because it is a book that she herself shaped from beginning to end in her lifetime. See Krauss, “Problem Sets,” 161–77.
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becomes Woodman’s uncanny gesture toward the gendered mark of the “schoolgirl,” a figure secured by her repetitive use of Mary Janes as fetish object, for example, and by her self-portraits’ dramatization of the contrast between her usually disrobed, sexually maturing body and her still cherubic, rounded face. Admiedly, the question of whether Woodman’s photographs of herself are self-portraits is open to debate. Woodman photographs herself, or young women who double as herself, not to fasten identity but to trouble and complicate identity, an important twist on the self-portrait, but one that nonetheless allows her work still to be classified within that genre. For this reason, I emphasize the importance of Woodman’s use of the self-portrait as structuring genre.27 But what are the links between self-portraiture and the sublime? Necessarily, the disembodying, or self-separating, act of making the photograph selfportrait brings up the sublime as that aesthetic venture of dislocation ;0) excellence. The body in Woodman’s self-portraits is positioned as a figure standing for the subject-who-sees, and the subject-who-sees in the /)'-'84$ "9 :4*2$#$,- experiences the sublime as a dislocating violence. The body-prop is femininely troped in Woodman’s self-portraits: dressed and undressed to emphasize gender, positioned in metonymically violent relationship with its surroundings. This double awareness—the artist’s awareness of the cultural currency of her body and her awareness of her body as materiality— exemplifies Woodman’s understanding of violence in the aesthetic, and the disorienting stroke of the sublime. This violence is a gendered violence for Kant insofar as he describes the mind in the moment of sublime perception in positionally gendered terms, a feminized seeing subject violently treated by the (4=)$;-'", , or violent seduction, of the (for Kant) always interiorized event of perception. My turn on reading the problem of gender in the Kantian sublime, however, is to look not at how questions of gender arise in our response to Kant but at how 01)$0*@ in Kant’s work a disorientation of gendering shapes the aesthetic. If Freeman argues that for Kant “the imagination is gendered as feminine and [that] its sacrifice functions rhetorically to ensure the sublime moment … scapegoating a feminine figure,” I suggest that Kant’s terms of imagination and reason as they function in aesthetic perception are more complex, shiing through performative modes of gender, and importantly always within the one subject-who-sees.28 Not two discrete entities, masculine and feminine,
27 In this, I concur with Harriet Riches’ interpretation of Woodman as so immersed in the project of photographing herself as to in effect photograph herself even when photographing other women. “A Disappearing Act: Francesca Woodman’s ‘Portrait of a Reputation,’” Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 1 (2004): 99. 28 Freeman, Feminine Sublime , 69.
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but rather modes of subjectivity govern Kant’s sublime. I ally Woodman’s nearly decade-long series of self-portraits with this notion of the sublime as exemplary of ontological instability.
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Aer graduation from the Rhode Island School of Design, which included an important year abroad in Rome, Woodman moved to New York City, where she began the 5$#;1$ 7)">$<- and produced !"#$ &'(")*$)$* +,-$)'") .$"#$-)'$(. Despite her intense engagement with her cra, Woodman has been recognized widely as an artist only posthumously, a fact that places her by the generically feminine act of ceding control over commercial interaction with audience— what Virginia Jackson, writing on Emily Dickinson, has playfully called a gesture of giving the audience one’s work en souffrance%29 This places her in a problematically feminine position resonant with the reputations of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, who achieved cult status aer death, so that even as Woodman’s powerful work itself militates against this particular passive position, one notes the dissonance between Woodman’s masterful art and the powerless position from which she must approach us: through survivors. Townsend’s comment on Woodman’s “schoolgirl” identity reflects the highly gendered position of Woodman’s oeuvre as a posthumously known body of work, a texte en souffrance. But this reality of Woodman’s oeuvre as posthumous performs an emptying limit: we reflect that, indeed, she died young and where do we go from there? Instead, I explore Woodman’s work through the very strategies invoking gender and youth that her work puts in place. Using a schoolbook as an artist book, for example, Woodman strategizes femininity as the difficult terrain of forestalled initiation: she exposes the woman artist as always already forestalled, understood as a permanent initiate. For this reason, I focus on Woodman’s gestures of geometry as politics. That is, I focus aention on the photographer’s masterful deployment of the “schoolgirl” trope of geometry, especially as it resonates with Kant’s mathematical sublime, and the theorization of geometry and aesthetic formalization in the 7)"1$2"#$,0. I place emphasis on the way that Woodman presents the aesthetic as mathematically bound, by using the student trope of a geometry textbook in !"#$ &'(")*$)$* +,-$)'") .$"#$-)'$(. The internal shi from her light and playful use of her student status— connoted by the textbook as artist book—to the intensity with which she engages questions of the aesthetic in that book should alert us to the necessity
29 Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 244.
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of reading Woodman as an artist whose work arrives at destinations at variance with our expectations of gender and age, even though (and also because) she draws on tropes of femininity. Following her death, Woodman’s parents, Bey and George Woodman— artists highly respected in their own right—have managed her estate, devotedly preserving, protecting, and promoting their daughter’s work, and her posthumous success is striking.30 Critics respond to George and Bey Woodman’s presentation of Woodman’s corpus with implicitly salvific gestures of comparison, recuperating Woodman by interpreting her work as reflective of 1970s feminist concerns, or by aestheticizing the trauma of her suicide, or by comparing her self-portraits to Orthodox icons, artifacts that for the Eastern Orthodox faithful are windows to the divinity. Indeed, Phelan argues that the entire project of Woodman’s self-portraits is to prepare the audience to accept Woodman’s actual disappearance, her suicide. Connecting Woodman’s suicide with performance art, Phelan postulates that “Perhaps on January 19th, 1981, [Woodman] found a composition that suited her, and she developed it into an act of suicide.” Driving home the point, Phelan argues that “Woodman’s use of photography as a way to rehearse her death allows us to consider her art as an apprenticeship in dying”—a troubling claim, and unmistakably one that indicates the powerful relationship between the now-alwaysposthumous Woodman and the critics and curators who handle her work.31 “Francesca Woodman” the name has become a title under the rubric of which is organized exclusively posthumous work. We see in different critical responses the use of Woodman as a figure for each decade’s dominant trope. Solomon-Godeau takes her as feminist icon, reflecting the eighties’ more monolithic cultural feminism. Phelan
30 In 2006 Chris Townsend brought out a thorough representation of her oeuvre, Francesca Woodman , with Phaidon. A selection of Woodman’s photographs has appeared in an edition published by Scalo in 1998 (Hervé Chandès, ed., Francesca B""*#0, [Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain; Zurich: Scalo, 1998]). Tribute has long been given to Woodman’s work in solo exhibitions, and her photography has been represented in group exhibitions in museums nationwide and internationally. A selective list of museums and galleries that have hosted Francesca Woodman solo exhibitions includes Espacio AV and SMS Contemporanea in Siena, Italy, 2009; Marian Goodman Gallery, 2004; Cornell University Museum of Art, 2003; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 2000; Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, 1998; The Photographers Gallery, London, 1999; Recontres Internationales de la Photographies, Arles, 1998; Galleria Civica, Modena, Italy, 1996; DAAD Galerie, Berlin, Germany, 1993; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 1990; and Hunter College Art Gallery, New York, 1986. Woodman’s photographs currently are handled by the prestigious Marian Goodman Gallery, New York City. 31 Phelan, “Francesca Woodman’s Photography,” 999, 1002.
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places Woodman in terms of nineties discourse of trauma theory, while Townsend reads her as the “schoolgirl” privileged in turn-of-the-century fascination with the femme-enfant , the renaissance of interest in surrealism. Mieke Bal gracefully and movingly writes on Woodman as a Proustian figure, evoking our early-twenty-first-century awareness of video a s a site of erosion, a space where identity is formally “scaered.”32 In trying to fit Woodman under the rubric of contemporary discourse, a gesture that cannot help but reveal most of all the shiing of critical thought through time, these critics implicitly respond to Francesca Woodman’s originary trope of photographing almost exclusively herself: for the performance of the impossibility of engaging a stable identity of the self is a central tenet of Woodman’s work. Yet Woodman commands the photograph not to destabilize identity but rather for its sheer usefulness as a tool to reveal identity’s fractionary quality. In responding to her work with concerns of aesthetics, perhaps I am reflecting my own temporal moment and frame, and even biography, reflecting a mistrust of the bourgeois contours of commemoration. I am also expressing an interest voiced by Woodman when she wrote that the task of her photographs was to allow her to locate “where I fit in this odd geometry of time.”33 Her interest is not in self-exploration, nor self-commemoration, but rather in the inevitability of the immersion of the self in culture: time crossing and crossed by the body, zeitgeist most legible in hindsight. The question of how to understand Woodman’s relationship to inheritance, to the canon, and to artistic lineage is taken up by Carol Armstrong, who like Townsend argues that Woodman is best understood as a girl interrupted, and who strongly emphasizes Woodman’s “marginality” and “minorness.”34 However, Armstrong may not sufficiently take into account Woodman’s medium as itself participatory in tropes of marginality, a bastard product of science and art’s liaison. Photography descends not only from the pictorial tradition but also from philosophies of perception, conceptualizations of the gaze that valorize the separation of gaze and body, ideas that in part generated the camera’s creation. Photography is placed at the margins through this inheritance—maybe the margins of art, but more importantly the margins of conceptualizations of seeing. The camera haunts theorizations of seeing.
32 Mieke Bal, “Marcel and Me: Woodman through Proust,” in Francesca Woodman C$-)"(;$<-'D$ , ed. Isabel Tejeda (Murcia, Spain: Espacio AV, 2009), 114–41. 33 Francesca Woodman, Francesca Woodman: Photographic Work, April 9–June 8, 1986 , ed. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Ann Gabhart, and Rosalind Woodman (Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College Museum, 1986), 238. 34 Carol Armstrong, “Francesca Woodman: A Ghost in the House of the ‘Woman Artist,’” in Women Artists at the Millennium , ed. Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 347–48.
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I point out that Woodman herself is intensely aware of the lineage of her medium, its minorness, and that playing through the terms of this lineage in the margins is central to her project. Claiming not to read Woodman through the lens of her suicide, Armstrong nonetheless posits Woodman as a feminine ghost: indeed, the title of Armstrong’s piece, “Francesca Woodman: A Ghost in the House of the ‘Woman Artist,’” highlights Woodman’s status as a suicide, a ghost. But Woodman appears in her photographs as a ghost only if we read the photographs according to their reception history—the historical fact of their being brought before audience by her survivors. Oen read as suicidal emblems, her characteristic use of blur and self-violating cropping in fact are methods that Woodman deploys to query geometry’s relationship to vision and must be read for that formal gesture. Again, I suggest a return to the terms of placement that Woodman’s work, not her history, offers: the photographs as object-images that allow her to negotiate a fit between herself and the “odd geometry of time” even as they also slip through stable, seled schema. This resistance to critical schema and strategies stems from Woodman’s almost uncanny fusion with her medium. It is not she who is marginal but photography that she understands as haunting, and deploys to haunt the margins of aesthetics. The powerful, mostly female critics who establish Woodman’s feminist credentials surprisingly fit with male critics such as Chris Townsend, and interpret Woodman with gestures of implicit redemption, at once emphasizing Woodman’s artistic power and also implying that her status is that of the lost girl—one in need of absolution. But this approach points to an under-theorization of the prodigy’s art, displacing the work, and risks leaving aside consideration of Woodman’s extraordinary early steeping in the aesthetic by dint of growing up in a household of artists. 35 Here, I must take issue with reception history theories and instead suggest that critical and cultural discomfort with the idea of a female prodigy is the engine that too oen drives responses to Woodman’s art. Consider, for example, how Townsend’s criticism endeavors to place Woodman in the position of unwiing, perhaps even lucky, producer of powerful images. Such an
35 Sloan Rankin and Benjamin Buchloh both discuss Woodman’s background as the very well-educated daughter of two artists, interpreting her early indoctrination into the field. See Rankin, “Peach Mumble—Ideas Cooking,” Francesca Woodman , ed. Hervé Chandès (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain; Zurich: Scalo, 1998), 33–37, and Buchloh, “Francesca Woodman: Performing the Photograph, Staging the Subject,” in Francesca Woodman: Photographs, 1975–1980 (New York: Marian Goodman Gallery, 2004), 41–50. Likewise, Bey Woodman, in Bey Woodman: Thinking Out Loud , emphasizes her lifelong work of studying art: visiting museums and traveling as education, an education in which the young Francesca Woodman was included (dir. Charles Woodman, Charles Woodman Video, 1991).
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approach ignores the ways that Woodman, despite her youth, uses her selfportrait photographs to contend with questions of aesthetic inheritance. Betsy Berne alludes specifically to this aspect of Woodman’s art when she argues that Woodman’s feminism inheres in the seriousness with which she took her own work.36 Rather than interpret the self-portraits, then, as ruminating aspects of true identity, or even self-destruction as one valence of identity, I focus on how Woodman uses the gaze directed toward the figure of the self as metaphor for the problem of aesthetic formalization. Woodman’s gaze turned on herself structures a #'($ $, 0=@#$ of gazing, a gesture that disrupts in turn each frame of reference by which we interpret her self-portrait photographs.
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Perhaps eager to dispel masculinist images, such as those put forward by Phillippe Sollers and Chris Townsend of Woodman as a sorceress or schoolgirl, Peggy Phelan and Harriet Riches theorize Woodman’s self-portraits as all about disappearance, as if they wished to bodily remove Woodman from the sightline of phallocentric misprisons.37 It is from Phelan’s provocative point of arguing that Woodman’s self-portraits are taken to prepare us, as audience, for her eventual suicide that I depart—depart from it both in the sense of deploying Phelan’s insight as an important basis for the study of Woodman’s photographs and also in the sense of questioning Phelan’s thesis of the death-bound thematic of Woodman’s art. Phelan’s argument turns on Cathy Caruth’s theorization of traumatic repetition.38 She suggests that Woodman, in her self-portraits, repetitively stages the moment of her disappearance, as if posthumous renown proleptically tugged at Francesca Woodman while alive. Subverting claims to artistic accomplishment, Phelan states that Woodman’s “work invites us, with immense fragility and precision, to allow her death to survive her art, rather than the other way around.”39 I depart from this
36 Betsy Berne, “To Tell the Truth,” foreword to Francesca Woodman: Photographs, 1975–1980 (New York: Marian Goodman Gallery, 2004), 5. 37 Phillippe Sollers’s essay on Woodman, “The Sorceress” (in Francesca Woodman , ed. Hervé Chandès [Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain; Zurich: Scalo, 1998], 9–13) will be discussed later in this book; Townsend’s monograph has already been mentioned. 38 In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History , Caruth argues for necessary amnesia surrounding traumatic experiences and also argues that the experiences return as traumatic repetition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, 59, 132n). 39 Phelan, “Francesca Woodman’s Photography,” 999.
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theorization because if Phelan argues that suicidal ideation is performed in Woodman’s photographs Phelan has first to assume a transparent legibility for suicide which in fact can only be read conditionally. Turning from critical fantasies of bodily recuperation, then, I seek the legibility of Woodman’s pictures in other registers. Phelan’s valorization of Woodman’s work as articulating “fragility” nevertheless is useful in terms of its evocation of the fragility of the medium, the photograph as transient memento. The disappearance evoked by Woodman’s manipulation of shuer speed to create images of herself as a blurred figure, or her use of square format and cropping to display images of herself without a head, or her placing herself at the edge of the photograph’s frame, is not the disappearance of Woodman’s ($19 but a shiing of the mechanism of -6$ 9)0#$ '-($19 , and a shiing of the mechanism of audience as the implied limit of the photograph. Her engagement is with the limits of seeing: a kind of seeing intensely related to Kant’s notion of D")(-$11$, , or imagination as the placement of the image violently ',-" the gaze.40 For Kant’s sublime encodes violence and loss, indeed, a “violence that is wrought on the subject through the imagination” because the image places itself into the gaze in a manner that complicates or reverses the relationship of the gaze (as agency) to the gazed upon (as object). Kant’s use of D")(-$11$, radically describes the gazed upon as an object that acts, that emplaces itself into the capacity of the gaze.41 Playing through tropes of the powerful object that in some sense throws or disturbs the gaze, Woodman’s work in its fierce contentions with the aesthetic reads as anything but “fragile” precisely insofar as it acts through its awareness of photography, the medium, as fragile. The 5$#;1$ 7)">$<- , for example, articulates the dissonance between classical marble caryatids and the photograph-caryatids with which Woodman was building her temple. The drama of the 5$#;1$ 7)">$<- inheres in this highlighting of the difference between marble and film, stability and fragility. Are Woodman’s self-portraits, with their characteristic blur and decentering, about formlessness, about the loss of self as the loss of form, or is something
40 I am using the term D")(-$11$,—representation—untranslated because I do not want to lose the doubleness of the term in the German, the sense of that which places itself. My reading of Kant’s use of D")(-$11$, is influenced by Jonathan Loesberg’s revision of Kantian aesthetics’ usefulness in postmodernity. As Loesberg writes, “The aesthetics that comes out of Kant will always depend both on an essentialism and on its own undoing of that essentialism, regardless of the essentialism or the skepticism of the philosopher, and it is precisely that deconstructive balance that will enable the postmodern employment of it.” Return to Aesthetics , 125. 41 Kant, /)'-'84$ , 89.
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more complex and difficult tracked in these images?42 Woodman’s submiing herself to the process of photographic self-portraiture reflects less a narcissistic obsession, or its obverse wish to disappear, as rather a fascination with the violating—flaening—gaze of the photograph, and with blur as a way of bringing dimension into the flat image. As a stroke of integrity, she characteristically submits her own body to the experimentation of that violence. Her negatives destabilize the privileged Kantian notion of negative pleasure. Woodman’s self-portraits, uninterested in her own person, use the body of the young woman photographer as a prop to query the violence inherent in aesthetic formalization, traditional readings of the relationship between femininity and formlessness radicalized by Woodman’s selfportraits. Like Kant’s notion of D")(-$11$, as that which forcibly re-presents in the imagination what is at once still sensuous and definitionally not embodied, Woodman evokes an uncanny deferral of materiality in the act of seeing that is placed in the photograph. She emphatically aends to the photograph as medium, playing with its singular flatness as disembodying power while emphasizing her body, deploying the female nude with all its semiotic freight. Woodman’s self-portraits invoke a fall into perception as a loss of intact boundaries, and I connect this vertigo of perception, a hinge between the sensuous and the rational, with the core difficulty of the Kantian sublime. Approaching Woodman’s work in terms of the sublime as risk (encompassing threat as a valence of fragility), I’m aware that there are many sublimes: Burke’s sublime, Hegel’s sublime, Herder’s sublime, the postmodern sublime, Lyotard’s seminal interpretation of Kant’s sublime, and Yaeger’s female sublime, to name a few. While I return oen to Freeman’s feminine sublime and to Vijay Mishra’s gothic sublime, in focusing on Kant’s /)'-'84$ "9 :4*2$#$,- I am acknowledging, to put it mildly, the influential pull of the philosopher’s work on the topic. But, as I will show, the striking proximity of concerns that occur between Kant’s sublime and Woodman’s self-portraits merits articulation. Woodman’s emphasis on geometry, exemplified in her use of an Italian geometry textbook as the template for !"#$ &'(")*$)$* +,-$)'") .$"#$-)'$( , and reflected in recurrent structuring motifs of her photographs, manifests as commentary on key terms of the Kantian sublime and also resonates with Kant’s discussion of geometry in the 7)"1$2"#$,0. A dialogue opens between Woodman’s interrogation of the aesthetic as an “interior geometry” and Kant’s architectonic imagination theorizing the sublime. States Kant, “The sublime is that, the mere capacity
42 For a discussion of gender and focus, see Lindsay Smith, The Politics of Focus: Women, Children, and Nineteenth-Century Photography (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998).
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of thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense.”43 That is, the sublime at once forefronts and destroys the frame, a gesture on which Woodman’s self-portraits remark. Woodman’s exploration of the meaning and work of the frame pivots on this boundary condition of the aesthetic. Vijay Mishra, in 56$ ."-6'< !4=1'#$ , suggests, “The sublime is that which cannot be bordered, defined, delimited.”44 Woodman’s images work by disarticulating and dislocating the preeminence of the frame implicit in the photograph, a gesture strongly resonant with Derrida’s reading of Kant’s sublime as that which troubles the frame: “What has produced and manipulated the frame puts everything to work in order to efface the frame effect.”45 For Derrida, the sublime '( -6'( <",-$(-0-'", of the work of the frame. Not only, as Townsend notes, do Woodman’s photographs present an obsession with the problem of space, and space’s function as frame, but this obsession is keyed into Kant’s theorization of the gaze in the sublime as an event violently displaced from the spatial and the temporal. Woodman’s photographs exemplify a risky and troubled relationship to space, an exploration that pressures boundaries. Commenting on the uncanny swerve of photographic space in her pictures, Woodman’s use of the serial plays across the spatial register. Phelan interprets the serial gesture of Woodman’s work, its quality of repetition, as posraumatic, while Krauss argues it derives from origins as student exercises and Townsend links it to a tradition in American photography passed down through Aaron Siskind. I suggest, though, that Woodman’s trope of repetition in stretching space across the boundaries of individual frames taps the Kantian sublime as mathematical sublime. Woodman’s entire oeuvre—interpretable as a nearly decade-long series of self-portraits—inclines toward the status of that which is repeated until it becomes massive, the massive a central concept of Kant’s mathematical sublime. Woodman’s nearly ceaseless return to the self-portrait, a repetition that makes a series great “beyond every standard of sense,” takes on the terms of the sublime by invoking magnitude, both through sheer repetition and by invoking the vulnerable, even violated, position of the observing subject in a lifelong series of self-portraits whose boundaries are effectively eroded by juxtaposition against each other.46 For, of series, Kant argues,
43 Kant, /)'-'84$ , 81. 44 Vijay Mishra, 56$ ."-6'< !4=1'#$ (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 41. 45 Derrida, 5)4-6 ', 70',-',2 , 73. 46 Kant, /)'-'84$ , 79. Argues Kant, “The Sublime is that in comparison with which all else is small” (80).
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“The … series is a condition of inner sense and of an intuition in a subjective movement of the imagination by which it does violence to inner sense.”47 Woodman’s repetitive recourse to the self-portrait gesture, legible as a lifelong series of self-portraits, goes so far beyond student exercises that it asks to be interpreted beyond such frames of reference. As if nothing might have truncated the continuation of the self-portraits, Woodman’s repetition creates a series of self-portraits so extensive as to form together a massive text. Importantly, Woodman’s implicit invocation of the massive work of art—her massive, lifelong series of self-portraits—militates powerfully against notions of woman’s art as miniature and delicate. The volume that she achieves by returning day aer day, year aer year, to the act of the selfportrait, even as it opens her to charges of feminine D0,'-0( , shakes gendered norms. Woodman’s oeuvre insists on the massive, a massive continuous work whose very over-sized force militates against coding the photographs as transparent feminine meditations on beauty. S M As I have noted, Kant’s sublime’s relationship to substance and space is troubled. For Kant, the sublime occurs only in the mind of the beholder and cannot adhere to a physical object. Likewise, the sublime resists and troubles form, troubles structure and materiality. Photography’s history suggests a relationship to the sublime, insofar as they share troubled concepts of materiality. Interpreted by Henry Fox Talbot as “fairy pictures” because of the ephemerality of his early methods of making pictures from light, the photograph yet retains the memory of the risk of ephemerality, the back-story of impermanence.48 Its hybrid status as scientific artifact and stepchild of the pictorial tradition places the photograph almost between maer and form, between object and evanescence. While we speak of a photograph’s composition and formal balance, the photograph also always contains the threat of raveling, of decomposing back into formless light. The photograph tests Kant’s sublime configuration of what erupts and disrupts the boundaries of form. Woodman’s focus on the self-portrait as a site of blur works so powerfully because she invokes photography’s history as “fairy picture,” or ephemerality reified, and also enunciates its resistance
47 Ibid., 89. 48 Writes Talbot, “This method was to take a camera obscura and to throw the image of the objects on a piece of paper in its focus—fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away.” Quoted in Beaumont Newhall, 56$ History of Photography: From 1893 to the Present , 5th ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 19.
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to vanishing, the form that teeters on the verge of the formlessness of light. Is the photograph indeed an object, or a record of an object? Of course, it has physicality of its own, but this physicality seems always to be less or more than the sum of its parts. That is, the history, trace, of the physical that the photograph presents, along with the dissolution of the physical that its status as light-graph also presents, focuses a crux of form and formlessness that echoes Kant’s concern with how the sublime connects to the object—this very troubled connection. My suggestion is that Woodman’s self-portraits, by enacting a decentering of the prop of subjectivity, interact with Kant’s concern about vision’s threatened and threatening power (which contains the problem of form and formlessness), the object’s intermediary status in the sublime. Woodman’s approach to visually decentering the subject interacts with Kant’s theorization of the struggles surrounding formlessness and stasis in the aesthetic. In the photograph that Townsend uses for the jacket of Francesca Woodman , for example, we see Woodman’s “shadow” made explicit in white powder (Untitled, Providence, RI, 1976; fig. 1). Beneath the figure of a nude Woodman siing in a chair, a floor covered with white powder retains the dark imprint of her body. Apparently, Woodman had lain down in the powder and made a kind of nude “snow angel” in it and then goen up to sit in the chair for the slant self-portrait to be snapped. Although the self-portrait cuts off her head, we are uerly aware of her gaze in this image. Her gaze is the subject of the photograph, its truncation precisely the point. For irresistibly, we “see” her looking down at her own dislocated shadow, her own negative. This dislocation of flesh from shadow, of form from form’s echo, is precisely the twist that photography offers, and Woodman’s uncanny selfportrait of herself as a negative plays through its terms with masterful wit. Indeed, Woodman makes the topic of many of her self-portraits the way that form is lost and gained in the photograph—which is both an object and not an object. Woodman presents an ingenious grasp of her medium’s risk, and this risk correlates with the threat of dissolution that Kant’s sublime presents. My contention in the chapters that follow is that Woodman’s theoryproducing photographs work figurally as Lyotard intends, through terms of figuration that trouble and alter the status quo. The figures in her photographs interpret and interrupt ideology and charge and change the aesthetic. Woodman interrogates the “subjective movement of the imagination by which it does violence to inner sense,” shiing her body as a figure that represents the imagination in photographs staking their claim as interior geometries.49
49 Kant, /)'-'84$ , 89.
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S P Developing from Benjamin Buchloh’s argument that Woodman is uerly concerned with the process of photography, the physical immersion that produces the framed image, I approach Woodman’s engagement with geometry.50 Engaging and troubling the architectonic, the flat plane of the photograph plays through the process of losing and claiming space as it is framed. A tapping of the sublime as interior, but interior complexly adumbrated in an always flat image, marks Woodman’s interaction with the gendering of the aesthetic. For the history of femininity as interiority and excess, analyzed by Judith Butler in her reinterpretation of the Platonic chora in Bodies that Maer , points to an ambiguous cultural space, at once originary and abject, threatening because of the quality of excess that also defines the sublime."! While Butler suggests that a radical disassociation of the feminine and interiority is necessary to undo the denigrating link between femininity and formless maer, there are other ways to interpret the chora. Indeed, I will suggest that Plato’s chora resurfaces or echoes in Kant’s sublime. One of the tasks of this book, then, is to return to the vexed relationship between form and origination, in which is embedded the problem of the idea of the feminine as that which produces form but lacks form itself. The relationship between form and femininity is pressured and thrown into relief in Woodman’s sublime. Woodman’s work performs an extraordinary intervention into the terms of the sublime, a gesture which the following chapters will chart. Reading Woodman as an artist engaged in the discourse of aesthetics, a discourse bound up with metaphors of photography and gender, and interpreting Woodman as an artist who interrogates and revises this discourse, I hope to offer a way to widen the scope of our critical gaze on her remarkable photographs.
50 Buchloh, “Francesca Woodman,” 46. 51 Judith Butler, Bodies That Maer: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993).
