Linda S. Kauffman,
Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture.

University of California Press, California, 1998.
ISBN 0-520-21032-8
324pp
$18.95 US (pb)

Uploaded 16 April 1999

Although we’re gravitating closer to the unfleshed dimensions of cyberspace it seems to me that our obsessions with the body are just as delirious as they’ve always been. The 90’s literary hype around all things corporeal, was fuelled in part by a desire to return focus to a more integrated understanding of the psychological and physical. The body is the most tangible proof of our mortality because it’s in a constant state of decay – no wonder it has always been a source of fascination, horror, pleasure, experimentation, entertainment, categorisation and vanity. Linda Kauffman in Bad Girls and Sick Boys takes us on yet another ‘fantastic voyage’ through viscera, flesh and death. She challenges dominant assumptions about the body by attempting to expose the fears and taboos that surround it. The performance artists, writers and film makers she chooses to support her position, all collectively “point toward a new paradigm of spectatorship, one that is generated from or driven by the insides of the body, one in which the human body is simultaneously the spectacle, the performance space, the subject, and the object of pleasure and danger”(15). I found her analysis of these marginalised celebrities, their work and philosophies, extremely accessible. She is no dry, distant, ‘voice of god’ academic – she actively engages with her subjects, personalising her relationship to them through interviews and anecdotes. This intimacy (rare in the chillingly ‘observational’ world of cultural studies) allows us to engage with the humanity of that which is ugly, raw and grotesque.

Bad Girls and Sick Boys is divided into three sections; Performance for the Twenty-first Century, Visceral Cinema and Arresting Fiction. In the first section we’re introduced to Bob Flanagan. Before he died in 1996, Flanagan battled his cystic fibrosis by creating sadomasochistic performances pieces with long time partner Sheree Rose. He theorised that masturbating with soft toys, slapping excrement around his genitals, and performing abject acts that returned him to a state of infancy, were about reclaiming the power of the pre-oedipal mother. But he didn’t stop there … Bob went on to rupture “the phallus’s authority”(22) by nailing his penis to a plank of wood, driving sharp instruments through it, and weighing it down with a number of heavy objects. As perverse as all this ‘cock shocking’ activity seems, it’s light entertainment compared to the pretentious surgical play of ‘Orlan’, a sometime French art history professor, who ultimately wants to acquire Venus’ chin, Diana’s nose, Europa’s mouth and Psyche’s eyes. In undergoing elaborate surgery to implant these features (often in unexpected places like her forehead) Orlan believes she is deconstructing notions of ‘the feminine ideal’ by revealing that classical beauty is culturally constructed and therefore unnatural. Not content to be an unconscious spectacle during her surgical cut-and-paste jobs, she actively engages with her audience by recording the procedures through video, the internet, and photography while reading French feminist literature.

Although Kauffman uses contemporary performance artists like Orlan, Carolee Schneeman and Annie Sprinkle to expose the misogyny of beauty ideals’, the whole ‘trip’ is a little bit 70’s/80’s – she even dusts the cobwebs off Laura Mulvey’s antiquated ‘gaze theory’. The text’s weakness lies in Kauffman’s failure to explore or even attempt to understand the value that women often find in using spectacle and beauty synonymously for social and economic power, parody and pleasure. Are these women the duped or the dupers? When I was reading through the section on Orlan in particular, I felt like yelling “I get it”, “we get it”, “we got it a long time ago”. We’re very savvy when it comes to notions of construction and deconstruction in relation to the representation of women in myth and media; we don’t need a narcissist who slices her body in order to understand a very obvious feminist statement. Kauffman implies that women who submit to conventional stereotypes of beauty (outside the arena of feminist protest) are cultural sleepwalkers – ignorant and androcentric. Her collusion with and unquestioning support of the performance art she cites is narrow and puritan – the very thing she abhors in the work of anti-porn crusaders Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon.

Kauffman begins her attack on anti-porn in the Visceral Cinema section. By drawing on Gus Van Sant’s My Private Idaho (1991) and Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984) she comments on how film makers have satirised rather than exploited notions of porn by playing on the cliches and ho-hum machinations of the sex industry. The techniques these and similar film makers use to produce fictional exposés are itemised in the hope that film reviewers will “take this checklist with them to the movies, so they will know porn when they see it and when they don’t” (114). What is noticeably lacking in Kauffman’s prescriptive breakdown of non-porn material, is any clear definition of porn itself or even a brief acknowledgment that pornography is subjective and value ridden terrain – this much became clear in the heated Australian debate over the 1999 release of Adrian Lyne’s Lolita (1997).

No chapter on the visceral in film would be complete without a spiel on David Cronenberg. Here Kauffman returns to her central themes of bodily exploration and penetration. Unfortunately she says nothing terribly new about his work. The old theories of abjection, the semiotic chora and the vagina dentata (largely attributed to Barbara Creed’s application of Kristeva’s theories to horror film) are merely reworked and reworded. Although Cronenberg’s attraction to technology and the shifting boundaries of the organic to the inorganic are quite interesting, this section would have been far more lively if Kauffman had talked about how computer technology is already being used in the community to transform the way we understand identity. Bodies are not just physical matter any more, they’re vivisected and refashioned through virtual realities – Cronenberg’s organic to inorganic perhaps. I get the feeling there’s a whiff techno-phobia about Kauffman’s approach – it’s a bit too stuck in old ‘magic bullet’ media theories – she even credits television’s “endless combinations of signs and codes”, for example, with the power to “shape us far more than we shape them” (128). There is no recognition of just how media literate today’s consumers are … how intricate their reading of television, film and computer texts has become … how they’re able to shape-shift on the screen with breathtaking agility via the various technologies at their disposal. This notion that the body is merely a mask or a costume that can be remoulded is directly related to the work of both Cronenberg and Orlan; however, the connection between what is already going on in the community and the work of film and performance artists is not given much attention.

Kauffman’s conversations with J.G. Ballard were the most focused section of the book. Her tendency toward bias was evened out by allowing Ballard (through an interview transcript style of writing) to speak for himself. The alienation of death and the irrational horror attached to the disorientation and mutilation of the body were of course his pet subjects. “Why I want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”, a feature of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1967-9) is to be savoured. From Ballard she moves to Bret Easton Ellis and from there to the Dworkin/MacKinnon dyad. Kauffman cleverly compares Dworkin’s semi-autobiographical novel Mercy (1990) to Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). Although both used class struggle and brutal sex to comment on the endemic greed of Reagan’s America, Ellis emerges a witty social commentator and Dworkin an intolerant fanatic. Kauffman’s distaste for Dworkin and fellow anti-porn extremist Catharine MacKinnon is unremittent; her attack is incisive and extremely satisfying.

Bad Girls and Sick Boys is fascinating. I found it difficult to put down. I may not have agreed with everything but I certainly found it compelling enough to introduce to myWomen in Media students, all of whom collectively honed in on Kauffman’s frequent anti-male generalisations. The short disclaimer in the introduction is also somewhat insulting; “Since my background in literary theory and feminist theory informs Bad Girls and Sick Boys, some readers may find ‘too much’ theory in these pages but I have purposely simplified this specialised language, since my audience extends to many ‘lay people’ in legal, feminist, and artistic circles who find it academic – in both senses of the word” (4). I am always suspicious of academics who feel it necessary to make patronising apologies for what they see as ‘dumbing down’. So much for the fluid and interchanging boundaries of art and academia that she appeared interested in fudging – this attitude only sets up a hierarchy and in so doing widens the distance between these disciplines.

Despite Kauffman’s enthusiasm for the possibilities of perverse feminist art I didn’t find any of it either “witty” or “exhilarating”(265). She is a bit one-eyed (perhaps doe eyed) about the power of performance ‘statements’ to make a significant impact on our understanding of the way romantic beauty ideals have been and continue to be constructed. Although this is the weakest section of the text it is engrossing – not because it exposes the “hypocrisy of certain taboos”(265) but because it allows us to understand the fragility, pathology and passion of the artists themselves. To sum up, I was hoping for something a little more progressive, less stuck in already well (overly) documented theories of the body … but then again the body is all about reflux and retro … a labyrinth of theoretical folds and passages to which we will always return.