pre-s ~ thank you justice breyer for having the courage of your convictions in the supreme court today. i can't wait to read your dissent.
so, enough of that interpersonal meditation, yes? yes. instead i shall get my nerd on right here. as you already know, i'm working on my dissertation. this involves reading and/or rereading many books. i love reading, but prepping my lit review for what will ultimately be a 200p paper (then hopefully a book) is more than a little daunting. there are many wonderful things about it, too. i do love making the connections between theory and practice that are best generated when doing copious amounts of simultaneous reading and writing. i get to share brain time with theorists and writers that impress, inspire, and sometimes even infuriate me ~ hence providing not only stimulation, but also a reason for alliteration (a personal favorite). one thing that is both fun and cringe worthy is reviewing my own stuffs over the years. sometimes it is better than others.
below is an excerpt from a simple response paper i wrote in 2004. the whole thing is an informal response ~ basically write back to something that spoke to you in the text. they aren't the best 7 pages i've ever written, but they are about a book i love about a person i love. The book: Where is Ana Mendieta? by Jane Blocker. Ana Mendieta was an amazing, inspiring artist with whom I have more than a passing fancy. this is just a segment ~ no need to even read it as i mostly posted it as a sort of prod for myself ~ but it is a bit of a look into how i was thinking in a moment. i couldn't write it this simply now, so its a bit nostalgic. anyway ~
from the middle:
Mendieta confronts gender with/in other binaries and issues, so teasing out the implications of gender necessarily reconnects to her engagements with ethnicity, and nationality. Blocker at no time attempts to isolate gender, but she does distinguish the way that gender plays through Mendieta's play in a way that allows a focus on issues of gender. The female body pervades Mendieta's work. The handprint in the book references only a body part, but it is specifically a woman's body, Mendieta's body. The burning signifies a ritualistic engagement both in Eliade's argument and in Mendieta's performative act. Here Blocker reads Mendieta as referencing the ways in which the woman's body is positioned as the primitive, the ritualized, and the originary body. She notes that Mendieta is in some ways working along the same trajectories as Eliade in that she is also confronting binaries, historical and contemporary, and how they operate. That Blocker suggests Mendieta's connection with Eliade's work prevents reading the act of burning her hand into this book as merely an opposition to his thoughts and/or conclusions. And yet, this hand functions as resistance. Visually, the single hand can signal a demand that the observer stop, whether to stop them from seeing what is on the page, or to keep them from seeing it unproblematically, the hand interrupts the words. The mark makes a place for the corporeal body with/in intellectual considerations of how the body factors into the historicity of the primitive/modern person, and other attendant binaries. Mendieta uses her body not to counter either side of the binary, but rather to collapses the dichotomies on which Eliade (tenuously) relies. Blocker also recognizes, both in this chapter and in other references to this piece, the way in which this piece plays with essentialist/antiessentialist ideas. This chapter, and later references to this image, suggests that Mendieta, perceives something essential about the female body working through these binaries. Exactly what that is remains complicated and ambiguous, but this work seems echoes other shadows of the disappearing female body in her work.
As Blocker discusses, in this work Mendieta "plays between primitive and modern" in a search for origins (42). This play relies on how the female body is often elided with primitivity and nature, and in opposition to the male relation to civilization and culture. According to Blocker, Mendieta is not only aware of the way in which nature, "in its various incarnations as earth, female, and primitive" are left out of the very histories that are forged upon/with/through it, but finding dramatic ways to both point to that absence and mark the shadow of presence (43). Her branding functions mimetically as a ritual act, both invoking and destroying the concept of the primitive. Mendieta thus "forges a link between ritual performance and the imaginary prelapsarian moment from which it draws its strength" (43). This ritualistic marking performatively re/inserts the modern female body into the primitive and the concept of a female body that mythically predates Eve's "sin", a moment which can be seen as the moment when the other binaries were split along gender lines. However, it occurs in a modern world using tools on an artifact of culture, a book, and therefore performatively undoes any dismissal of the female body as merely, or exclusively, primitive or natural. Considered in the terms of birth and rebirth, Mendieta's handprint creates and destroys, but ultimately leaves something new. She invokes death, disappearance, shadow, and, simultaneously, a place from which to rise like a phoenix. This hand seems to write not only in the moment of this particular work, but also toward her work with tombs and other sepulchral images of the female body.
Blocker also points to ways in which this image relates to other images of the disappearing body that Mendieta creates. I am most intrigued by how this burned hand brushes against, in a sense reaches out toward, Mendieta's Silueta series. The burned hand is obviously a silhouette created by fire, by heat. In her Silueta series, Mendieta similarly uses fire and heat to mark the disappearance, the simultaneous presence and absence, of the female body in the earth. One example that Blocker mentions is the untitled Silueta from 1977, the image of the female silhouette in the Iowa snow. As Blocker explains, this body outline becomes more pronounced as the sun melts the snow, and illustrates how assorted binaries operate in this image. Although Blocker (quite correctly, I think) focuses more on how the work dramatizes racial and ethnic stereotypes as the catalyst for the way warmth transforms the image, she does recognize that these stereotypes are located in the female body. As with the hand burned into the book, the hot blood of the female ties back into the primitive, the search for origins, and the sexuality associated with the earth/nature. That her body warms the cold snow, which could be associated not only with whiteness, but also with rationality and the appearance of order, and connects her body to the messiness and mutability of the earth below. At the same time, the power of that warm female body threatens the purity, the rationality, and the stillness that the snow suggests. Again, like the way the burning hand acted on the book, the warm female body performing both "naturally" and deliberately. She is, as Blocker says, performing in a way that "reconstitute[s] the terms around which [her actions] are organized" (66).
so, enough of that interpersonal meditation, yes? yes. instead i shall get my nerd on right here. as you already know, i'm working on my dissertation. this involves reading and/or rereading many books. i love reading, but prepping my lit review for what will ultimately be a 200p paper (then hopefully a book) is more than a little daunting. there are many wonderful things about it, too. i do love making the connections between theory and practice that are best generated when doing copious amounts of simultaneous reading and writing. i get to share brain time with theorists and writers that impress, inspire, and sometimes even infuriate me ~ hence providing not only stimulation, but also a reason for alliteration (a personal favorite). one thing that is both fun and cringe worthy is reviewing my own stuffs over the years. sometimes it is better than others.
below is an excerpt from a simple response paper i wrote in 2004. the whole thing is an informal response ~ basically write back to something that spoke to you in the text. they aren't the best 7 pages i've ever written, but they are about a book i love about a person i love. The book: Where is Ana Mendieta? by Jane Blocker. Ana Mendieta was an amazing, inspiring artist with whom I have more than a passing fancy. this is just a segment ~ no need to even read it as i mostly posted it as a sort of prod for myself ~ but it is a bit of a look into how i was thinking in a moment. i couldn't write it this simply now, so its a bit nostalgic. anyway ~
from the middle:
Mendieta confronts gender with/in other binaries and issues, so teasing out the implications of gender necessarily reconnects to her engagements with ethnicity, and nationality. Blocker at no time attempts to isolate gender, but she does distinguish the way that gender plays through Mendieta's play in a way that allows a focus on issues of gender. The female body pervades Mendieta's work. The handprint in the book references only a body part, but it is specifically a woman's body, Mendieta's body. The burning signifies a ritualistic engagement both in Eliade's argument and in Mendieta's performative act. Here Blocker reads Mendieta as referencing the ways in which the woman's body is positioned as the primitive, the ritualized, and the originary body. She notes that Mendieta is in some ways working along the same trajectories as Eliade in that she is also confronting binaries, historical and contemporary, and how they operate. That Blocker suggests Mendieta's connection with Eliade's work prevents reading the act of burning her hand into this book as merely an opposition to his thoughts and/or conclusions. And yet, this hand functions as resistance. Visually, the single hand can signal a demand that the observer stop, whether to stop them from seeing what is on the page, or to keep them from seeing it unproblematically, the hand interrupts the words. The mark makes a place for the corporeal body with/in intellectual considerations of how the body factors into the historicity of the primitive/modern person, and other attendant binaries. Mendieta uses her body not to counter either side of the binary, but rather to collapses the dichotomies on which Eliade (tenuously) relies. Blocker also recognizes, both in this chapter and in other references to this piece, the way in which this piece plays with essentialist/antiessentialist ideas. This chapter, and later references to this image, suggests that Mendieta, perceives something essential about the female body working through these binaries. Exactly what that is remains complicated and ambiguous, but this work seems echoes other shadows of the disappearing female body in her work.
As Blocker discusses, in this work Mendieta "plays between primitive and modern" in a search for origins (42). This play relies on how the female body is often elided with primitivity and nature, and in opposition to the male relation to civilization and culture. According to Blocker, Mendieta is not only aware of the way in which nature, "in its various incarnations as earth, female, and primitive" are left out of the very histories that are forged upon/with/through it, but finding dramatic ways to both point to that absence and mark the shadow of presence (43). Her branding functions mimetically as a ritual act, both invoking and destroying the concept of the primitive. Mendieta thus "forges a link between ritual performance and the imaginary prelapsarian moment from which it draws its strength" (43). This ritualistic marking performatively re/inserts the modern female body into the primitive and the concept of a female body that mythically predates Eve's "sin", a moment which can be seen as the moment when the other binaries were split along gender lines. However, it occurs in a modern world using tools on an artifact of culture, a book, and therefore performatively undoes any dismissal of the female body as merely, or exclusively, primitive or natural. Considered in the terms of birth and rebirth, Mendieta's handprint creates and destroys, but ultimately leaves something new. She invokes death, disappearance, shadow, and, simultaneously, a place from which to rise like a phoenix. This hand seems to write not only in the moment of this particular work, but also toward her work with tombs and other sepulchral images of the female body.
Blocker also points to ways in which this image relates to other images of the disappearing body that Mendieta creates. I am most intrigued by how this burned hand brushes against, in a sense reaches out toward, Mendieta's Silueta series. The burned hand is obviously a silhouette created by fire, by heat. In her Silueta series, Mendieta similarly uses fire and heat to mark the disappearance, the simultaneous presence and absence, of the female body in the earth. One example that Blocker mentions is the untitled Silueta from 1977, the image of the female silhouette in the Iowa snow. As Blocker explains, this body outline becomes more pronounced as the sun melts the snow, and illustrates how assorted binaries operate in this image. Although Blocker (quite correctly, I think) focuses more on how the work dramatizes racial and ethnic stereotypes as the catalyst for the way warmth transforms the image, she does recognize that these stereotypes are located in the female body. As with the hand burned into the book, the hot blood of the female ties back into the primitive, the search for origins, and the sexuality associated with the earth/nature. That her body warms the cold snow, which could be associated not only with whiteness, but also with rationality and the appearance of order, and connects her body to the messiness and mutability of the earth below. At the same time, the power of that warm female body threatens the purity, the rationality, and the stillness that the snow suggests. Again, like the way the burning hand acted on the book, the warm female body performing both "naturally" and deliberately. She is, as Blocker says, performing in a way that "reconstitute[s] the terms around which [her actions] are organized" (66).
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