| Provoking paradox The parabolic trajectory of this text will follow that of Matthias Herrmann's semen when it shoots from his penis, that is, it will start in one place and lead to an entirely different one, only to find that both positions are not so far apart after all. Herrmann's subject matter and the medium chosen to convey it speak to each other dialogically, such that content and context redouble, falling and folding back upon each other as ejaculate falls on the penis after orgasm. Acknowledging this, my approach will be alternatingly playful and penetrating, voluminous and even gushing, so as to mimic the visual and conceptual puns taking place within Herrmann's frames. This interpretation of Herrmann's work is inspired by feminist theory, which is surprisingly compatible with arguments based in foundational, even seminal, moments in photographic theory and the gaze. My desire is to tease out the links between the phallus (and its referent, the penis), the gaze and photography in Herrmann's work to suggest that, by this plenitude of signifiers, a flooding of effects is occasioned, where meanings are complimentary and contradictory. The paradox within Herrmann's imagery involves the penis (in particular, the erect, ejaculating penis identified by Linda Williams as 'the money shot' so paradigmatic to hard-core pornography),#1 yet presents a seemingly-impossible, non-phallic masculinity. Further, Herrmann's work suggests a fluid identity such it could be closely aligned with the goals of feminists who consider the fleshy qualities of sexual difference to be subversive resources in the expression of identity. This suggests the potentially parallel aims of queer artists and feminists in the interrogation of heteronormative masculinity, with unforeseen results. In Herrmann's recent work, body fluids make their appearance literally in the shooting, gushing semen, yet they are also representative, in a metaphoric sense, of an evasive, expansive identity, one in which the body and its by-products form a continuum, traversing the enigmatic, even opposing ranges between the feminine and the masculine, vision and touch, the density of the body and its two-dimensional image, the macho and the queer, the innocent and the infected, the visibility of the self versus its effacement, and the life range from birth to death. Moreover, the toying, teasing invocation of body fluidity, as a means to communicate new identities, is predicated upon relationality rather than opposition. This not only fosters a sense of continuity between the self and the other, but also presents an awareness of the various relations transpiring within oneself. The title of this essay refers to the curiosity Herrmann seeks to satisfy in making these works. With a calculating, analytic focus, Herrmann wonders if conventional (i.e. analogue or non-digitally-enhanced) photography can capture both the moment of ejaculation as well as the movement of the ejaculate, asking "what does sperm do when it's shot?" in the same spirit of scientific experimentation that led photography to capture a bullet leaving the pistol, thereby revealing a capacity for visualization that exceeds that of the naked, technologically unaided eye.2# To accomplish this, Herrmann chooses the unforgiving precision of 8x10-inch transparencies and to print them at 20x25-inches, a scale larger, more forceful, more revealing and less forgiving of technical mistakes than all the previous works, whose 5x7-inch scale offered the viewer intimate moments of voyeuristic delectation. Freezing the moment in time - what film theorist Kaja Silverman has attributed to the gaze as the capacity to alternately 'memorialize' or 'mortify' its subject #3 - takes an erotic turn in Herrmann's documentation of the ephemeral nature of pleasure itself. Working solo in the studio as both photographer and photographed, Herrmann has captured "something we never really see, as the moment you/your partner shoots his load you're generally preoccupied with other things."#4 Paradoxically, Herrmann turns to a technology that is particularly adept at disembodied objectivity to explore sensual experiences perceived largely through the body. So too has Andres Serrano (in 1989) created a series of photographs that captured, at close range, the mid-stream spurt of ejaculate. This involved overcoming similar technical issues to those faced by Herrmann, as like him, Serrano worked alone in the studio. While the eventual results of Serrano's experimentation (greatly magnified images of white liquid blurring across black grounds) were statements of abstraction, Herrmann's recent photographs show the ejaculate remaining connected to the penis and to the specific body from which it emanates. In both artists' work the release of the shutter corresponds to an instant of auto-erotic release, appropriating the exacting gaze of a clinician in order to document self-pleasure, an experience relatively impervious to adequate description in language. Herrmann's foreplay in the visual register demands a closer look for the ways in which he invokes and then inverts tropes of visuality, photography and ejaculation, questioning whether these closely-aligned prerogatives are paradigmatic of traditional masculinity. The body/text/photograph missiles that Herrmann launches lend themselves perfectly to subversion, perversion and père-version, thereby aligning Herrmann with contemporary feminists (for example, singer-performer Peaches) who pull the rug out from under traditional masculinity and take the stance of 'father-fucker,' giving the finger to gender norms.#5 The pointed nature of Herrmann's inquiry is also misleading, for the shoot suggests violence and opposition between subjects, when in fact ejaculate is a highly relational substance suggesting proximity, transfer, exchange and mingling between two intertwined subjects. There is also a revealing lineage to the term shoot, involving not only the linked discourses of visuality and photography, but also the imperatives of the phallus. Despite all the conditions and criteria that will subsequently be described (and despite the divisive, dissecting powers of the eye), Herrmann's work - seemingly the most phallic of art practices - is disarmingly non-phallic by reason of his fluidity, his taunting use of metaphor and his recourse to the pulsing carnality of the body. The seer's shoot Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic notion of gaze has influenced much contemporary art and theory in recent decades. This is due to its centrality to theories of subjectivity in which the perception of gendered identity occurs primordially through vision. One is constantly reminded that Lacan's theory situates the gaze not as residing within the subject but rather in the world, pre-existing the subject, who in sight is thus opaque, no longer simply the looker, but the looked-at.6# This helps to define the subject's identity as being constituted by the perception of another's imagined point of view, external to the subject. The inaugural power that Lacan attributes to the workings of the gaze in bringing about a sense of self is to the extent that, "the gaze is that underside of consciousness." #7 Silverman grants an even greater force to the gaze as that which confirms or denies our sense of self as an image to be seen: "The gaze is the 'unapprehensible' agency through which we are socially ratified or negated as spectacle."#8 Lacan's notion of the gaze is influenced by Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological model of perception: the idea is that the visible is external to the subject and surrounds him, such that the subject must acknowledge others who also possess the power of vision and who have viewpoints different from our own. #9 This leads to a sense of intersubjectivity, a dialogic relationship between self and other. Following Merleau-Ponty, Lacan concedes that the position between seer and seen vacillates: "I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides." #10 Lacan, however, reads into Merleau-Ponty's visual field a sense of polarization, paranoia and even antagonism, rather than retaining Merleau-Ponty's sense of connection between two subjects, who fraternize due to the knowledge that they share the same visual horizon. Within Lacan's gaze, similar to the parameters of the photographic frame, the subject seems caught within this external field that has control over him, in which his sense of control or mastery over his surroundings is reduced because he is visible to others. Lacan mentions Sartre's 'peephole' scenario of the viewer being viewed, caught unawares at the keyhole by a person who creeps up behind him and sees him and emphasizes the associated feeling of shame to which the original viewer is reduced.#11 This scenario is precisely where the sense of danger and capture enters the Lacanian gaze so that the person looked at is reduced to a blind spot: "As the locus of the relation between me, the annihilating subject, and that which surrounds me, the gaze seems to possess such a privilege that it goes so far as to have me scotomized [.]." #12 Lacan's predatory gaze, reducing the subject within it to a target, bears analogies with the hunter who kills the prey that crosses his path, only it is the hunter now who is hunted. The subject's position is reduced to insignificance - a 'stain' in the visual field - he is objectified and rendered defenseless.#13 For Lacan, the gaze is something external to the subject's eyes, and he calls it, not ironically, the 'seer's shoot,' implying a phallicization of the gaze as something powerful and penetrating. #14 Art historian Hal Foster has discussed how the workings of the gaze are closely related to abjection and trauma and also draws our attention to its mortifying quality: "Lacan imagines the gaze not only as maleficent but as violent, a force that can arrest, even kill, if it is not disarmed first."#15 Foster has also focused on the threatening aspect of the Lacanian gaze as a form of hunting within the visual field: "Note the atavistic tropes of preying and taming, battling and negotiating: the gaze is given a strange agency here, and the subject is positioned in a paranoid way."#16 This tension-filled intersubjectivity working within the gaze defines Herrmann's entire practice of photographic self-portraiture, which is predicated upon the present or eventual look of the seer and the creation of an (at least imagined) awareness by the subject within the frame of the seer who apprehends his look and vice versa. Herrmann knows we will look and presents himself as a self-conscious spectacle to be seen, electrifying the gaze through the valence of power that connects viewer with viewed. Moreover, Herrmann is implicated in both positions as he is both subject to be seen and camera-operator. Two of Herrmann's recent works can be read as invoking but also challenging the fatal workings of the gaze. I find it glamourous to disappear [Frédéric Beigbeder] reads the text that accompanies the sight of the tip of Herrmann's penis protruding through a hole in a cardboard wall. Ejaculate shoots from his cock/head, which at first glance, appears as an eye would through a peep-hole. Instead of being reduced to a stain in the visual field or being annihilated by the gaze, Herrmann turns the tables of the scopic economy and performs a 'no-show,' denying the spectator's visual pleasure by hiding himself and substituting his phallic 'eye' to meet the invasive stare of the voyeur. By substituting the seer's predatory 'shoot' with his own body's 'shoot' (which also resembles a gun jutting through a walled fortification), he evades 'capture.' A politicized reading of this disappearance, however, is less playful, for it could allude to the many gay artists who have died from AIDS. In one iconic work from 1992, artist David Wojnarowicz stated, "I am disappearing but not fast enough," taking an elegiac, activist stance as a battle cry to articulate the psychic and social invisibility and exclusion he felt as a person with AIDS who was running out of time. #17 Wojnarowicz's gesture seems removed from our present era and from Herrmann's work not so much by history but by its agonistic form of identity politics, one whose necessary, vocalized agency and urgency have since then become more muted, more mature and more ambivalent. Perhaps the present tonality of subtlety is due not to complacency or lack of concern but to a stark familiarity with the issues and to exhaustion from their steady cycle of trauma, loss and grief. (Later, I will return to Herrmann's deployment of the image of shooting semen as an act of confrontation against the homophobic fear of contagion.) In another work where Herrmann's penis peeks through a cardboard box, the accompanying text reads coyly, With exposure comes freedom [Steve Rogenstein] playing upon photography's capacity to reveal 'all' in addition to Herrmann's own penchant for nudity. Herrmann challenges the very paradigms of visuality as he isn't so much captured within the gaze but released - liberated through the self-exposure of exhibitionism, giving the politics of representation all there is to see. He takes advantage of the artistic license of photography, another type of exposure, while ultimately revealing very little of himself. Herrmann's ironic critique of the inherent qualities of the photographic medium, its claim to foster transparency, poses questions to its very epistemology regarding what is at stake in giving oneself to be seen and what one can 'know' from that vision. The photographic shoot If the gaze has been shown to have a mortifying quality to it, so too has photography been linked to a 'death in life,' most famously by Roland Barthes, who attributed to photography the unique capacity to reveal: "This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake."#18 These powers associated with the medium have evolved into a mantra whereby the photograph captures the subject for posterity while simultaneously suggesting the eventual death of the subject so imaged within its borders, as if encapsulating a premonition. Noteworthy is what Silverman ascribes to this dualistic quality of the conflated 'camera/gaze's functions' (i.e. its powers to capture life for eternity as well as to snuff the life out of the subject): its availability for dismantling by artists. #19 These ideas are inflected with humour when Herrmann photographs his own ejaculations such that the micro-death produced by orgasm repeats itself, almost to the point of excess, with every click of the shutter. These deadly effects make one question what anxiety Herrmann is warding off by this obsessive/compulsive behavior (which, paradoxically suggests the effervescence of the life source): lack, castration anxiety, his own eventual death? And what of the annihilating gaze? In a work whose enigmatic quotation, translated from the German, reads To kill somebody is a great task for works of art [Dario Argento], one sees only Herrmann's erect penis poking through a hole in a large expanse of mundane cardboard, taped together and stuck with the text fragment in addition to the word 'hell.' Here Herrmann alludes to the inherent link between photography and death outlined by Barthes, as a premonition of death as well a materialization of its qualities, perceived in photography's silence, finality and irrevocability, its absences, and immobility. Despite that Herrmann has scotomized himself, reduced himself to a little 'stain' in the visual field, he refuses to become prey to the penetrating eye of the camera and shields himself (his physiognomy anyhow), offering his own 'weaponry' to counter the necrophiliac gaze of photography. In a work whose text fragment reads, Because at the end of the day, you always pay [Boris Becker], one sees the full-frontal nudity of Herrmann, whose penis is secured to his torso with tape and whose expression is dissolute. Herrmann stands within a cardboard box made to measure his frame, repeating the sense of confinement inherent in the camera's view-finder and within the confines of the photographic frame. Here the framing device mimics a coffin, complete with a door that opens, literalizing the sense of fatalism inherent in photography as Barthes sees it. His stance of authority, legs placed firmly apart, counters tendencies towards voyeurism implicit in representations of the anomalous other for the public appraisal by the spectator. By presenting himself as a spectacle, Herrmann challenges the viewer by shifting his position so that he at once possesses power but is simultaneously divested of it. Herrmann's look is also shifty, beedy, suspect, spent - qualities identified by cultural theorist Berkeley Kaite as specific to the female model in heterosexual, soft-core pornography and like her, Herrmann presents more of a sideways glance than a penetrating look.20# With Herrmann, however, his look appears less about coyness than exhaustion - he looks defeated by being made visible and seems to question the extent to which what one sees on the surface is any indication of his true self. That his identity is 'boxed in,' enclosed and propped up by a 'support' that is disposable and insubstantial, is suggested not only by the cardboard box but also by the very limits of photographic representation. As with many of the 8x10s, Herrmann multiplies visual and textual puns in Does a monster live near you? [Unidentified newspaper headline] by layering fragments from the various genres: sex, sports and photography. He juxtaposes his erect penis, from which ejaculate 'dribbles,' against a pink basketball wrapped with packing tape and framed by a glowing studio flood lamp (he shoots - he scores!). Herrmann evokes slang used to describe male prowess in these areas, appropriating their terminology to create a uniquely queer lexicon for a high art context. Male orgasm in a heterosexual context is the moment through which a biological heritage can be created. Yet ejaculate, as with the flow of other body fluids, can also be life and health threatening, due to its potential for the transmission of HIV and other STDs. Touching the gamut from love to violence, he states When you don't shoot, you can't kill [Woman selling flowers to Queen Mum]. This text quotation appears in a back-lit image of his erect penis, adorned with cock-ring and squirting semen above a small, black platform such that the momentum achieved by his body fluid achieves status as circus performer. Herrmann's continued ability to perform in this metonymic way (where the part stands in for the whole) is a kind of incarnation of his continued, indefatigable existence. He emphasizes equally the pleasure and fascination ushered in with the appearance of ejaculate in addition to its potential to 'kill.' The bi-polar qualities to ejaculate, this seemingly innocuous fluid, which is never present in any great quantity, making its appearance in mere spurts and trickles, is both potentially life-giving as well as pernicious. The omnipresence of the phallic, penetrating, even wounding quality of photography can be detected even in writing not overtly concerned with sexual difference. For example, when Barthes' describes the punctum, that singular, piercing quality of the photograph which grabs one's attention, "[.] that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me - is poignant to me)," he names it using bisexual terminology such as, "sting, speck, cut, little hole," suggesting alternately female and male ciphers of sexual difference similar to those forms made evident in Herrmann's iconography.#21 And note the playful allusions of Barthes, who states, "For me, the Photographer's organ is not his eye (which terrifies me) but his finger: what is linked to the trigger of the lens, to the metallic shifting of the plates (when the camera still has such things)."#22 The camera is implicitly a weapon to be wielded, a tool used to take aim in a predatory relation balanced when, "the person or thing photo-graphed is the target." #23 Herrmann's pornographic/photographic 'shoot' materializes the slippery relationship between the camera (as a potent prosthesis of the eye and an extension of vision), the penis, and a gun. The slice of life There exists a redundant, even superfluous quality to the photographs that depict only Herrmann's penis, due to the fetishistic quality of this body part, coupled with the way it is shown as a fragment. The sense of incompleteness emblematic to the photograph is described by Christian Metz as inherently fetishistic in the way it offers 'protection against loss' and 'preserves fragments of the past.'24 Further, ejaculation in the photographic realm is itself a type of loss as articulated by Kaite: "The 'money shot' is the final loss, the inevitable limpness of desire in the face of its representation (and of representation in the face of desire)."#25 Metz also suggests that the mechanism of the camera apparatus, coupled with the framing effect of the photograph, in its exclusion of so much outside the scene, is symbolic of castration: "the off-frame effect in photography results from a singular and definitive cutting off which figures castration and is figured by the 'click' of the shutter."#26 Contrary to what Metz identifies as the 'irreversible absence' effected by the fetishistic nature of photography, I read Herrmann's work as part of a continuum of embodied plenitude rather than loss, ironizing and complicating the quality of photography that simultaneously captures a fragment of life (or at least the potential for it, again and again in the flow of ejaculate) while it prefigures death by freezing for eternity each instant in time.#27 This is due to the temporal dimension and Herrmann's personal relation to it that permeates and qualifies his recent work as an HIV-positive artist, thereby allowing one to place the freeze-frame qualities of the photographic shoot in greater depth, in a context that involves the longevity of the body one views normally through the medium as an 'instantaneous' or 'immediate' slice of life.#28 Contributing another dimension to Herrmann's work is that pornography is a photographic 'genre' described by Kaite as "privileging a bodily articulation which offers up too much to see [.] and it is in this narcissistic fusion - there appears to be nothing lacking in the field of vision [.]." #29 With this in mind, the 'analogical plenitude' deconstructed by Barthes as a quality of the photographic medium (i.e. the apparent richness of reality that it can 'confirm' seemingly ad infinitum - to seemingly show and tell us all there is and was to see)#30 is therefore magnified by the pornographic tone of Herrmann's gaze. Not only does Herrmann seem to reveal everything of his body and his private pleasures, he does this by exploiting the many contradictory qualities of the medium. Yet despite so much to see, does one ever actually 'know' Herrmann? Rather than suggesting the ability to fix identity (for eternity) within the intersecting force-fields of photography, visuality and sexuality, Herrmann offers fluid, relational images traced by anxiety, effacement, elisions and inversions. He exploits but also questions the implied sense of mastery associated with self-portrait photo-graphy's capacity for self-presentation/self-preservation, challenging its sense of domination over one's image and legacy. The phallic eye/I The substitution of the penis tip/head for the eye/face is a representational strategy for Herrmann that becomes tautological. The prodding, poking quality to photography is coyly mimicked by Herrmann's probing 'second eye,' the tip of his erect penis (which, like the anus and other orifices, suggests a winking, 'blinking eye'),#31 which insistently appears at any and all opportunity, even at the opening formed by a few pieces of flimsy cardboard held together by packing tape. It is not only genital orifices that have an erotic, epicene quality, but, within a pornographic context, also the eye, which Kaite calls "the ocular orifice, an orifice which begins as ambisexual; i.e., it can receive as well as emit."#32 In these works, Herrmann is playing a game of hide and seek, cache-cache or peek-a-boo, substituting a part of himself for the whole and in the process, re-zoning the traditional morphology of the body such that the seat of insight and identity (the eyes and the face) is displaced onto the genital area. The penis 'head' re-turns the gaze and performs his identity for him. The phallic eye/I are conflated within Herrmann's work to become vehicles for agency. This dynamic matrix of vision is illustrated by an earlier work by Herrmann, where he exposes himself as artist/subject who simultaneously wields the apparatus and becomes the object captured within its trap. Adorned by a text fragment which reads, Icons need cameras in front of them - as well as around their necks [Graham Fuller], Herrmann photographs himself photographing himself, naked and with an erection and camera lens both pointed directly at the viewer. #33 Although Herrmann partakes of this phallic photographic prerogative, which is loaded with the conceptual baggage of intellectual 'illumination,' there is slippage evident all his positions, despite the assuredness of his focus. The disembodied, phallic 'I' of Herrmann's penis is substituted for the cognitive eye implied by the sense of vision, such that 'insight' in the form of ejaculate and visuality flows through the erotic body. This satisfies the question as to how he is both in front of the camera lens and behind it at the same time, at once hidden and exposed. One work, clarifying a 'carnal density of vision,' an eroticism of the gaze, reads, Anyway, where am I? [David Wojnarowicz] and shows the penis head and topped with a dollop of cum peeking through a hole in some cardboard. #34 Giving body to vision and fleshing out desire, despite the limitations of photography's two dimensions, his penis is the stand-in for the self and it satisfies the voyeuristic promise of photography. Similarly to what Rosalind Krauss has identified as the 'photographic conditions of surrealism,' which revolve around its 'semiological conditions,' namely framing, different ways of looking and the hidden meanings of simple objects, it's interesting to note the photograph by Man Ray that Krauss chose to illustrate her essay.#35 It shows the top of a man's fedora in an abstracted form so that the man's face is completely obscured by the gentle folds of the felt forming a diagonal crevice. Immediately suggesting the much-magnified head of a penis as well as labial folds, the ambiguous figure then morphs into eye-lids, like slits through which an eye blindly peers. The figure also transforms from an object that covers to an object that is un-covered, unveiled. As Krauss points out, the work illustrates the 'prosthetic' quality of the camera itself: "The camera covers and arms this nakedness [.]." #36 If we turn to a specific image within Herrmann's theme of ejaculation, entitled Shit happens in which a used unfurled condom limply sticks to a metal bar (doubling the presence of the 'shaft'), the idea of camera-as-prosthesis becomes a double-entendre after the legacy of Surrealist photo-jokes. The protection or 'armature' of the condom is whipped off, unfurled, leaving Herrmann's penis unprotected, suggestively limp and ineffectual despite the ejaculate that flows from it. Like many of the Surrealist textual and visual strategies involving black humour, Herrmann's text is also shifting in its connotations: is he referring merely to the embarrassment of premature ejaculation or the more serious consequences of a condom breaking during sex? Untitled - Head is another faceless self-portrait in which the artist's 'head' appears both deadly and dick-like. Here, packing tape wrapped around his entire face covers his mouth and nose as well as his eyes - surely a dangerous game to play in the studio when one works alone. In this solipsism, introversion and self-enclosure, he offers a risky measure of his own identity through the limits of the body, through its formal parameters. He presents himself without access to the gaze - his power of mastery is sheathed like a giant penis 'all wrapped up' with a condom for sex. Herrmann presents himself in public feats of auto-manipulation that suggest a self-realization gone backwards - a disappearing act of a self burdened, but perhaps also intellectually stimulated, by various 'pathologies.' Herrmann's non-phallic masculinity Despite the fact that Herrmann unfurls so many images of his own penis, he does not invoke the associated power structures of mastery that accompany the linked notion of the phallus. While Herrmann deploys the penis, or rather, his own particular, situated, embodied, individual penis, he does this without phallicism, a proposal that is not as absurd as it would initially appear. According to Kaite, "Even the seemingly most masculinist (or 'phallic,' in the vernacular sense) representations, identities of subjects and objects, men and women, models and readers, are acquired under threat and characterized by decenteredness, instabilities, and impurities (in the logical, not moral sense)."#37 Herrmann's recourse to the penis suggests an identity traced by fluidity rather than phallicism and this aligns him with the strategic discourses of a particularly fleshy feminism, after Luce Irigaray, a point to be discussed later. For now, the distinction between penis and phallus will show how Herrmann's work challenges the traditionally masculinist (i.e. heteronormative) notions of autonomy, potency and visuality. The phallus is a psychoanalytic notion, also after Jacques Lacan, which implies the patriarchial domination of language, cultural systems and gender differentiation as well as the compliance of the subject to its laws. Not only does the Lacanian phallus exists in this symbolic register, it represents the possibility of signification itself, its very underpinnings. In light of the subtext of sexual difference that grounds its workings, it is unfortunately also representative of the status-quo or the norms themselves, according to John Zuern: "that many of Lacan's critics understand as a confirmation of patriarchy and heteronormativity."#38 Within the Lacanian linguistic system of the phallus, both the male and the female subject is always castrated as s/he never possesses a full mastery of language, but remains desirous, split - language always pre-exists the subject and is that to which s/he must conform, must accede. This leaves the subject in a state of perpetual lack, never in possession of the phallus. The phallus is not a material, tangible thing anyway, but a state of affairs, a symbolic environment based on a sense of deprivation rather than fulfillment. One clarification central to a feminist reading of Herrmann's work is the distinction between the phallus and the penis. According to John Zuern, "For Lacan, the phallus operates in the psychic life of the subject as a signifier, but does not signify the penis."39# Yet as Jane Gallup points out, despite Lacan's attempt to distance the penis from the phallus, it is a 'fallacious' metaphor due to its self-referentiality. As a symbol it is "an end in and for itself," an unattainable state of solitude beyond everyone's reach. Contrary to the self-sufficient phallus, Gallup identifies qualities to the penis that suggest an openness towards the other: "the erect penis, unlike the symbolic phallus, is not monolithic power, but desire, need for another body."#40 If we think of Herrmann's work as toying with the penis, the literal and fluctuating quality of his organ (which, unlike the phallus, he can grasp), we can think of his body as referential, relational, dialogic and opening onto the possibility of the other (at minimum, acknowledging the spectator), rather than monologic, despite the fact that he works solo. Although the phallus was never meant to symbolize the penis in a literal way, the link between them that clearly evokes the sense of power persists. According to Drucilla Cornell, "Although the phallus for Lacan is never in truth the same as literal penis, 'it' - in quotation marks here because the phallus is not a thing or a body part - is still identified as masculine,"#41 and therefore associated with the inherent privilege and expectations associated with masculinity. One of the most obvious symbols of masculinity is power: "Although this is a compensatory fantasy, it is one that props up civilized 'man' by allowing him to define himself through the attributes we associate with potency."#42 This is due to the strong visual and linguistic imagery created, to Lacan's own descriptions of the phallus, in which his choice of words is significant in the double entendre they evoke, as quoted by Zuern: "It might be said that, by virtue of its turgidity, it is the image of the vital flow as it is transmitted in generation." This statement suggests the erectness of the phallus as well as its heteronormative function for producing offspring: note that the 'flow' is here in the service of reproduction rather than auto-eroticism or gay sex. Its capacity is described as an ever-present, ever-renewable potentiality, much like the penis's capacity to become erect with desire: "a sign of the latency with which any signifiable is struck, when it is raised (aufgehoben) to the function of signifier."#43 Many theorists have suggested that the notion of the phallus, its seemingly 'inherent' power or even necessity, is open to interrogation, even resignification. Silverman discusses the power of the phallus in terms of Althusser's notion of ideology, which is founded upon illusion and misrecognition, where the phallus is emblematic of the illusory power of representational structures such as language. Describing this effect as the 'dominant fiction,' Silverman states: "Its most central signifier of unity is the (paternal) family, and its primary signifier of privilege the phallus."#44 To a similar extent, feminist theorist Drucilla Cornell has described this illusory quality to the phallus as maintained by the inherent power attributed to its functioning: "Potency is a metaphor that encompasses all the attributes that culturally come to be identified, not with the actual father, but with the imaginary father, the one who at least in fantasy has the phallus."#45 The illusionary quality of the phallus - that which sends the subject into a state of misrecognition - is also that which lends itself to re-signification. It is this aspect of the phallus that is emphasized to heighten our understanding of the way Herrmann plays with it for his own comic, subversive purposes. Zuern writes about phallic power as amenable to 'dicking around,' to envision a future in which neither men nor women are oppressed by heteronormative masculinity.#46 If one considers the earlier body of Herrmann's work, in which masquerade, gender parody and the shifting signification of fetish objects were invoked in relation to a performative, embodied identity, one sees the extent to which male and female - "our dominant fiction's most fundamental binary opposition" - seem to tumble and dissolve.#47 Likewise, Kaite has written about pornography as 'a mediated text' which has the epicene, androgynous quality of bearing traces of both gender positions.#48 In this regard, one could consider the gender-bending play of Herrmann's work, especially from 1995-99, where he theatrically deployed a myriad of masculine as well as feminine selves, queer and straight, strategically subverting and ironizing codes of gender in a melting pot of erotic hybridity for the subject on both sides of the 'mirror.' If, after Silverman, "méconnaissance motivates the male subject's phallic identification," then it is Herrmann's ability to explode the workings of the phallus by the exposure of its ideology of compulsory masculinity that is not as rule-bound as previously imagined.#49 Ironically, it is precisely the ways in which Herrmann makes use of the penis and the flows it produces that align him with a type of 'deviant' and 'non-phallic masculinity' that Silverman has importantly identified as bearing similarities with the female subject.#50 Moreover, Cornell has proposed how the Lacanian symbolic (which encompasses the notion of the phallus) is not as rigid in terms of gender codes as generally thought, allowing for instability in which each gender can shift, slip, and entertain qualities of difference, including metaphors of the maternal. According to Cornell, "Thus, the Lacanian framework can potentially explain masculine rebellion against the very order that would seem to be in their name [.] It can also explain why such rebellion through a positioning vis à vis the feminine is possible for men."#51 This is significant in demonstrating the dialogue Herrmann's work could foster with feminist aims, as we will now explore. Fluidity What are the relationships that could be formed between an artist who so enjoys photographing his ejaculate shooting in all directions and feminist theories of gendered identity that have made efforts to debunk the mythology of the phallus? Might one find ironies by reading Herrmann's work against the metaphoricity of Luce Irigaray, a feminist known for her affirmation of female fleshy forms? Perhaps subversive laughter could be heard from both sites of 'otherness,' from feminist to queer identities, whose frequently parallel aims in the articulation of difference could be strengthened and stretched by combining forces, by cross-pollination? Moreover, could one turn to fluid imagery to account for the non-phallic identity that has reared its head in Herrmann's photographs? One could assume the metaphor of bodily flows as a conscious, counter-phallic tactic to articulate identities that refuse sedimentation. Interestingly, recourse to images of fluidity, more often than evoking the masculine prerogative of ejaculation, have usually led to specifically feminine notions of embodiment, in particular those flows related to maternity. While on one hand, this recourse to the body has been disavowed by some North-American feminists as essentialist (i.e. as reducing or restricting women to the function of the biological body), on the other hand, this approach has been defended by feminists as useful in subverting masculinist representational schemata that deny or disparage the female body and its capacity for reproduction, relationality and its protean qualities.#52 According to Irigaray, resorting to metaphors of fluidity, the very imagery that has been so disparaged by masculinist representations - especially by those philosophers going back as far as the Ancients (who conceived of the male as solid, dry, self-contained and measurable in a quantifiable way) #53 - becomes a subversive strategy that foils the oppressor, engulfs him, rains on his parade and soaks him to the skin. This tactic of fluidity may also be said to counter the 'phallomorphism' of Lacan's inflexible signifying framework into something capable of metamorphosis, opening onto sexual difference. #54 Cornell has described Irigaray's achievement as, "constantly evoking fluidity as the overflow of the barriers of identity, gender or otherwise." #55 Irigaray's metaphors for female identity open possibilities for reciprocal communion with otherness, for ways of operating that circumvent the imperatives of the phallus, which posits a foundational opposition between the sexes: "The other can come into play in all kinds of ways providing that there is no imposition of rigid forms ."#56 Against its turgidity, 'potency,' self-sufficiency, aridity or verticality, I suggest that the image of the phallus is not completely immune to fluidity and recall Lacan, who mentioned its 'vital flow' and Zuern, who creates an ejaculatory image of the phallus as 'always coming.'#57 There is always fluctuation between the relational and divisional qualities to semen proposed in Herrmann's photographs, ascribing fluidity to the 'identity' of the semen itself. While Herrmann suggests the potentially fatal outcome of orgasm, If you don't shoot, you can't kill he also asserts its relational capacities: "Semen doesn't only form a connection between two people, but also within oneself." #58 After Irigaray, flow and flux are models through which one could acknowledge the fleshy aspects not only of feminine identity, but also of non-phallic masculinity: in asserting identity that cannot be essentialized, that 'never closes up into a volume,' one achieves possibilities for connections between two separate bodies as well as within oneself. #59 If the feminine is so constrained within discursive structures that can't accommodate her fleshy existence, then, to be strategic, one could imagine this body oozing out everywhere as fluids do, overtaking, enveloping or even drowning philosophers (like Déscartes) in its murky waters which cannot be entirely mapped out through vision, geometry or rationality. #60 The writings of Irigaray can deepen one's understanding of how Herrmann claims flesh and fluidity, the frequently clichéd aspects that have wrongly coded the body as strictly within the domain of the female, and therefore as something negative, to become positive elements rather than insults. Irigaray's description of how the uncontainable, unpredictable, material (maternal) body has been devalued as a source of knowledge within philosophic approaches shows us the extent to which Herrmann's mindset could be considered compatible with the aims of feminism, in that he refuses to disengage himself from the glorious sludge of embodiment. Yet I caution against any feminist appropriation of Herrmann's work, one that would steam-roll over what is uniquely queer in it - for this mistake would be to commit the same crime that Irigaray has accused masculinist philosophy of perpetrating: a vision of 'one-ness' blind to specificities and pleasures of sexual difference. What are the specificities and connections within the auto-erotic, performative body of Herrmann, a photo-based artist whose subject matter is comprised almost entirely of his own ejaculatory image? Perhaps HIV-infection, present in the ejaculate that (over)flows within so many of Herrmann's photographs, is a form of otherness within the self that must constantly be negotiated. Perhaps this 'otherness' is incorporated into his identity in ways that shift the tone of his work from the earlier, more playful theatrics to a narrowing of focus on the bare minimum of props, largely the primordial, mortal body itself, using it as the field of exploration for concepts of presence and absence, continued visibility and the threat of disappearance. The primary resources of Herrmann's body are the same tools used before 1999, but now their meaning has a different, more cutting inflection. The 'otherness' within Herrmann's embodied self, the seemingly abject qualities of semen (especially in its 'infected' quality), is not only endlessly explored, but also shared with the public in the transparency of his photographic gaze. The bodily fluids and aspects of Herrmann's frequently glorified, frequently hidden flesh are the grounds upon which his art is played out, much like canvas and paints are to a more traditional artist. Directed outward from his body, Herrmann's ejaculate is a fluid form of speech through the body, a form of contact with others. In his public display of these acts, he voices his identity outwards. Moreover, this otherness within the self is equally a body fluid, that in sexual penetration, is capable of becoming the self within the other and is therefore relational rather than that which cuts the masculine self off from the 'otherness' of femininity. In fact, this fluid relationship with otherness forms a challenge to abjection, if the abject is viewed as something threatening that must be shunned or suppressed in order for the subject to 'thrive.' Herrmann writes about the conflicting qualities invoked by the image of semen: "There is the innocence of the white fluid, the power it has to give birth as opposed to the danger associated with it (STDs in particular, HIV/AIDS more specifically)."#61 Herrmann's photographs reflect the simultaneous reaction/attraction to the strangeness of his body's emissions as in: 'This is me?' much the same way a child looks equally with fascination and horror at the blood flowing from a cut. While this ambivalence does suggest the qualities of the abject, Herrmann's work does not invoke those aspects of identity that usually accompany references to it within contemporary art, those that invoke the body's debased substances or its condition as injured to bear witness to an oppressed, marginalized or otherwise wounded subjectivity. Despite the 'diseased' or 'infected' status of Herrmann's semen, what is actually transmitted in the 8x10s is its precious, delicate beauty and therefore, a sense of wonder that arises about its possibilities. Ultimately, Herrmann's representational dynamic in the 8x10s is as much about the gaze, visuality and the discourse of photography as it is about the constantly shifting, heterogenous aspects of an identity that cannot be contained, an identity still unfolding through a decidedly mutable, malleable body. This of course, is a continuation of his previous masquerade works from the late nineties, which explored the many facets of gender, art world ironies, aesthetics, technologies of the self and other 'perversions.' Now, fluidity of identity has taken over in a more primordial, literal way - making use not of costume, accessories or accoutrements which grace the body's surface but the inherent resources of his body. The fluidity of Herrmann's identity is also subtly apparent in the enigmatic 'statements' he makes to accompany his imagery (none of which are his own - all are quotations taken from other sources), suggesting those differences and paradoxes that are co-present within one body, forming tensions between the body and its image in the visual field, as well as questioning one's ability to grasp his identity through either textual or visual sources. For example, witness the competing 'pathologies' of Herrmann's psyche versus that of his corpus, the perversions of his body-manipulations against the literal infection of HIV. Some 'pathologies' can be represented endlessly and inventively on film, while some, at this stage at least, cannot be seen with the naked eye, only read on hospital charts or measured by CD4 cell counts. For example, in Pills, a self-portrait shot against angry red backdrop, an entire month's worth of the HIV cocktail, still encased in their sharp packaging, is violently shoved in Herrmann's mouth. Is he feverishly ingesting the pills, or is he gagging as he spits them out, regurgitating them, violently abjecting them? This form of cocktail is of the Molotov kind - laced with violence and wilful resistance. In Private Life , the dizzying white lights of the studio are aimed at the spectator while Herrmann is nowhere to be seen. In a reversal of positions, the viewer sees from the point of view normally occupied by the model, Herrmann, such that we are all lit up like stars. Two contradictory text messages appear to 'affirm' how his artistic persona is, in fact, no reflection of his day-to-day identity, an effect that is at once claimed by the auto-biographic text but disavowed due to Herrmann's absence from the picture. The statement, My private life is completely normal [Jack Nicholson] becomes suspect when juxtaposed with the word 'hell.' The blinding glare also eerily suggests that one is under the intense scrutiny of a god-like figure that surveils from a hidden perspective. The white sheet thrown off also suggests a body being unveiled for surgery under the lights of the operating room. Something is amiss, a condition that will remain undetected by the spectator. Yet who and where is the subject to which the text alludes? While the text fragment appears to be auto-biographical, like all the others in Herrmann's work, it is a quotation lifted from another source, challenging the presumed authenticity of self-representational artwork. In these recent 8x10s, Herrmann's identity is fluid with his slippery evasions, in the sense that what one sees in the photographs is not Herrmann's true identity, but a performance, a phantasmic, chameleon self. Even the testimonial grammar that informs the statement, I am what I do, but not really [David Wojnarowicz] cannot be trusted because they are originally Herrmann's words. In this work, Herrmann gives himself a shower in the studio from under a red bucket of water, much like Irigaray's philosopher, who drowns by the senses that arise through the body, engulfing him. Herrmann is drenched: his fluid, uncontrollable identity runs over and off him like a torrent of water in his own version of water sports. Through an endlessly inventive image repertoire suggesting an identity that will not be confined to the frame, Herrmann performs the self as an unpredictable heretogeneity that extends well off screen. Metaforeplay and gushiness Irigaray's metaphoricity has, however, not been unproblematic within feminism itself and has been accused of essentialism and even deemed 'metaforeplay.'62# Against such critique and even exaggerating Irigaray's terms, Cornell proposes that a "certain amount of flooding of the symbolic order by the imaginary is desirable."#63 Defending the articulation of embodied, feminine identities not based in masculinist paradigms, Cornell asks: "Why is it so bad to gush? Because gushing is identified as a 'feminine' characteristic? [.] Is not the 'gush' exactly what overflows the very boundaries of subject, understood as held apart, an erect self against the other [.]?" #64 By strategic engagement with photography and the gaze and the very representational systems that would seem to structure his identity in a fixed way, im/mortalizing it, and by his subversive refusal to let his identity be boxed in, Herrmann also seems to 'want a little bit of that flood.' The support for figures associated with the feminine is not only timely in light of the continued cultural interest in the body, but also expansive in its possibilities for bridging a divide between 'two solitudes,' that is, work surrounding the body by feminist and gay artists.65# Why do the flows of woman's periodicity and experience of maternity so rarely get read in relation to male flows - in particular, those suggested by ejaculation, which is so closely related to the presumed power of the phallus? Perhaps because the 'fluidity' of woman is a normative characteristic that has had oppressive material repercussions (politically, economically and historically) and has also been disparaging (consider the repulsion of the mother in the abject), while contemporary instances of male fluidity are often taken as taboo or transgression (as in Serrano's 'cum shots' or Bob Flanagan's masochistic performances where he nails his penis to a board so that blood squirts out). Cornell suggests the power of fluidity to shake the notion of the phallus from its already-precarious position: "The gush figures the undermining of the illusion of the subject to be one with itself."#66 With these notions, one could certainly imagine some alliances forming between feminists and the aims of male artists whose gestures could be considered non-phallic in their recourse to imagery of fluidity. Because of the shifting, malleable ways in which Herrmann deploys nebulous, polysexual, hypersexual, auto-erotic permutations of the gendered self, his work offers a direct challenge to the 'dominant fiction' of heteronormative sexual difference, that predicated upon the mute but overarching thrust of the phallus (veiled or not) to structure cultural representations. I appreciate Cornell's exuberant word 'gush,' which warms up some of the clinical neutrality of the term 'fluid.' Gush suggests that the taps are on full-blast, or even that the pipes have broken altogether - that plumbing is out of control. Gush alludes to a font, a hydrant, a primal source, a fountain (of hope, life, eternal youth?). Gush suggests an extra-sensory dimension to fluidity. It alludes to an effervescent enthusiasm and joy - as when someone's gushing - when words overflow and cascade before the rational intellect can put them neatly into perspective. Gush seems appropriate in relation to all the excesses that characterize Herrmann's work: his pornographic exposure, the phallicism of his gaze, the repeated visualization of his orgasms, all of which, ironically, disarm the spectator as much as the artist. Further, I wish to retain the notion of metaforeplay, as foreplay suggests the initiation of erotic fun rather than the nastier term 'tease' and is therefore appropriate for Herrmann's ludic photos, in which the artist's je and his jeux are always intertwined, taking part in a laughter similar to Irigaray's subversive feminine writing. The laughter sometimes takes a turn to black humour as Herrmann toys with our expectations and misleads us with his apparently light-hearted tone. The unflinching way he contemplates the perils of embodiment also engage the frequently-neglected issues of time and bodily frailty. Longevity Maybe nothing can save me [David Wojnarowicz] Herrmann scrawls sloppily with thick, black magic marker onto an empty box of Kodak film (the same film used to shoot the 8x10s), through which a hole has been roughly cut to allow his penis to peek. His off-handed comment speaks to photography's limited powers of preservation in the face of the potential mortality of the body. While a legacy is created through Herrmann's photographic practice, which, like all art, holds a generative capacity to immortalize its subject and 'outlive' its creator, this seems less desirable than Herrmann's ability to work with the sense of an unimpeded future. This appears to be a luxury entertained by those not HIV-positive, those not faced with the necessity of managing a serious illness and the threat of premature death, those whose capacity to experience freshness and enchantment in a sensory way - to smell it, to grasp it - is still unimpaired. The frame of reference is now the abstract, intangible experience of time unfolding rather than the quantifiable, perceptible margins offered by the camera lens. Herrmann also seems to be commenting upon the limited powers of pharmacology to preserve him: there is no magic bullet. In general, Herrmann's photographic focus on his semen (a fluid that, in a queer context, is vulnerable to signification as infected) is especially ironic in relation to this presumed eternity achieved by the male artist through the legacy of artworks, in which the artworks themselves are his 'spawn' and prone to description as 'seminal' in terms of the artist's career. In uncovering the philosophic precedents for the concept of artistic genius, feminist philosopher Christine Battersby notes: "It was spermatic: an active, forming principle analogous to the male seed." #67 In particular, the notion of creative genius is founded upon the quasi-religious, mythologization of semen as paradigmatic of this male prerogative: "Genius reveals itself as divine promptings from within the male self: to reproduce, and to produce artistically. The pen, paintbrush and sculptor's chisel are made substitutes for the penis." #68 As Battersby has shown, in the history of aesthetic philosophy, in order to curtail any acknowledgement of the female's special contribution to the act of giving birth, the male appropriates the powers of procreation for himself. For feminists, the omnipotent, artist-creator figure, who is depicted like a God or a deity, is another dominant fiction to be debunked. In this regard, Herrmann's hilarious gesture of using his erect penis, dripping with semen, to outline a type of 'masterpiece' that depicts nothing more than a child-like stick figure, aggrandizing it with the inflated title Painting, and then photographing the activity becomes ironic, even sarcastic on many levels. The ephemeral quality of a work-on-paper compared to oil-on-canvas, suggests that the longevity of all artistic creations and the geniuses that produce them are highly suspect, if not laughable. I am no party animal , states Herrmann, quoting comedian Ben Stiller, again asserting that despite the playful posturing and conceptual gaming he presents in his photographs, one should not take him literally. His work is better understood as a form of identity subversion: he is who one sees in the work at the same time as he is not. I conclude with this work because the iconic qualities of the image are amenable to metaforeplay: the male form of the erect penis, ejaculating and meeting the female form of the yellow flower, labial petals open and accommodating. These two elements appear not so much to be duelling as forming a dialogue - forming speech through the body, intertwining traces of many genders. Herrmann's penis is coded by the feminine in the gushing fluid while the flower is traced by the masculine in the prick-ly erectness of its stem. The liquid 'seed' contained within the semen is echoed by the 'seed' contained within the flower buds. The fleeting bloom of the flower is contrasted with ejaculate, an embodied energy source that is at once renewable and spent, to comprise a contemporary photographic memento mori - a contemplation of mortality and the transience of pleasures - suggesting the simultaneous potential for freshness and corruption, melancholy and joy. These conflicting sentiments register as states of flux, flow and as part of a continuum involving a multitude of shifts, those between states of birth and death, feminine and masculine, potency and vulnerability, infection and purity, self-affirmation and self-denial, the ability of photography to capture the subject and that which escapes its frame. Yet the mention of terms in this fashion suggests that they are polar opposites, even limits, when in fact they are not cohesive 'states' at all but always, to a greater or lesser extent, degrees of permeability and change. Herrmann's work investigates, in a myriad of carnal gestures, the strange and lovely paradoxes of the fleshy, fluid body - how it simultaneously possesses relational qualities as well as the potential for opposition. While undermining classic tenets of photography and the gaze, Herrmann's work also gains momentum by invoking their very terms, in order to resignify the phallic power linked with them, and contributing to possibilities for multi-faceted identity that can neither be incarnated into a substantive, gendered unity nor completely disembodied into pure visuality. With thanks to Ingrid Paulson for her proof-reading, to Claudette Lauzon for her comments, and most affectionately to Matthias Herrmann for his generous enlightenment during the writing of this text. #1 Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and "The Frenzy of the Visible" (Berkeley: U California P, 1989), p. 93. #2 Matthias Herrmann, e-mail to the author, 12 Jan, 2004. #3 Kaja Silverman, Threshold of the Visual World (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 137. #4 Herrmann, e-mail to the author, 12 Jan, 2004. #5 Title of Peaches' CD, Kitty Yo: XL, 2003. #6 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Penguin, 1964), pp. 67-90. #7 Jacques Lacan, p. 83. #8 Silverman 133, citing Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 83. #9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Intertwining - The Chiasm," The Visible and The Invisible, trans. Alfonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968), pp. 130-155. #10 Lacan, p. 72. #11 Lacan, p. 84. #12 Lacan, p. 84. #13 Lacan, p. 74. #14 Lacan, p. 72. #15 Hal Foster, "Obscene, Abject, Traumatic," October 78 (1996), p. 109. #16 Foster, p.109. #17 Untitled, gelatin-silver print and silk-screened text, 38 x 26-inches, reproduced in David Wojnarowicz, Bushfires in the Social Landscape (New York: Aperture, 1994), p. 83. #18 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill-Farrar, 1981), p 96. #19 Silverman, p. 137. #20 Berkeley Kaite, Pornography and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), p. 75. #21 Barthes (italics mine), p. 27. #22 Barthes, p. 15. #23 Barthes, p. 9. #24 Christian Metz, "Photography and Fetish," The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography, ed. Carol Squires (Seattle: Bay P, 1990), p. 158. #25 Kaite, p. 138. #26 Metz, p. 161. #27 Metz, p. 161. #28 Metz, p. 158. #29 Kaite, p. 138. #30 Roland Barthes, "The Photographic Message," Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Flamingo-Fontana/Collins, 1977), p. 18. #31 Kaite, p. 82. #32 Kaite, p. 79. #33 Herrmann quoting Graham Fuller, Interview 11/91, Text Pieces 1996-1998 (Zurich: Stemmle, 1999), p. 125. #34 Linda Williams, "Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the Carnal Density of Vision," Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), pp. 3-41. #35 Man Ray's "Illustration for Tzara, 'D'un Certain Automatisme du Gout,'" 1933, reproduced in Rosalind Krauss, "Photographic Conditions of Surrealism," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambride, MA: MIT P, 1994), p. 116. #36 Krauss (my emphasis), p. 116. #37 Kaite, p. 2. #38 John Zuern, "The Future of the Phallus," Revealing Male Bodies, ed. Nancy Tuana et. al (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002), p. 59. #39 Zuern, p. 59. #40 Jane Gallup, "Phallus/Penis: Same Difference," Men by Women (New York: Holmes, 1981), p. 250. #41 Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accomodation (Lantham, MD: Rowman, 1999) xvii. #42 Cornell xvii. #43 Lacan cited by Zuern, p. 60. #44 Silverman, p. 34. #45 Cornell xviii. #46 Zuern, p. 56. #47 Silverman, p. 34-35. #48 Kaite, p. 67. #49 Silverman, p. 44. #50 Silverman, p. 2-3. #51 Cornell, p. 53. #52 Diana Fuss, "Luce Irigaray's Language of Essences" Essentially Speaking (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 55-72. #53 Anne Carson, "Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity," Men in the Off Hours (Toronto: Vintage-Random, 2001), pp. 130-157. #54 Fuss, p. 65. #55 Cornell, p. 15. #56 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985), p. 234. #57 Zuern, p. 66. #58 Herrmann, e-mail to the author, 12 Jan, 2004. #59 Irigaray, "Volume - Fluidity," Speculum, p. 239. #60 Irigaray, "Eye of a Man Recently Dead," Speculum, p.185. #61 Herrmann, e-mail to the author, 12 Jan, 2004. #62 Cornell, citing Domna C. Stanton, p. 209. #63 Cornell, "A Return for the Future: Interview," Feminist Consequences: Theory for a New Century, eds. Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka (New York: Columbia UP, 2001), p. 448. #64 Cornell, Beyond Accomodation, p. 15. #65 Although I view this to be an exaggeration, this term, suggested by art historian Gerta Moray during a public talk given by artist AA Bronson at the Power Plant, Toronto, January 2004, alludes to the frequently parallel aims of queer and feminist artists who engage in body work, despite the lack of dialogue between them. I quote her phrase, which comes from Canadian political history to describe the antagonistic silence between French and English Canada. #66 Cornell, Beyond Accomodation, p. 15. #67 Christine Battersby, (London, UK: Woman's P, 1989), p. 59. #68 Battersby, p. 63. Andrea D. Fitzpatrick Published in 8x10'', Edition Fotohof, 2004 |