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Beginning With The Body: Fleshy Politics In The Performance Art Of Rebecca Belmore And Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Samantha Balzer
Beginning With The Body: Fleshy Politics In The Performance Art Of Rebecca Belmore And Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Samantha Balzer
Journal of Feminist Scholarship
This article examines what I term the "fleshy" politics of Rebecca Belmore's 2002 Vigil and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's contributions to the 2009 version of the performance project Sins Invalid: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility. Focusing on the embodied performances of both Belmore and Piepzna-Samarasinha, I read the skin of the artist as a site where complex politics develop. This analysis is broken into three sections: the first considers the relationship between the performing body and the performance space; the second attends to specific movements each artist makes; the third focuses on garments worn in each …
The Problem Of Protection: Rethinking Rhetoric Of Normalizing Surgeries, Amy Falvey
The Problem Of Protection: Rethinking Rhetoric Of Normalizing Surgeries, Amy Falvey
Journal of Feminist Scholarship
This essay focuses on the rhetoric of protection that emerges around infants who face the prospect of normalizing surgeries. Frequently, decisions to proceed with normalizing surgeries are made by doctors and parents with "protection" of the infant as a motivating force. "Protection," in such contexts, typically refers to protection of the infant from the inhospitable world that lies in wait for an individual whose body does not conform to social, morphological, and biological norms. While this concern may be valid and important, this essay argues that there are alternative narratives or notions of protection that must also be acknowledged and …