Essay by Sylva Storm for Contextualising Practice
Content Warning: this essay discusses abortion, reproductive rights and queer trauma and contains images of scarification
RAW: Nobody who loved me saw it happen (2019 – 2024) (Figure1, 2) is a performance documented by filmmaker and artist Celeste De Clario. The 29-minute durational work records me tattooing my chest with the word RAW in white ink. The video consists of a single shot of my chest occasionally panning upwards to capture my face and shoulders. I tattoo, bleed and wipe my skin tenderlyThis essay utilises an auto-theoretical [1] writing style to interrogate the ‘closet’ and to trace the politics of the queer and abortive body so as to explore how confessional and performance practice can create a location for the processing of grief and shame.
RAW was completed in 2024, but this work began in 2019 with a pregnancy and abortion I had at the age of 20. The portion of the title ‘Nobody who loves me saw it happen’ is a reference to the surgical nature of my abortion. Surgical abortion is done under general anaesthesia I was unconscious, and no one who knows me witnessed it. Abortion is isolating. I met someone recently who works in abortion peer support. We discussed the differences and similarities between our experiences. They told me: you don’t understand it unless you’ve had one. The taboo surrounding abortion makes it further isolating. I had the support of my friends and family, but I was uncomfortable discussing my abortion outside of familiar spaces. In 2023 when I was creating this work I was also in the process of coming out as queer, a differently loaded experience, which included far more joy. I see the connective tissue of a kind of closet. I consider RAW in reference to both experiences.
My closet holds many things
‘Tonight I’m cleanin’ out my closet’ (Eminem c. 2001).
Making and writing about RAW(2019 – 2024) propelled me to consider the nature of the closet. As Sedgewick has articulated:
‘[e]ven on an individual level among the most openly gay people there are very few who are not in the closet with someone who is personally, economically, or institutionally important to them (Sedgewick 2008:19).
Coming out as queer was a relatively soft landing. I had come out as bisexual a few years earlier, and my coming out was more a dribbling of information. Once an ex-boyfriend and I split up, I was able to negotiate the imposter syndrome I had experienced in a heterosexual relationship and began referring to myself as queer. Coming out is vastly different depending on your place and positionality as noted by Butler:
‘[w]ho is represented by which use of the term [queer], and who is excluded? For whom does the term present an impossible conflict between racial, ethnic or religious affiliation and sexual politics? What kinds of policies are enabled by what kinds of usages, and which are backgrounded or erased from view? (Butler 1993:19).
Coming out as non-binary was also gentle within my community. I didn’t feel as though I was asking my friends to see me any differently. I liked the way my best friend described why they hadn’t come out to their sister yet. They said that: she has a need to understand me categorically, but my gender is a constant becoming. I see gender as Billy Ray-Belcourt poetically puts it: ‘[w]hen two bodies embrace they become a window. Gender is what’s heard when wind touches glass. Remember: by the time sound reaches flesh, innumerable bursts of light have already shot through us’ (2021:103). Or, as Judith Butler shows us in Gender Trouble (1999), gender is a series of actions in a predetermined social construct that give the appearance of gender being inherent. I still haven’t come out to my grandma, even though I have a cousin who in non-binary. Nor have I come out to my dad properly despite him being young and progressive. Coming out feels like a demand for my family to no longer view me as a daughter, granddaughter or niece. Carrying them through my critical review of gender will be an exhausting endeavour, one that will happen slowly.
The reason it is important to discuss my experience of the closet in reference to this artwork is because of gender and sexuality’s relationship to the body. The body–my body–is at the centre of the work and is doused in the semiotics of gender. The terminology of the closet can also be effectively used to understand the shame and secrecy that often surrounds abortion.
Abortion and the closet
Australia has some of the most liberal abortion laws in the world, however as the LaRoche Et al. research details these rights don’t necessarily mean easy access (2020). This spoke to my experience of navigating the public system to avoid spending money on an abortion I couldn’t afford. Several days after I found out I was pregnant I found myself alone at the Royal Women’s Hospital trying to find an office my doctor had recommended, where you could talk to someone about accessing a free abortion. I walked around for ages before sitting in a waiting room full of pregnant bellies and unborn babies before I realised, I was in the wrong place. I never found that office. Nauseous and overwhelmed, I returned home knowing that I would pay the $700 for a private procedure. This lack of support from the public health system is indicative of how complex the process of getting an abortion is, even if you are white, non-religious, live in the inner city and have someone who can afford to help you. In the aftermath of my termination I told myself how lucky I was, to have been able to access an abortion, to have had my partner at my side, that we could afford it and that I could tell my friends and family. Madison Griffiths eloquently describes their experience of getting an abortion in their politically infused memoir Tissue. Their experience mirrors my own in many ways. They describe a ‘guilt that had married itself to [their] pregnancy, proof that [they] had committed a wrong against [themselves], [their] future. And the guilt of seeking an abortion, the pang of self reproach which — on particularly bad days, and despite [their] best efforts — had manifested in a way that made [them] believe [they] had committed a wrong against whatever, or whoever, was growing inside of [them]’ (2023:29).
The process of getting an abortion even for those of us who are pro-choice, who didn’t think twice about what they would do when they discovered their pregnancy is still marred by shame and guilt. ‘Abortion stigma also works on different levels, for instance that of the personal, the community, the institutional, and the framing discourses of mass media’ (Nys 2022:2). I am someone who doesn’t keep much to themselves, publicly or privately, however I didn’t tell my teachers who were both generous and liberal minded that I had had a termination after missing school for three weeks. I am particular about who I tell and when, maybe because of shame, but more so because I know it makes others uncomfortable. Abortion, as Pozen has articulated is ‘in other words is in the closet’ (Pozen 2017:161).
Furthermore, the language that surrounds abortion advocacy is heavily gendered. This, amongst other reasons, is why it took me so long to come out as non-binary. In excavating one closet it became harder to open up another. For this I like Maggie Nelson’s queer reading of pregnancy:
Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one’s ‘normal’ state, and occasions a radical intimacy with—and radical alienation from—one’s body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolise or enact the ultimate conformity? (2015:16)
So, though these experiences can illuminate something about the other, they are also in conflict with my processing of them. This can create a complex relationship withthe body, one that performance practice offers a space to consider.
The political Body: What happens when an experience becomes an artwork?
Offering up experiences of pregnancy, abortion and parenthood that exist outside of a normative cisgendered female experience is in no way an erasure of the experience of women. I was recently reading an article shared by feminist author Margaret Atwood entitled Why Can’t We Say “Woman” Anymore. This article in conjunction with Atwood’s endorsement exemplifies the sentiment of many second wave feminists who fear that inclusion will lead to their erasure. This policing of gender inclusion leads me to ask the questions: does my queer body ever get to be non-political? And does talking about abortion ever get to be non-political? Gender and abortion have long been politicised. The decriminalisation of homosexuality only occurred in 1994 (Eggleton Et al. 2023:4). In 2013 Tasmania was the last Australian state to decriminalise abortion (Costa 2015:349). We see a constant critique of queer agency in contemporary media and abortion remains a taboo. My body is not afforded the privilege of being non-political.
In making my work RAW(2019 – 2024) I chose to work directly with the subject matter; my politicised body. Belcourt says that we should start with the body ‘for so much is won and lost and lost and lost there’ (Belcourt 2021:27). I was not searching to make a politically loaded work, but rather a work that considered and marked my experience. In hindsight, I see that the process of excavating one’s closet is political. Abortion is the subject matter, my queer body the work, and though I wrestled with those experiences privately, the act of making this work and of sharing it publicly makes it political.
The bodily archive
‘To me the pain and the blood are merely means of artistic expression’, Marina Abromovich (n.d).
Just like Hiršenfelder I see my body as an archive, ‘a time machine that actively creates ways of accessing individual or collective experiences…we are not building it to remember or understand the past but to think of the future’ (2020:71). My body is a collective site of my memories catalogued imperfectly. Or as Baum argues:
‘Memory, in its lack of wholeness, its compromise, and its obsolescence, is fragile. Recontextualized by changing concepts of age, gender, race, and sexuality—in short, by notions of self and experience—memory does not reside apart from the body but sits uneasily in a fleshy vessel which holds memory. Trauma is thus psychophysiological’ (Baum 2017:673).
Abortion teds to be physically invisible and sometimes grief/trauma calls for something tangible, a marking, something that exists outside of the body. Belcourt notes that’[s]o many world shattering things can happen in the schism between an event and our ability to comprehend it. I pitch a tent there’ (Belcourt 2021:62). For me, in that space between the event and the ability to comprehend it came an artwork. I made this work for myself. However, I find this inclination to render something physically present to comprehend the felt in others too. For example Griffiths has argued that they ‘ wanted something tangible, immutable. Proof of the ritual. A return to what it is to make yourself bleed, to the redness I had acquainted myself with already’ (2023:24). I wanted to mark my body in acknowledgement of the way it was already marked invisibly. This process of marking the body has a lineage in performance art and queer art. I consider Cathy Opie’s Pervert (Fig. 3) a political response to lack of inclusion in the queer/dyke community for those practising sadomasochism, Opie has carved the word pervert into her chest. And years later Self-Portrait/Nursing (Nursing) Opie is pictured breastfeeding her son, the scar of ‘pervert’ still visible on her chest.
I consider Marina Ambrovich’s Lips of Thomas (Fig. 4) a semi-biographical performance work, where she cut a pentagram across her stomach, a marking of the communist and orthodox background of her childhood. This act of marking solidifies an event or events as your own, as visible on a body that has experienced them.
A bid for confessional practices.
I see my practice as a series of answers and questions, some kind of call and response. Answers I often don’t know I am looking for, and questions I don’t know I have asked, until they are illuminated through my practice. This discovery happens through all parts of the process, sometimes it arrives before the work is made, sometime years after the work is complete. I, like Griffiths, ‘don’t profess to have made sense of [my abortion]’ (2023:4) but I consider it time to share, at the very least my lack of shame, my tenderness. The awareness that you are not the only woman who has faced the predicament of an unwanted pregnancy — that people you admire and care for also terminated a pregnancy, whether recently or long ago — can clarify the scene (Sanger 2017:167). I consider this practice of confession necessary to this work, the ‘personal made public’ (Nelson 2023:75). This illumination of abortion allows others to see themselves reflected, but it is also a moment of catharsis for myself. This “moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you’ (Ahmed 2006:116).
Art, a conclusion.
Performance art offers opportunities to explore and process in an undefined way – I cannot always explain myself, but in performance there is a possibility for a multifaceted experience, one that words may fail. It is tender, it hurts, I can feel shame but I don’t think that I should feel shame, I am proud of my body and guilty for what I put it through… I love myself, I am hurting.
Performance, and the documentation of performance, offers a multifaceted experience for me as the artist, and for the viewer. The bodily archive, as a site, offers a space for confessional dialogue where the personal becomes political, becomes the personal again. The documentation captures my gentleness, the roughness of the needle, my chest bleeding and my hand gently wiping the wound and putting salve on it, a visual cue to the complexity of a human emotional experience that has its roots in care. Therefore as Maria Puig de la Bellacasa has argued, ‘[t]o care in a more feminist self is to think outside of a singular life, and to do this is to participate in a process of self-making that exceeds the individual. With care, one grows a collective skin’ (2017:117). Though the closet looks to hold grief when we first shine a light into it, this excavation has shown me that the opposite of shame is joy. And as Belcourt says ‘Joy is art is an ethics of resistance’(2021:87) one that must be engaged collectively.
Notes
[1] autotheory combines memoir and personal writing with theory.
References
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