Difficulties on reframing a prevalent rape narrative
Staging sexual violence in order to tell a nuanced post-victim experience proposes difficulties not only because of the prevalent societal victim narratives, but also the historical conventions of staging rape with a male gaze. Repeating one-sided narratives reinforces harmful societal attitudes and further establishes binaries such as subject/object and passive/active.
We remain stuck in one-sided conversations about victim-blaming and the protection of perpetrators in the society. The historical societal and artistic conventions have conditioned audiences to watch and discuss (or not discuss) sexual violence in a certain way. Difficulty of representing rape is "the problem of shaping physical, lived experience into a narrative that is heavily influenced by social and cultural discourses in both its construction for the theatre, and its reception in performance" (Fitzpatrick, 2018, p.130).
Feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey was the first person to articulate the concept of male gaze in film: "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly" (Mulvey, 1999, p.808).
Especially in Finnish culture violence is often framed as the victim’s problem, particularly in film and television. Depictions of violence focus on the perspective of the perpetrator rather than the victim (Pitkämäki, 2017). This parallels with rape’s depictions on stage. It is a thematic element used in theatre to this day.
In English theatre sexual violence became a popular subject when women were introduced to the stage in the 1660s. As in film, historically the narratives have been told through the male gaze, often eroticizing rape and putting emphasis on the experience of the perpetrator. However more recent rape narratives, particularly written by women, challenge the tradition by centring the narrative around the victim's experience and exploring ways to express their agency. These narratives emphasize the violence and pain, rather than staging rape in proximity to sex (Fitzpatrick, 2018).
Theatre scholar Lisa Fitzpatrick argues how portraying women’s vulnerability as central to their sexuality creates opportunities for eroticizing rape. One common rape trope in film and theatre is women surrendering to the violence and ultimately finding pleasure in it (2018). The trope aligns with the rape myths of “it wasn’t really rape” and “she asked for it” (see Illinoid Rape Myth Acceptance Scale).
I enter this multifaceted and challenging conversation as a choreographer. Especially, as a Finnish artist, I strongly believe that sexual violence and rape must be discussed publicly since they are issues hidden in plain sight in our society. Silence is one of the most pervasive and destructive forces sustaining this problematic culture. While some theatre scholars critique explicit portrayals of gender-based violence on stage, arguing that such representations risk reinforcing stereotypes of women as inevitably subject to rape (see Fitzpatrick, 2018), I don't believe the solution is to avoid addressing sexual violence in performance altogether.
Cultural and literary scholar Sanna Karkulehto discusses how our culture doesn't have ways of expressing or telling stories of sexual abuse without sexualizing, hurting or shaming the survivor's self-image even more. But she believes it is possible to tell these stories with dignity when the survivor is portrayed as a living, thinking and feeling human being (2012).
Not having common language or pre-existing patterns to follow, I as an artist wander about largely uncharted terrain. Specifically working in the field of contemporary dance, with a notable lack of research or artworks about sexual violence in recent years (despite their prevalence in the society) means I find myself actively developing methodology and artistic language as I go. This is both a challenge in creating ethical ways of working, as well as creating work which encourages the audience to understand the work through a new lens. Working in the medium of dance means I take part in creating an embodied non-verbal language with new codifications for reading and understanding a female post victim body of sexual violence.
Creating, engaging with and understanding these new codifications demands years of work and engagement with audiences. Making art about a subject that is particularly influenced by the male gaze and aiming to create beyond it is particularly challenging. As an artist I am by no means immune to the male gaze. I have been exposed to it my whole life and it is easy to fall into simply duplicating familiar patterns. Gender studies scholar Leena-Maija Rossi condenses the conversation well: when is it about repeating familiar imagery and normalizing violence and when is it about portraying it in a critical light as a way to reiterate it, to tell it differently (2017).
In the recent years intimacy coordinators have offered ways to start challenging the male gaze and its associated stereotypes in theatre and film. Intimacy choreography can be used to stage sexuality in ways that go beyond the traditional expressions of desire or the anticipation of sex (Barclay, 2023).
I believe the potential for film or theatre is that performances become more intense, authentic, and natural. Different body representations emerge than what media has long presented. This isn't entirely unexplored, but it's one of the greatest potentials—a genuine shift in representation. (Saskia Oidtmann interview)
Intimacy coordinators are rather common practice in film and theatre nowadays, but they remain a rare presence in the field of dance. Looking ahead in-depth interdisciplinary embodied research into intimacy coordination and dance proposes an inviting and largely unexplored artistic territory.
Body art and provocation
Having stated the lack of existing artistic examples to follow, doesn’t mean that artists wouldn’t have engaged in this topic before. Within my work I find most resonance with evocative feminist performance art and specifically the lineage of body art.
The feminist art movement in the West emerged in the 1960s and 70s to rewrite the male-dominated art history. Body art arose during the same period and differed from performance art in its expression of particularly gendered and sexualized bodies. The body was central to body art in all of its subjectivity and social implications (e.g. gender, race, class) (Jones, 1998). Body artists were talking through their own bodies, creating a new category that art historian Frances Borzello refers as the issue-based self-portrait (2022/2012). Explicit feminist body art subverts how women’s bodies are viewed through the structures of desire capitalism and actively seeks to reverse the male gaze in finding ways for the bodies to see rather than only be seen (Schneider, 1997).
Some of the most important performance art pieces include Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm 0 (1974) and Caroline Schneemann’s Interior Scroll (1975).
In Cut Piece Yoko Ono sits on stage and invites the audience to cut pieces of her clothing off using a pair of scissors.
Yoko Ono and Abramovic purposefully propose their bodies as passive objects for the hands of the audience thus highlighting the audience’s behaviour and their relationship to the female body on display. They are interesting cases of audience participation and highlighted objectification of the female body, which reveal discourse around body politics, power and the gaze.
In Interior Scroll Carolee Schneemann stands on a table and reads from a book. She then undresses herself, performs ritualistic poses and pulls a scroll from her vagina reading it out loud.
Schneemann’s work is interesting in comparison for its radical establishment of the female body as a subject, as author and provocateur. All the works purposefully blur and highlight the roles object and subject.
Performance artist Karen Finley created works from the 1980s onwards that confront themes such as sexuality and abuse, frequently incorporating nakedness and provocative language (see Finley, 2000). The themes of all these works fall into the same universe as my research but the most significant difference is the overt activism and conscious provocation, specifically in the case of Finley. The works come from an era when feminists were fighting for rape and sexual violence to be recognized as a serious issue in the society and establishing them as forms of violence rather than something in proximity to sex. Now, over 50 years later the discussion has significantly moved on (though there are worrying regressions in some countries), which means I am able as an artist to take a less provocative approach.
There are activist and provocative elements in my work, but they are not the core focus or aesthetic driving the form of the performance, as is often the case in body art. The performance for example takes place in a traditional black box setting with a clear border between the audience and the stage, whereas body art took place in more unconventional or challenging settings, for example galleries and public spaces. The piece carries an activist essence through its aim to increase knowledge and understanding, with the goal of influencing attitudes. It does not deliberately seek to shock, but its direct engagement with a taboo subject may naturally come across as provocative. Some degree of provocation is necessary to challenge entrenched beliefs, yet the work primarily invites the audience to reflect on their own thoughts and emotions, rather than confront the artist directly. The primary intention of the work is not to provoke, but to invite discussion, viewing provocation as one way to spark a dialogue.
In Rhythm 0 Marina Abramovic stands in the middle of a space with a table of objects in front of her. The objects included for example a rose, a feather, grapes, honey, a whip, a scalpel, a gun and a bullet. The audience could do whatever they wanted to her with them.
Audience as witnesses
In After the audience is invited to take part in the performance as witnesses. It is a different gaze than subverting the gaze of the spectator which historical feminist body art proposes. The piece navigates between the experience of uncomfortable and comfortable for the audience. The topic in itself is challenging, and it is not supposed to be easy to watch. However, my main goal is to get people talking about sexual violence. So, the provocative and challenging gaze that many evocative feminist performance artists propose, is not the one I opt for since it does not necessarily invite the audience to be willing to self-reflect and engage in challenging conversations.
My proposal of witnessing is a very different gaze than what the works of performance artist Vanessa Beecroft propose. The body might at first glance appear similar to the body I am proposing: a naked female body who is wearing tights. However, Beecroft’s works present large groups of women who stand in gallery spaces as tableaux vivants (see Boucher, 2012) often referencing either the fashion industry or the military. The women are purposefully unapproachable, and they are viewed as objects (see Steinmetz et al., 2006). The works are often interpreted through a voyeuristic gaze. Voyeurism is "the action of watching ‘unaware’ bodies involved in private (or sexual) actions to derive (sexual) pleasure" (Rodosthenous, 2012, p.64).
Contrary to Beecroft I give the audience permission to watch; the body is not presented as an unaware object nor is the audience framed as “peeping” into the experience. While how her armies of unapproachable women placed in the gallery on the same level as the spectator can be perceived as threatening, my placement of one body on stage with over a hundred seated people watching it (partially from above) proposes a main tone of vulnerability combined with agency. The audience is allowed and welcome in the space: one test audience member described her experience that, even though watching was not easy she had almost a sense of being honoured for being invited and allowed to witness.
Regina José Galindo is a performance artist who makes works about gendered violence and racial discrimination in Guatemala. I reference her work from the context of the lineage of evocative feminist performance art. This exegesis provides a white European point of view of the lineage, with Galindo’s works being an exception. Her works are particularly interesting in how they propose challenging questions towards witnessing. Literary and performance art scholar Candice Amich writes about a selection of her street and gallery performances in the 2000s (2017).
In the work No perdemos nada con nacer [We don’t lose anything by being born], 2000, Galindo lies naked, curled up inside a clear plastic bag, abandoned at a garbage site where municipal workers and photographers find her. Their indifferent reactions underscore the artwork’s commentary on the rising number of local femicides and the disturbing normalcy of discovering women’s bodies discarded in the area. Amich recognizes how witnessing in this case is used as a way to make the audience complicit as perpetrators.
The relationship is particularly interesting since I am working with a similar topic of violence against women, albeit in a very different cultural context, and proposing witnessing as a gaze. However, Galindo’s work emphasizes the passivity of witnessing, thus making it a powerful agent for guilt. Where asI do not highlight the passive connotation of witnessing creating a more ambiguous relationship with it.
I view spectating as partially an active act in itself. Philosopher Jacques Ranciére emphasizes how the spectator interprets, makes connections, feels and understands, thus claiming the spectator does not in fact need to be “activated” (2009). Art historian Claire Bishop also challenges the binary of passive/ active regarding spectating or participating. She views the binary as unproductive and an allegory for inequality (2012).
The terms active and passive are central to my research. However, in terms of spectating, I concur with the perspectives of Ranciére and Bishop and propose seeing it not as a binary but as a more convoluted relationship, where the existence of passivity does not discard the possibility of activity. I do not explicitly frame the audience's experience to provoke guilt about witnessing, as Galindo does, but I do not deny it as a possible undertone in my work, due to the partially passive nature of witnessing.
The main incentive of After is getting the audience to speak about the topic of sexual violence and what they have just witnessed. Through the work-in-progress showings I received valuable insight from audience members struggling to find words, with male spectators particularly uncertain about how to discuss the topic. This informed the ending of After, in which the performer helps audience members find words and briefly discuss what they have just witnessed. Afterwards the audience is invited to write their testimony on a piece of paper which are collected. There is also a Q&A to further discuss the work afterwards. These testimonies and after talks will provide valuable future research data.
I propose challenging rape myths and the male gaze in connection to sexual violence but I am not proposing “a right way” to discuss or experience the work. The right words do not exist (yet?). But what matters most is that we at least try to break the silence, even if we fumble awkwardly for words, as a first step toward creating new ways of talking about it.
Coming back to Galindo’s work, Amich writes about the danger of reading it solely through fragility and victimhood (2017). I do not see a risk in reading my work through victimhood, in fact, I actively propose it. However, like Amich, I recognize the pitfall of reading victimhood only through fragility as this can allow audiences to distance themselves from it and perceive the victim as "other".
"The harm that Galindo’s performance practice invites to her body collapses the distance between testifier and witness to absorb the spectator in a vision of violent mutuality" (Amich, 2017, p.102). I propose witnessing as a way to respect, listen and empathize, which in my hypothesis if successful leads to an experience of mutuality similar to Amich’s description of Galindo’s work. Theatre makers Jessica Blank and Eric Jensen discuss the power of empathy in context of documentary theatre which is a form of theatre that uses real people and events as sources. They describe empathy as dissolving the boundary between self and other, compelling recognition of the other's humanity making their questions our own (2005).
Though, I do not explicitly state to the audience that After is based on my own experiences, still I recognize inflicting empathy as major potential in my work. "It's time for us to identify with other true stories, the ones that feel dangerous, the ones that leave us with more questions than answers, the ones that scare us and feed us and change us from the inside out" (Blank & Jensen, 2005, p.22).
Nakedness, objectification and vulnerability
Feminist activist and artistic interventions have been central in exposing how nudity has served to please the male gaze (see Majewska, 2023). In this research, I prefer the use of the term nakedness to nude following Borzello's definition. Borzello defines nude in the context of fine arts as a highly aestheticized naked body without imperfections and sexuality. Religious studies scholar Terhi Utriainen (2006) comments on nudity having the presence of the ghost of a dress, whereas nakedness is a more real and vulnerable portrayal of the body without clothes as is. Borzello recognizes the body art of the 1960s as an important shift from nude to naked (2022/2012). 1
The body I propose is naked, at times commenting on the nude. I use nakedness as choreographic potential (see chapter Deeply personal in public) as well as an expression of vulnerability and bareness. Combining nakedness and witnessing, I endeavour to engage in a more nuanced discussion of vulnerabilities and intimacies: "one observes the performer as playing with the naked dramaturgies at hand, with the sexualisation of the naked body being only one of these dramaturgies" (Vivas, 2015, p.26).
Theatre scholar Karl Toepfer (1996) considers nakedness through the exposure of genitals. I however do not see the question of genitals as particularly relevant in my research. In this context they do not contribute to the essence of vulnerability and bareness with which I engage in. The choreographic potential of the vulva is rather non-existent in my research. It does not, for example, jiggle to the extent that it would be visible from afar to the audience. In reference to Beecroft’s women who don’t wear anything under their tights, I made the choice to wear knickers. Not wearing knickers would risk inviting the voyeuristic gaze, especially when combined with being fucked movement material in positions where the legs are spread and the crotch faces the audience (see chapter Deeply personal in public).
Breasts are not genitalia, but historically they have been the object of the male gaze as a representation of feminine sexuality. I made the choice not to wear a bra on stage informed first and foremost by artistic qualities, but the reference to the activist nature of Free the Nipple movement is not accidental either.
Without a bra, a woman’s breasts are also deobjectified, desubstantialized. Without a bra, most women’s breasts do not have the high, hard, pointy look that phallic culture posits as the norm. They droop and sag and gather their bulk at the bottom. Without a bra, the fluid being of breasts is more apparent. (Young, 2005, p. 83)
I am not claiming that the bra is only an aestheticized result of the patriarchy, they have many functions, including comfort. But I am proposing on stage a naked female body, which by in not wearing a bra refuses the eroticisation and aestheticization of the breasts and instead presents them in their fluid form. This opens up not only their choreographic potential of the oscillation of flesh but also expands the options of their form and its interpretation: a sag of flesh, the everyday breast, the breast one sees in a sauna, the bouncing breasts.
I acknowledge the danger of misinterpretation of my work. I am placing a naked female body on stage that is embodying violent penetration and for instance performing sex positions. I am also presenting pain and pleasure as a part of the same discussion. If spectators are unable to shift their gaze towards witnessing and viewing the body as post victim, it runs the risk of being interpreted through the male gaze and its familiar narratives and rape myths.
Yet I argue the work presents transformative potential for the audience. Presenting a naked woman does not automatically mean the body is objectified (see Attwood et al., 2021). I claim, arguably paradoxically, that staging sexual violence naked, reveals the violence on the body by showing its impact on the flesh, resulting in a de-eroticised and unromanticised depiction.
However, it would be difficult to discuss the experience of sexual violence honestly without addressing objectification. The body I propose is not presented solely as an object, but being a solo work the person on stage has incredible agency, things are happening to the body, yet the body is also doing. The dancer is solely responsible for creating the performance in that moment. The single body on stage cannot be read in relation to any other bodies (except the audience). There is violence on stage, but there is no perpetrator present, thus putting solely the experience of the victim at the forefront.
Philosopher Judith Butler also questions the relationship between the subject and agency: "And does the insistence on the subject as a precondition of political agency not erase the more fundamental modes of dependency that do bind us and out of which emerge our thinking and affiliation, the basis of our vulnerability, affiliation and collective resistance." (Butler, 2020, p. 49).
Rather than fitting into a simple, linear narrative of an empowered survivor, the body is expressed as a post victim. This combined with the adaptation of empathic witnessing as a way of experiencing the work holds potential for the spectators to consider a new kind of victim narrative and to reflect on their relationship to it. This is narrative and relationship, that complicates the relationship between agency, subject and object, thus introducing the possibility of recognizing a joined vulnerability which Butler discusses. Butler also considers the transformative potential of mourning: "If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another?" (2020, p. 30).
I argue that the transformative potential of my work lies exactly here: empathic witnessing suggesting we are all vulnerable 2 and responsible, rather than categorizing the experience of the victim as something "other", something that could never happen to us, something outside of us. This poses significant potential to breaking the silence around sexual violence, reshaping how society encounters survivors, and transforming harmful attitudes surrounding the issue."It is not on the shoulders of the victim of abuse and oppression to protect themselves from the oppressor." (Taylor, 2020, p. 54). The responsibility is shared by all of us. The focus of this artistic research is affecting the beliefs of the witnesses of sexual violence. Ideally we would live in a world where it would not happen in the first place, but I wonder if that is beyond the means of art altogether.
Notes:
1 Artist-researcher Mariella Greil proposes a third, complementary concept to nude and naked: bare. While I do not reference the bare body, it proposes interesting conversation with the concepts of nude and naked (see Greil, 2019).
2 However I acknowledge some individual and groups are more vulnerable than others (see for example Dancus et al., 2020).