From: marek@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Marek Lugowski)
Subject: Holly Hughes on language etc/ hippo birdy Marie / Marek
Organization: Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois.
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 07:22:08 GMT


This is from RE/SEARCH #13, _Angry Women_, which contains interviews with
and other material describing 16 important women performance artists and
their views on "critical questions such as: how can you have a
revolutionary feminism that encompasses wild sex, humor, beauty and
spirituality _plus_ radical politics?  How can you have a powerful movement
for social change that's _inclusionary_ -- not exclusionary?  How is
language based on dualisms (mlae/female, gay/straight, black/white,
mind/body, personal/political) obstructing our visualization of a "better
world"?  A wide range of topics -- from menstruation, masturbation,
vibrators, S&M & spanking to racism, failed Utopias and the death of the
Sixties -- are discussed passionately.  Armed with total contempt for
dogma, stereotype and cliche, these creative visionaries probe deep into
our social foundation of taboos, beliefs and totalitarian linguistic
contradictions whence spring (as well as thwart) our theories, imaginings,
behavior and dreams".

The text below is an exerpt from the section on Holly Hughes.  It is my
birthday card for Marie Coffin (Winter Solstice, 21 Dec.), and a general
interest follow-up to several recent threads on rap concerning language.

		-= = -==-=-==- -   =-=- - -- - - =- =- - -

"Performance artist/playwright Holly Hughes gained nationwide attention
when her grant was revoked by the NEA in election year 1990 (along with
grants to Karen Finley, John Fleck and Tim Miller).  She said, 'I think the
reason my  work was overturned is because it is chock full of good old
feminist satire, and secondly, I am openly lesbian.'

"Since 1983 Holly Hughes has written and performed plays and monologues.
She grew up in Saginaw, Michigan, in a very Republican, upper-middle class
family before moving to New York and _agitating_ in the underground
performance art/theatre scene.  Prior to becoming a playwright/"lesbian
scientist exploring the polymorphous perverse", she was a feminist
painter and sculptor.  To date her performances have included _Well of
Horniness_, _Lady Dick_, _Dress Suits to Hire_, _World Without End_,
and _No Trace of the Blond_ (in collaboration with Ellen Sebastian)."

[from the interview section]

ANDREA JUNO (Editor):  There's a big problem with the linguistic process
of labeling.  You're this "lesbian" or "feminist" -- yet what do these
terms mean?  Everyone has a different interpretation.

HOLLY HUGHES:  Well, lots of lesbians will tell you I'm not a lesbian!
I guess I'm not hardcore enough for them.

AJ:  There's this idea that those linguistic definitions take away from
the wholeness of your being.  Oversimplification (for example: you
being labeled as a "spokeswoman for the lesbian community") is a frequent
form of abuse.  But at your last reading you were talking about really
universal experiences -- such as being a waitress at the "Red Lobster".
Within a dispossesed community somehow the totality of life gets defined
in a really artificial way --

HH:  That's another one of those traps you get stuck in.  In performance,
I rarely feel I have the luxury to be a human being -- I have to always
present content explicitly linked to sexual identity.  Only straight white
men have an extended period of experience where they aren't continually
hit in the face with how their sexual identity sets them apart -- because
their identity is seen as _normative_.  The "good cop/bad cop"of any kind 
of liberation is "assimilation vs. autonomy".

AJ:  On that level there's power in the reclaiming process... proclaiming,
"I'm a lesbian!" or "I'm a whore!" -- taking these once-negative labels
and turning them around.  Our culture's langauge structure alienates us.
Part of our legacy from the Industrial Age is: widespread fragmentation and
compartmentalization of our psychic and bodily life --

HH:  Right.  For example, even though I'm a self-identified _femme_,
when I'm fucking my girlfriend a lot of my fantasies are about _being a
guy fucking a woman_.  I've finally gotten to a certain point in my life
where I don't _judge_ that anymore; I've accepted that because it _works_
for me -- _I have a dick and I know what to do with it_.  But there remains
that critique in the lesbian-feminist community:  that there's _no language
for female desire_...  And perhaps I'm so saturated by heterosexual images
that I can't conceive of something that's uniquely my own _and_ lesbian.
That might be true, but my feeling would still be, "_So_?  So can I still
have my own dick?"

I continually feel the poverty of the words and language that supposedly
express women's sexuality.  There are a lot of descriptions of what happens
to a man's dick from the moment it's flaccid to the moment he shoots his
wad -- minute descriptions that are part of our collective unconscious.
But what happens to woman's genitalia?  There's no language -- and I think
about that.

One of the things I like about being a lesbian is: I do feel freer in my
sexuality.  If I wanna penetrate someone, I can do that.  And I can fuck
in any orifice.  I can take my imaginary dick off, and there are less
values attached to it, because if I'm a lesbian "top" or "bottom", those
roles don't translate to the rest of the world, whereas male/female ones
_do_.  And what happens in bed gets mirrored in the world, and values --
positive and negative -- get attached.

....

HH:  Also, we can talk about patriarchy and power in terms of being _too_
successful predetors who are proceeding to _do ourselves in_.  We can
talk about how human beings can be better in the future, but perhaps
these impulses of aggression, territorialism and all that aren't
necessarily _male_ -- perhaps they're not _inhuman_.  They may really be
in our blood and in our flesh; it might be horrifying and yet normal for
us to kill other humans over territory and resources.  Maybe through
admitting how normal this is, and how this is something we're _driven_
to do... maybe through acknowledging that under the grip of this "animal
nature to control a turf' we're _powerless_, we might reclaim some power...

....

HH:  Something that I've always resisted in feminism is the notion that
women are _innately_ "better" or more "nurturing" or "closer to Nature",
because this shows signs of the _Bambi_ mentality.  First of all:  Is
Nature _good_?  No -- nature is _without value_.  If you look closely
there's a lot that's horrifying, offensive and _not pretty_ in "Nature".

AJ:  The Civilization vs. Nature duality is a projection of the Judeo-
Christian idea that "Man" (that is, "White Men" -- blacks and Indians
weren't considered human) alone possesses a living soul which could return
to God; everything else is condemned to hell.  Now certain scientists are
claiming there's not only a continuum between Man and Animal (chimpanzees
can learn language) but between man and the machine.  For instance, no
longer can we in good conscience feel separated from the other "animals".

HH:  Feminism, in associating women with "nature", has sparked some very
complicated considerations.  A feminist friend of mine who is in her
'50s says, "I used to be more of a conventional feminist, but now I am
sociobiologist by avocation.  I feel that we're a primate society, and
if you look at primate societies they're all male-dominant..."

AJ:  But there are female-dominant "animal" societies, like bees --

HH:  Right.  But I worry about any liberation movement putting on blinders
-- that maybe we're _not_ going to "save the world" because we refused
to face some unpleasant idea or fact.  As a queer, I don't want to be
imbued with "divine" qualities.  I think there are great deeds or events or
people in queer culture that have been hidden or erased, and that it's
important to reclaim them.  And I think that all Outsider cultures have
something that the dominant culture really needs.  But we're not going to
save the world by pretending  that we're more "divine" or more "natural" or
more "archetypal"  or more truly _this_ or _that_.

		-=----- ---==--==    =- -=---== --= -==-

Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems