Performing vulvic spectacles: Looking twice, thinking anew

Abstract

Contemporary performance’s interest in staging spectacles can often work to elicit a reaction, draw attention or arouse interest as well as work to interrogate particular discourses around identity politics, particularly when nudity is involved. Whilst the body in performance has been subject to close analysis, there has been relatively little research on the representations of vulvas within contemporary performance, in particular, the ways artists expose their genitals as spectacle to analyse sociocultural themes of gender, sexuality, medical discourse, body politics and beyond. Whilst acknowledging cultural feminists of the 1960s–70s who pioneered a forum for vulvic art, this article examines spectacles produced by The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein in her performance Notorious () as well as artist and photographer Del LaGrace Volcano in Jenny Saville’s painting Matrix (1999), both of whom expose their vulvas to find pleasure in the liminal space between shock and unlearning. This article presents vulvic spectacles as spaces of transformation, challenging patriarchal constructs and conjuring dialogue around an often-tabooed body part, offering the possibility to call into question beliefs, knowledge, internalized biases, and practices – to look twice and to think anew.