Stripping Inscription

WELCOME!

This page is designed to document the filming of a performance piece that deals with identity and the ways in which identity is inscribed on the body. It includes a description of the project as well as an explanation of the project's theoretical basis. I've also included a variety of links, including excerpts from my master's thesis which was the inspiration for this project and a slected bibliography for those who would like to read more about the cultural inscription of the body. Finally, visitors to this site have the option of viewing the short film that is the result of this project.

I hope you enjoy! And please contact me with comments or questions. I look forward to hearing from you.

Links

Read Thesis Excerpts

View Film Clip

Read Film Transcript

Bibliography

Above: The artist, Marnie Binfield, at work

In some ways, the project is an extension of my master's thesis, entitled "Dressing to Dsitress: Fashion as a Symbolic System and Its Subversive Potential," which considers the various ways in which the body is inscribed and how these inscriptions are a form of communication and are as such "read by others."
In my thesis, I look especially at the ways in which individuals can inscribe their own bodies in particular ways to make declarations of their identity and to stand up against the "forced inscription" that occurs in our society. I champion the indivual's ability to reinscribe hir body , to say through style somrthing about who s/he feels hirself to be.
This practice poses some challenges, however, not the least of which is the fact that expression of identity through style always involves consumption and some engagement with the corporate capitalism of the dominant order. Jean Baudrillard in his essay “The System of Objects,” argues that postmodern individuals attempt to “actualize themselves through consumption” (408). Rather than developing a social identity through real and sustained connection to a community, Baudrillard argues that individuals attempt to purchase an identity.Pierre Bourdieu deals with these ideas in his essay "Distinction," arguing that "Consumption...is a stage in a process of communication, that is an act of decipherig, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code" (1029). The necessary "code" amounts to "cultural captial," the ability to understand class specific messages, and cultural capital marks the indiviual's place in the social hierarchy of the dominant order.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno take these ideas to an even more depressing place in their essay "The Culture Industry and Mass Deception." The culture industry includes all forms of media, and I would argue other style industries such as fashion. Horkheimer and Adorno argue, "Under monopoly capitalism all mass culture is identical." But even worse, people become unable to resist it's power. Their need or desire to resist the homogeneity created by the culture industry is also supressed by the culture industry which has the power to control the individual consciousness.
I don't agree with Horkheimer and Adorno entirely, but I do think they make important points. In a capitalistic society in which "style" is so often equated with "substance" and in which we are innundated with mediated messages that show us not only how to look but how to feel and what to think, it does become very difficult to resist domination by these forces. Furthermore, even attempts at resistance like punk's "do-it-yourself" aesthetic and anti-consumption attitudes represent responses to (and therefore, engagement with) the dominant capitalist order.
In this piece, I deal with the "commodification of identity." Part of my point is that the culture industry attempts to sell us "ready-to-wear" identities. Go to the Gap and buy your "just plain folks" uniform. Go to Hot Topic, you to can be goth. For this reason, I set the piece in a retail boutique so that I am surrounded by racks of clothes, identities for sale.
Another aspect of this piece, however, is the ways in which we all fall prey to the practice of reading others in this way. We think that we can tell who someone is by the way they look and we use these sartorial and stylistic clues to categorize people even before we get to know what lies beneath the external appearance. This piece is close to my heart. I still feel that sartorial codes are powerful and can be used to express aspects of one's identity in ways that are resistant to domination by the culture industry. This, I think, can be especially true for women, who have long been constrained by very limiting representations of femininity. Nonetheless, this piece deals with the ways in which this sort of puposeful reinscription always fails to truly express the unique individual who hides beneath the hair, the makeup, the clothes. We can use them to scare people or to make people think rather than just to blend in, but there is still so much inside that can never be displayed on the outside.

Spoken Word		Costuming
The spoken word piece is an attempt to articulate my resistance to and frustration with attempts by the culture industries to "sell me an identity." This process not only involves marketing clothing and particular styles, but also a certain inscription of our bodies themselves. Fat bodies are assumed to be lazy. Female bodies and male bodies have separate codes. Tattoos are automatically assumed to be resistant despite the fact that they have become massively popular. Thus, I tried in the spoken word piece to comment not only the way in which the culture industry sells us clothes and style, but also the ways in which our physical bodies are marked with traces of our identitites and our histories. From scars that tell stories to body parts (like breasts) that evoke responses from strangers our bodies speak for us before we even have a chance to do so. Finally, I deal with the ways in which our bodies cannot express our innermost selves, with what is hidden by our bodies. In this section of the work I am also trying to sort out ideas about how we can express our inner selves, how we can share them with others. More importantly though, I am trying to consider the ways in which we can resist dominantion and know ourselves as individuals rather than as commodities. How we can be happy in our own bodies and how we can use them to say what we want them to.		Costuming for this piece posed some unique problems for me. As a person who has been involved with fashion from the day I bought my first Barbie outfit, I have a lot of experience with costuming for specific puposes. My original concept was to wear a variety of layers that expressed different aspects of my own identity and remove them one at a time. I have a fabulous pair of pleather bondage shorts (see photo of artist at work) that I thought would make a shocking final layer. This plan didin't work for a number of reasons. First, I don't have enough baggy clothes that represent styles that I actually wear. It would have been impossible to create layers that fit well enough over each other that I didn't look like the stay-puffed marshmallow man when I had them all on. Second, and more importantly, this apporach didn't really represent the ideas that I work with in the spoken piece. Because I am dealing with not only what we put on our bodies and what it says, but also our bodies themselves and how they speak for us, I chose clothing which both revealed and concealed my body. Another key element in clothing choice for this peice was that I could easily remove it at times that made sense with the spoken piece. Finally, I wanted to choose clothing that reflected the way I see myself so I stayed within the parameters of what I would be comfortable wearing in my daily life.

Some Final Comments on the Project

This project allowed me to take ideas with which I have been working for a long time and use them in ways that I never have before. In the months since I finished my thesis I have been troubled by the way in which I did not really problematize the distinction between dominant discourse and resistant discourses. In this project and in other recent work I have tried to deal more explicitly with the ways that discources interact, intersect, and engage with each other.
This project has also allowed me to develop and sharpen several communication skills. While I have been writing poetry since I was a child, much of it intended to be spoken rather than read, I have never performed a spoken word piece. This was also my first time to use a digital video camera, as well to create a "set" for a performance. As I put this project together, I became much more comfortable with building websites (a chore I have only done once before and at which I hope to become much adept). I also learned how to use imovie and how to create Quick Time files. These are all skills and practices that will help me to express my ideas more creatively and to reach a larger audience with them.