gender

Logic

Although I had seen documentation photos of Schneeman's Interior Scroll performance before, I hadn't seen the text of the scroll. I read it as an indictment of myself — I saw in the portrait of the unnamed structuralist, a mirror of my own practice and preoccupation. And I saw how clearly gendered that and the paired messiness of performance seemed.

Un-gendered

A trajectory towards a generic view of containment, possibly un-gendered, and described in a language of instrumentality seemingly well suited to a discussion of technology, appears from a certain perspective to be promising. But, is the lure of the generic, as a solution to the problem of difference, a symptom of masculine blindness to that difference, one more gesture of erasure that fails to account for the way that breasts or a womb change the experience of embodiment? Is accusing Irigaray of missing something in her cleaving to woman, equivalent to the phallic gaze which refuses to see her? Or, is there a radical potential in the embracing of a notion of containment by the masculine body — not a containment on the model of the womb, but a containment that cannot hold; not a containment that gives birth to the new, but a containment that grasps and releases, that receives and sends?

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