Pathopolitics: Feminist Performance Art, Biopolitics, and Affect in 1970s America

This dissertation brings affect theory (the study of the political dimensions of emotion and feeling in culture and everyday life) in contact with the history of American feminist performance art, a fitting yet underexamined overlap. Following Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics, my theory pathopolitics scrutinizes the increasingly politicized nature of the cultural representation of emotions in contemporary American culture. I argue that feminist performance artists of the 1970s were particularly attuned to the multifaceted ways the cultural politics of emotion were shifting in their time in popular culture, news media, and capitalistic enterprises, especially advertising and the medical-industrial complex. The politics of feminist art practice across the nation worked to disturb conventional ways of “thinking feeling” that had theretofore hindered political objectives of the feminist movement. To demonstrate this, I turn to three artists representing three geographies across the U.S. Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-American artist working in Iowa, performed horrifyingly realistic Rape Scenes in response to a grisly local murder, overcoming her own fears of violence and radicalizing audiences’ encounter with the subject of rape. Adrian Piper, an African-American artist-philosopher working in New York and most known for her later work in the 1980s and 1990s, utilized a Kantian model of rationality and meditative practice in The Mythic Being and Food for the Spirit to devise a methodology of art production that confronts the illogical nature xenophobia in her audiences while forestalling their psychological projection, which could undermine the political efficacy of her work. Finally, Lynn Hershman adopted the depressed persona of Roberta Breitmore, whose experience in her daily life of writing in her diary, working, meeting dates, and going to psychiatrist appointments and support groups testifies to the contemporaneous shift in psychological thought and medical practice to an individualistic, biomedical model of mental illness, leaving many to bear the burden of mental illness alone. Together, these case studies demonstrate a tidal shift in 1970s America in the articulation and contestation of cultural politics through individual affect, attesting to the need to refine our theoretical and historical methodologies in the study of the politics of emotion