ABSTRACT
From a feminist perspective, a great deal of shamanistic male performance art has been centred on unravelling a repository of collectively unconscious guilt, and on desire for power or for contact with generally despised aspects of nature and body-the femaleness suppressed in our culture. McEvilley focuses on the critical neglect of these unconscious processes and on the sexual prohibitions which activated shamanistic performance art, but he fails to identify the denied ‘femaleness’ of ‘areas that were previously as unmapped and mysterious as the other side of the moon’. What he notes as ‘behavior deliberately contrived as the most inappropriate and offensive’ (suggesting personal exorcism of social taboos and prohibitions) remains bound to the patriarchal psychosocial structures that it attempts to illuminate. In early male performance art the panoply of physical taboos, mutilations, and violations-which had its apotheosis in ‘fucking female corpses’—is understood by feminine analysis as the crazed expulsion of female complementarity (which was socially annexed and denied primacy).
