ABSTRACT
IN take a Peek! Bobby Baker makes a spectacle out of herself, turns herself into a ‘spectacular’ demonstration of ‘failed’ femininity in a way that constitutes a site/sight of critical feminist ‘work’. Her performance demonstrates that a social and cultural shift in the economy of the feminine and the maternal requires alteration not only to the symbolic, male-defined objectification of women, but also to women’s own collusion in the ‘compulsory’ feminine: the policing ‘matronizing’ voice that keeps women fearful of making a spectacle of themselves. In Take a Peek! Baker is relatively and curiously silent. She functions mostly as a dumb show at the mercy of her two speechand action-empowered assistants. Manipulated and silenced, her presence works emblematically: she ‘pictures’ feminine suffering and pain through a series of mostly wordless tableaux. Aside from the fortune-telling sequence in which, although she is invited to talk it is not long before she is told to shut up, it is only in the final episode as Baker recites her recipe for happiness that she comes into speech. Tracing a line of argument through Tania Modleski’s observation on the function of feminist writing as necessarily concerned with the ‘“mute bodies” of women’, as opposed to ‘the “speaking bodies” of men’, Peggy Phelan argues that ‘for performance the opposition is between “the body in pleasure” and, to invoke the title of Elaine Scarry’s book, “the body in pain”’ (Phelan, 1993: 150). As a performance, Take a Peek! may be argued as locating the ‘mute’ woman’s body as a ‘body in pain’ that comes
eventually to ‘voice’ and to pleasure. There is a further observation to make in respect of Baker’s silence, however. While, on the one hand, in line with Modleski and Phelan’s thinking it can be argued as ‘speaking’ to the position of women who historically, socially and culturally have been denied a ‘voice’, on the other hand, the silence is also evocative of suffering in a Christian and, by implication, symbolic, sense. Both possibilities are made present and are a reflection on Baker’s unusual combination of feminist and of spiritual beliefs. In Take a Peek! Christian imagery is present from the outset: it is part of the show’s setting up and sending up of the feminine, the maternal, presented as the burden Baker has to bear. Baker’s demeanour was penitential, her head bowed, checking to ensure that her audience were following, but seeking to avoid their gaze as much as possible. Walking, processing with Baker, here, and in the tableaux to follow, where spectators stopped at and then were moved on through images of suffering, was Baker’s own version of the stations of the cross. Her burden, her cross, was the overly large (she was wearing several, not just one, white gowns) and ungainly (she had on pink, fluffy slippers that, with her multigowned body, made it harder to walk) female body. As a ‘fallen’ woman, a woman ‘failing’ to live up to the feminine ‘ideal’, Baker commits her body to spectacular suffering. In her analysis of Powers of Horror, Mary Russo argues that ‘the privileged site of transgression for Kristeva, the horror zone par excellence, is the archaic, maternal version of the female grotesque’ (Russo, 1994: 10). The ‘maternal version of the female grotesque’ figures in Baker’s House of Horror as she unleashes the monstrous-feminine on her spectators. Ghostly laughter and blood-curdling screams, as from a horror movie or fairground ghost train, fill the air as spectators walk to their next point of viewing, one that reveals Baker in a glass-fronted window display, flooded in pink light and in reclining porn pose position, with red fruit juice dripping from her mouth. She snarls at her audience and ‘vomits up’ her ‘insides’ (juice). The imaging of menstrual blood (juice) suggests a ‘maternal authority’: an archaic return to a playing with bodily fluids, waste, that the ‘symbolic law’ (of the father) does not permit (Kristeva, 1980: 72-3). The abject body on display is one that menstruates, births, miscarries and aborts. Importantly, however, Baker’s display is one of mock-horror. The maternal ‘beast’ behind the glass screen provokes laughter rather than (self-) loathing, or rather plays with, makes fun out of the ways in which the feminine is made monstrous. Baker’s various masquerades of femininity might, for example, be argued as performance equivalents to Judith Butler’s explorations of ‘gender trouble’, her exposition of ‘compulsory citationality’, for example, that demonstrates the production of femininity as ‘the forcible citation of a norm’ (Butler, 1993: 232).
