ABSTRACT
The Queen's Dog, a performance staged at the Judson Dance Theater in the spring of 1965, marks a transitional point in the development of Carolee Schneemann's feminist performance art. Trained as a painter, Schneemann began creating interactive performance works in 1960 when she instructed a group of friends to proceed through an environment behind her house in Illinois. For her orgiastic Meat Joy, for example, Schneemann cast male and female performers in a staging of sexual agency that crossed the gender divide. Distinct from her post-performance notes, Schneemann's preliminary notes and drawings for The Queen's Dog reveal her initial intentions to probe the relationship between her dream world and psychosexual development. Schneemann's interest in dislodging given notions around psychosexual development is perhaps most explicitly signified in the written words "cunnilingus for children." Through her experimentations with performance as a means for representing the psychosexual, Schneemann portended an entire generation of feminist art and theory.
