Vulnerable Object - Risk-Taking Subject: The Female Body in Performance and the Patriarchal Reflex
Barratt, Mary-Lou (2026) Vulnerable Object - Risk-Taking Subject: The Female Body in Performance and the Patriarchal Reflex. Rewilding: The Stolen Body Issue, 2. (Submitted)
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This essay considers contemporary reading of female bodies, the ongoing normalisation of gender-based violence and gendering of risk. It explores how feminist performance art disrupts these socio-cultural norms while being continually pulled back into patriarchal fantasies of female vulnerability.
Focusing on the afterlife of Yoko Ono’s ‘Cut Piece’ (1964) and Marina Abramović’s ‘Rhythm 0’ (1974), the essay examines how photographs do not simply record these events but continually remake them, casting women’s bodies as passive and vulnerable, perpetually 'at risk.' Bringing feminist discourse into dialogue with risk theories and Sharon Welch’s account of a ‘feminist ethic of risk,’ the essay reads this as a patriarchal recuperation, a ‘reflex,’ that obscures women’s elective risk-taking and reinforces a gendered division in which risk-as-opportunity is coded masculine while women are positioned as at risk, objects of protection rather than subjects of transformation. In response, the essay points to alternative readings, specifically those foregrounding female control, endurance and dissensus, arguing for an assertion of women’s agentic risk-taking to expand the collective imagination of what embodied activism and militancy can look like.
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