Women and Their Abject Visual Art
At Dear Television, Hairpin Pro-Bowler Anne Helen Petersen takes on the “exquisite repulsion” of American Horror Story: Coven:
American Horror Story disregards hierarchies. It signifies as one thing and is another. It is, in other words, abject as hell. Which is precisely why it inspires the reactions it does: it’s addictive yet embarrassing; you love and hate it, can’t decide if it’s sympathetic or predatory, misogynistic or feminist. Fiona is a shameless ball-buster, but she’s also terrified by her own aging body, beholden to societal understandings of what “beauty” and “vitality” look like. Even as the “Supreme,” her power only extends so far: she can decimate men, but she can’t decimate patriarchal ideology. Those sorts of nuanced contradictions function as AHS’s narrative engine: it feeds on them, explores and explodes them.
I haven’t seen Coven yet, myself (N.B.: I am a wuss), so call it a leap, but AHP’s discussion of the show’s treatment of abjection (“an object of fascination and of repugnance”) reminded me of Emilie Friedlander’s take on FKA Twigs at The Fader last week. We’ve posted a few of the British singer’s videos this summer (see here and here), and like Coven, they’re difficult to watch and then to digest, mostly for what Twigs chooses to do with her body. Friedlander finds similar value in the “nuanced contradictions” of Twigs’ videos: “I think we could all be a little more imaginative, maybe a little more open to confusion and ambiguity, when it comes to thinking about the expression of female sexuality in art.” AHP is on it.