Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
1960s, the mechanistic conception of pain as developed by René
Descartes was the predominant one in medical theory. According
to this view, pain was a symptomatic physiological reaction to
some sort of disease and would disappear as soon as the
disease itself was cured. Read against this foil, performance
art including pain as a side-effect or as a major concern
probably helped to explore the multidimensionality, semantic
ambiguities as well as the genderization of pain at a time
when pain was only just advancing to the status of a
scientific object in its own right (Zell 56). The 1960s and
1970s celebrated and emphasized the body "as a social
enactment of a subject who is particularized beyond norms and
stereotypes" (Jones 198). As Amelia Jones has pointed out (see
esp. 22-25), the 1980s saw a turn away from the body in
mainstream art discourse, closely linked up with feminism's
sceptical attitude towards potentially fetishizing effects of
the male gaze. Only in the 1990s did a revival of body art
take place - again in connection with a return of the body in
theoretical discourse but furthered by a new interest in the
politics of body/self representation.
41 However, in the wake of postmodern theories, the
notion of the body in pain has been fading or is gradually
being replaced by a posthuman body which seems to know no pain
(List 1999: 763). At the same time, it could be argued that
the realness of the body and of pain has never been felt more
acutely and is even absolutely vital to popular culture. A
recent instance of pain used in a sensational way for purely
http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/anybody/gutenberg.html (48 van 60)31-3-2005 18:21:57