Section 3
In essence (so to speak), the representational strategy boils down to Camille Paglia's assertion that "what is pretty in nature is confined to the thin skin of the globe upon which we huddle. Scratch that skin, and nature's daemonic ugliness will erupt" (5). In Paglia's construction, as in the Dionysian/Shamanic/poete maudit program, a set of evaluative categories is instated wherein the surface/socialized self alone is false--a social construction people wear like masks--while the natural, violent self (nature's daemonic ugliness) is "true," rooted in biological fact. Thus, Freud's id is the "real" nature of humanity, whereas the ego or superego are not real--as if the whole Freudian framework were god-given fact--and the nature of "nature" itself goes unquestioned. Given such constructions of human nature, especially the construction of female nature I have been discussing, as something concealed and inherently depraved, Paglia can say that "Society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature's power," a "system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature" (7). And since Woman is Nature, an aggressive, malevolent force, then Man must use brute force against her if he and his civilization are to survive.
Feminists have long worked toward materialist/social constructionist representations of women that highlight the damage done by such essentialist notions of "Female Nature." This continuing (though not necessarily unified) effort has attempted to make the Woman/Nature equation visible as a construct, and in doing so it has assailed both sides of the dualistic equation of Woman/Nature as nurturing and/or malicious Mother. The construction of Woman as inherently evil and violent can be traced back at least to the Judeo-Christian notion of the mind/body split. The mind, associated with Man, civilization, rationality, and spirituality, is posited as a superior, almost divine force; in contrast, Woman, who is "more attuned to, or akin to 'nature,'" is associated with the body, sex, irrationality, and evil; she is the force which corrupts the mind and so must be subjugated. The Angry Essentialists ignore the negative implications of this view of Female nature because they are concerned with its flip side: the construction of Woman as nurturing Earth Mother. Angry Essentialism reacts against the idea that women are "somehow more 'nurturing' or 'instinctual' than men" because women are "more attuned to, or akin to 'nature'" (Juno and Vale 4), a notion which straightjackets women in a biologically programmed role of nurturing their husbands and children. But both sides of the dualistic Woman/Nature equation have been perpetuated over the centuries---in religious and medical literature, anthropology, and most notably in Darwin's biological determinism and Freud's conception of the human psyche. This is why materialist (social constructionist) feminisms seek to make visible the historical processes which have constructed Woman/Nature in a dualistic manner, emphasizing the importance of revealing all of these conceptions of Woman as ideological constructs (and not god-given facts).
That Angry Essentialism butts heads with materialist/social constructionist feminisms is not surprising, given their divergent genealogies. Angry Essentialism, arises from a combination of cultural and radical feminist traditions, and ecofeminism is its closest maternal relative. Maureen Devine explains that "Ecofeminism as a discourse evolved out of the ecology movement in the early seventies," at a time when "women began to make connections between their exploitation in what is seen as a patriarchal socio-political system and the system of exploitation of the environment" (2-3). According to Devine, "Ecofeminism initiates [the] process of questioning the traditionally dualistic constructs of woman-man, nature-culture, rather than only explaining their workings" (32); it does this by first accepting the oppositions between woman-man and nature-culture, then critiquing the dualism (33). Thus ecofeminism provides a framework for deconstructing the opposition of woman/man and nature/culture which would allow an examination of "the separate entities of woman and nature in other relationships beyond opposition" (4). Unfortunately, however, there is a cultural feminist tendency in ecofeminism to valorize the identification of woman with nature by "emphasiz[ing] the virtuous, good, and thus the morally superior character of woman and nature in relation to the patriarchal culture that dominates them" (3). While Angry Essentialism rejects ecofeminism's passive characterization of Female Nature, it does valorize the identification of Woman with nature.
Significantly, in this regard, there is a direct historical connection between feminist performance art and ecofeminism, as is evident in Juno and Vale's invocation of the Medusa as mascot of Angry Women
and in Holly Hughes's Earth Mother Goddess in her performance piece World Without End. Devine explains that "Some of those ecofeminists who tend to valorize the identification between woman and nature focus on historical and theological analyses of the development of this identification over centuries and millennia." Others, she says, "focus on spiritual aspects like the celebrations of rituals meant to reaffirm connections to pre-patriarchal goddesses, and the like" (4). In The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 1970-1980, Moira Roth notes that, in the 1970s, women performance artists drew upon this "goddess branch" of ecofeminism for "material and inspiration for feminist rituals" intended "to help create and to maintain a feminist culture" (22). Roth observes that "Already in 1962, [Carolee] Schneeman had created Eye Body, in which snakes coiled over her nude body; but it was . . . eight years later," when ecofeminist texts first emerged, "that Schneeman fully understood the meanings of such pieces." As Schneeman remarked, "The implications of the body images I had explored would be clarified when studying the sacred Earth Goddess artifacts of 4,000 years ago'" (22).
Roth emphasizes that two camps emerged in ritual-making/ecofeminist performance: one sought to ritualize personal experience, while the other attempted "to move the performer away from the personal and toward the realm of myth" (23). Both approaches are significant in interpreting the Angry Essentialists. As Roth points out, in the first group, "the boundaries between autobiographical and ritualistic performances are sometimes blurred, and sometimes indeed the two genres are indistinguishable," while in performances by the second group, the performer attempts "to merge, or to transform, the personal into a mythic self and/or image, and frequently there is an emphasis on women's identification with nature" (23-24). Elements of both approaches are evident in Hughes's World Without End, an autobiographical piece in which Hughes represents her mother as an Earth Mother-Goddess, mixing enough "facts" with fictions so that the spectator cannot know what is "true." Likewise, in The Constant State of Desire, Karen Finley combines autobiographical elements, such as her father's suicide, with ritualistic elements, as when she covers her nude body with eggs, glitter, confetti, and garlands.
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