Surrendering to the Coolness and the Pull of My Fingers

Abstract

This thesis weaves together personal narrative and scholarly analysis of autobiography and pain. Judith Butler’s book entitled, Gender Trouble was used to look at and try to understand the performative body and in the analysis of autobiography within artwork. While Butler restricts her argument to hetronormativity, I have expanded upon that to consider the role of performativity and authority within autobiography and photography. One of the important tensions within my imagery is the question of truth. Is the body you are viewing truly in pain or do I simply look like I am performing pain. When, if ever, is something authentic? And if the world is based solely on perception, then how do we all co-exist? Elaine Scarry tackles this problem of conveying pain in her book, The Body In Pain: Making and Un-making Culture. Scarry believes pain to be a shared cultural phenomenon, but critiques the way it is shared by saying that “having pain is to have certainty and hearing about pain is to have doubt.” In my experience, embracing pain, or even just acknowledging its existence is an exercise in deep empathy. This non-judgemental emapthy or cognitive knowledge building of another situation is difficult and it is rare and undervalued as a social skill. Scarry goes on to talk about the importance of objects to this world of empathy. “Because each person’s made objects now inhabit the shareable external space outside her own body accessible to all, the objects she makes can be coupled with those objects made by the second, and the third, and so the large imagined town gets made.” I see myself adding to the work that came before me, adding to the imagined town. I see the need for a public discourse and identity based on expressed emotion. If empathy were more prevelant in our society, imagine the difference it could make. Imagine the town. “Through tools and acts of making human beings become implicated in each others sentience.”