Lynda Hall

University of Calgary
lhall@acs.ucalgary.ca

 

Holly Hughes, Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler. New York: Grove Press, 1996

 

Holly Hughes, one of the most acclaimed and popular contemporary performance artists and playwrights, publishes five of her works in Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler, including: “The Well of Horniness,” “The Lady Dick,” “Dress Suits To Hire,” “World Without End,” and “Clit Notes.” She also includes extensive autobiographical material detailing her artistic process while commenting critically on her family and the sociocultural milieu which informs her work, such as the collaborative feminist performance community at Women’s One World Cafe (WOW) in New York City. In this review, I focus on the two performance pieces I have seen, “World Without End” and “Clit Notes,” which exemplify her active interventions into cultural norms.

 

Self-creating within complex representational frames, Hughes uses parody and satire in her incisive critiques of misogyny and heterosexual hegemony. Self-creation and sociocultural critique are the thematic axes on which I address her book/performances. While her stage directions indicate “the performer,” her frequent references to her art as self-writing and self-invention invite the spectator/reader to conflate self and performer. There is no evidence to date that anyone else has performed either of the two pieces I address here. In discussing her work, I have simply used “Hughes” throughout.

 

Describing the sociohistorical changes which impact her experience as an artist, Hughes states that “visibility is the dyke mantra du jour…. When I came out in 1973 we fretted about the Male Gaze, how it could swallow us whole. Now we’re complaining that folks aren’t looking hard enough” (“Headless Dyke” 7). While visibility is liberating and promotes a lesbian sense of self-presence and desire for the artist and potentially for the spectator, visibility also invites and produces societal discipline and censure. In 1990, along with three other artists, Hughes was defunded by the NEA, creating a notoriety which precedes her wherever she performs.

 

In her Introduction to Clit Notes, Hughes addresses the NEA and the controversy that “swirled around public funding of art that addresses the body, especially the body that’s either queer, female, of color, or some combination of those” (19). The equation of “homosexuality with obscenity” by Congress made the risks of performance evident, as her works confront homophobia. Her art allows her to create and define her selves, providing the space “to talk back” (19).

 

The immediacy and materiality of the writer/performer’s body and voice on stage facilitate talking back and contesting cultural conventions by acting out subjectivity in relation to history, memory, and desire. Performance by definition suggests repetition, and through repetition, the possibility to pose questions, to play the same scenes and roles differently, and to re-member, re-view, re-shape, re-mark, and re-invent the past. The elaborate stage directions in Clit Notes enable the reader to imagine Hughes’ actions and body during performance. According to Hughes, she hopes her efforts will inspire others to exercise agency and rewrite their stories. Readers and spectators may realize that “they can be the heroine, that they can create their own plot rather than go on living inside the standard narrative” (9). Rewriting and revising old myths and fairy tales strategically, as Hughes does, is a way of interrogating diverse patriarchal, heterosexist imperatives and narrative plots. She concludes “Clit Notes” by inciting the audience to “start acting out our own plots” (212) of resistance. Hughes indicates that very early in life she resisted women’s harmful constrictive scripts of passivity and silence, and their designated female role as object of male desire. As a child she felt “I didn’t want to be a princess,” and she sardonically and subversively inquired: “What if I’d rather be eaten than rescued?” (10).

 

Writing/Performing: Creative Self-Invention

 

The autobiographical nature of Hughes’ writings and performances blurs traditional distinctions between the “real” and representation. Her performances and theoretical discourse suggest that, for her, life and art exist in a continuous relationship. Discussing “World Without End,” Hughes says: “The work’s real personal, real autobiographical” (Schneider 180). Refusing to evacuate the subject position, she fluidly performs her self at many ages, as well as her mother and her lover. Hughes foregrounds the complex contextuality in time and space of all subjectivity. Placing her performances and experiences in a sociohistorical context, Hughes interweaves (and subverts) myths, bible stories, family history, and re-membered dreams in her performance of self-in-process.

 

For Hughes, writing is a source of presence, self-exploration, and self-understanding, often integrated into an engagement with her sexual feelings and development. In her Introduction to Clit Notes she states: “I’m telling stories about how I became an artist and how I became a lesbian” (2). Hughes explains that she used writing to escape from oppressive family influences during “years of watching myself from the outside”; she realized writing “could open as well as close doors” (12). In reference to interrogations regarding her lesbian identity, she asks: “Don’t you hate it when people ask you why you are what you are?” (208). I suggest that this question constitutes the impetus for her art, and Clit Notes offers the reader Hughes’ perplexing and candid answers.

 

Overcoming compulsory heterosexuality in narratives entails frankly addressing taboo topics and expressing “unladylike” desires and experiences. Hughes suggests the proximity of feeling at home in the body and in the self through sexual acts and through writing/creating reality: “At WOW I can tell the stories I wanted to hear as a child…. I use words to make a home for myself with passageways that lead from the past into the present” (Clit Notes 18). Her writing and performances constitute an integral part of her everyday life. Referring to the NEA controversy and the power of the religious right, Hughes notes, “My role in the Cultural War is still very much a work in progress, a story that I’m telling as I’m living it” (22). Her artistic endeavours address a need to create space for self in a world which largely denies her desires and experiences; she claims, “I’m interested in trying to invent new images for women sexually” (Schneider 182).

 

In “World Without End,” multiple codes indicate to the audience the performative power to re-create your life. She enters carrying a composition book, and later reads words from it which we presume she has written earlier. She foregrounds the creative mode metadramatically in the first few words: “I’m going to tell you a story” (155). Performing with her own body and voice affords her performances an aura of authenticity.

 

As a spectator at her performances of “Clit Notes” and “World Without End,” in Calgary in June 1994, I felt engaged in a private conversation. Hughes deliberately creates a feeling of dialogue through her intimate settings, such as an “overstuffed wingback chair” in “World Without End” (154), and her frequent direct address to individual spectators. “Clit Notes” concludes with a debate on being out of the closet or being invisible, in terms of safety, and leaves the spectator to complete the dialogue; “You tell me,” Hughes invites (208).

 

Body Talk/Commanding the Gaze

 

Hughes frequently interrupts her narrative and makes individual audience members the object of her gaze and her construction. She refuses notions of male ownership of the gaze and desire by reappropriating the gaze and desire for herself. Her defiant act of “looking back” disrupts traditional unbalanced power relations between the performer and the spectator. Making her body a spectacle of active desire and agency, and claiming her right to a creative look, Hughes embodies a practical resistance to negative social scripts.

 

At one point in “World Without End,” Hughes directly addresses the audience in a confrontational monologue on issues such as racism, misogyny, domestic violence, rape, and lack of funding for abortion. Her mix of representational strategies motivates the spectators to perceive the fusion of both art and politics in everyday life. Hughes often assumes a teaching stance in relation to the audience, similar to the mother’s numerous lessons to Holly, thereby appropriating the traditional masculine prerogative of knowledge, voice, and authority. In “Clit Notes” she assumes the role of a professor and labels her first lecture “Performance Art as a Tool of Social Change” (196).

 

She foregrounds the body in her work as a source of creativity, pleasure, and knowledge, as well as the site of often violent social prescriptions. Rebecca Schneider praises Hughes for her courageous acts, declaring that “autonomy and the expression of sexual desire are an unusual mix for a woman to so adroitly control on stage” (172). In her Introduction to Clit Notes Hughes states, “I’m thinking out loud; I’m writing with my body” (2). She recalls that in college her body was “still a foreign country, still occupied by my parents, the doctors, the storm troopers of the normal” (8). Her art performs a Foucauldian counter-resistance to powerful disciplining institutions colonizing her body. She states: “I wanted to live./In my body./In the world” (194).

 

Hughes performs a body which appears very much under her control, and yet at times she also suggests a body and mind out of control. She joyously performs “hysterical” acts that defamiliarize the spectator and provoke us to read her body and its every gesture carefully. Near the beginning of “World Without End” she grabs flowers out of the vase, “throws them over her shoulder and then takes a nice long drink of water. From the vase” (157). Such an undomesticated act as drinking the flower water invites us to interpret her actions as resistant to several scripts of “normality.” She performs desires that are excessive and uncontrollable, and thus symbolically refuses patriarchal confinement and definitions.

 

In the opening moments of “World Without End,” Hughes appears lounging deep in the chair, wearing a “red silk off-the-shoulder number” and holding her composition book (156). There are few props around her, focusing the spectator’s gaze on her body and gestures as she commands center stage. The stage directions indicate that “she’s just stepped out of a Balthus painting” (157). Balthus often painted portraits featuring nubile adolescent girls draped seductively over chairs or beds, nude, frequently with legs apart. They appear innocent, vulnerable, and available as erotic objects. Balthus invokes a sinister atmosphere by portraying a childlike body in place of the passive adult female nude of classical representation. Hughes’ relaxed posture in a soft chair holding her composition book evokes Balthus’ painting “Katia Reading.” In a postmodern gesture, consciously imitating a Balthus pose (which in turn represents a re-creation of earlier traditional art focusing on the female body as object), Hughes uses and subverts cultural conventions. She appropriates the stage to reframe Balthus and the patriarchal perceptions of women his art exemplifies. Creating her own text, speaking with her own voice, and self-determining her own posture and dress, Hughes reappropriates female subjectivity for herself. Her self-portrait powerfully exposes confining cultural frames.

 

Female Sexuality and Desire / Mother Love

 

Hughes’ provocative critique addresses pervasive cultural silences that surround women’s sexuality and structure our world. Her representations of various components of women’s sexuality bring them into the realm of the visible as she grapples with the dilemma of what can be made visible in a culture that goes to some lengths to forbid, or at least prevent, such scripts. Focusing on sexuality, Hughes discusses “World Without End” in an interview with Schneider:

 

I'm experiencing that there's an absolute terror in this culture of women's sexuality. It's absolutely frightening...it's like, yeah, women are multiorgasmic, they're insatiable. There have been so many constraints put on our sexuality and so many blinders by every possible institution in the culture that we're just beginning to notice that there's this volcano beneath the surface.... We're just beginning to see that we have this desire, but it's terrifying to us. We back down from it all the time. There's just something monstrous about it, it's so unnameable and unknowable. (179)

 

In “Clit Notes,” her acerbic, irreverent humor exposes and attacks patriarchal definitions of female sexuality and desire that dangerously distort and silence women’s actual experience and anatomy. The authoritative text she reads and mocks, Dr. David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex, only mentions female homosexuality in a “footnote under ‘Prostitution'” (186). Distorting reality, he highlights strap-on appliances and warns about the extensive length of the lesbian clitoris (187). After her own body search, Hughes demarcates the self-alienation and doubt such misinformation creates in the teenaged girl; she states: “I began to doubt the very existence of my clitoris” (188).

 

Writing and performing “Clit Notes” brings the unseen and unspeakable “clit” into public discourse. She frequently makes connections between language, particularly the ability to name, and presence. In her preamble to “Clit Notes” Hughes writes, “I see myself as a political artist, and I think that making more people wrap their mouths around the word, if not the thing itself, is precisely the kind of political goal one can hope to realize through theatre” (184). Hughes displaces the phallocentric vocabulary centered on the words “dick, prick and cock” (184) by celebrating the clit. She decries the still current practice of clitoridectomy in Africa as a literalization of violent patriarchal discursive and material erasure of women’s anatomy and pleasures (197).

 

Hughes demonstrates the patriarchal maneuvres that oppress self-understanding and restrict women’s desire by promoting shame of the female body. In “World Without End,” after telling her childhood friend Jodeen about her mother’s active efforts at sexual education, Jodeen exclaims, “Holly, MY MOTHER does NOT have a pussy, and if she did–I would not want to know about it!” (168). Internalized shame and guilt produce massive self-denial. Foregrounding the insidious alienation from the body, Hughes claims that Jodeen will become “the kind of woman who’s doomed to drown in her own body. Doomed to wear her body like it was somebody else’s clothes” (169). The splitting of the self suggested in “wearing” the body like clothes confronts the cultural construction of body image that frequently produces anxiety and self-denial.

 

Insisting on the integration of mind and body, and actively articulating her desires, Hughes deconstructs dualistic hierarchies that situate women on the inferior side of male/female, active/passive, mind/body, subject/object binaries. She flaunts her embrace of the “bad girl” linguistic putdown, observing that “a woman only gets two choices: good and bad. So I got on the bad-girl bus because I thought it would be more fun. And let’s remember that I’m a whore and a dyke for good reason. I’m good at it” (175). She claims the authority to name herself, to reclaim words, and to ridicule misogynistic negative labelling of women. Very often works of resistance are critiqued as dangerously reinscribing the status quo. I would argue that Hughes positively deconstructs the prevailing order and provokes thought and more open minds.

 

Hughes persistently represents “mother” as inimical to traditional cultural scripts of a self-less, non-sexual being. Reversing the traditional male quest narrative, the mother takes her daughter on diverse voyages of discovery into unmapped sexual, psychological, and physical spaces. The mother exemplifies body talk. She uses her whole body to communicate her lessons. Hughes relates the mother’s “way of talking, with her tears and her pussy and with her sentences which could say ‘death’ but mean ‘pleasure’ in the same breath” (169).

 

A major scene in the performance occurs when the mother is enacted as standing “NAKED. Sssh! NAKED and glowing! Bigger than life. Shining from the inside out” (166). Refusing to repress the erotic bond to the mother, Hughes refutes Freud’s theory that girls abandon the mother as love-object, turn to the father, and as a consequence suffer from sexual repression (251). Sexual repression is rendered dubious in Hughes’ dynamic performance. Excessively retaining and expressing love for the mother, this girl refuses to redirect her desire from the mother to the father and retains the pleasure derived from the clitoris. The mother ensures her daughter does not suffer from culturally-sanctioned misinformation and ignorance of her body, saying, “Holly, this is your clitoris” (167). Hughes blissfully performs the mother’s body and her own as neither a dark continent nor unexplorable. Early in the play Hughes says this “still is my mother’s land. . . . and I am a continent” (161, 163). In fluid, diffused sexual pleasure and bliss, Hughes powerfully reclaims access to the mother’s body and her own.

 

Hughes also flagrantly undermines Freud’s notions of female genitalia as “nothing to be seen” by producing a new view. Hughes narratively brings woman’s insides out into view and into possible appreciation, placing value on the inner self and not just outer appearance. Calling this naked scene a mother-daughter fertility “sacred ritual, a mystery revealed” (166) which she witnesses and learns from, Hughes highlights the connections between ritual, performance, and life, and implies the audience’s intimate relationship to her self. In complete absence of the phallus, Hughes opens the “hidden room,” and the “mystery” or “meaning of life” is “revealed” (166). The mother celebrates her body and passes the possible pleasures on to her daughter. Performing this recollection with awe and delight, Hughes suggests appreciation for a mother who offers a daughter knowledge and self-respect.

 

Complicating the female body as a major sign, Hughes’ body is on stage as a real woman’s body, not fragmented and shattered, nor restricted to fixed statuary; “I can smell the memory of ocean drifting out from between my mother’s legs. Oh there is power in my mother’s hips!” she says (165). Smelling the “memory of ocean” erotically re-members woman’s body as fluid, not frozen in fixed patriarchal positions. Her counter-memory constructs a daughter who has seen and witnessed the power of woman’s sexuality autonomous from the male desiring gaze. Here the mother not only has a body, she also embodies the power of sexuality.

 

Hughes suggests that knowledge and appreciation of woman’s physical body contribute to the process of survival, to woman actively seeking and creating her own answers: “Mama says: ‘Holly, if something’s bothering you, and you want to know the answer to it, just remember the answer is inside you.’ And with that she reached inside herself, and then she pulled her hand out. I could see how wet she was!” (167). Erotic arousal and desire invite the daughter and the audience to explore the unrepresented and the unthought. Knowledge and self-understanding can come from “inside,” from the body and personal experience, from her mother’s teachings, rather than from “outside” misogynistic discourses such as Dr. Reuben’s.

 

The mother performs transgressive acts like massacring a porcupine and revealing the plenitude of her sexual physical body parts, desires, and responses. Violently bludgeoning a porcupine with an axe, the mother represents death and destruction and celebrates the erotic, rather than exhibiting maternal nurturing and giving of life. As agent, the mother acts out a lesson for four adolescent girls, encouraging “unnatural” acts in the next generation, rather than provoking passive compliance to social norms. Her non-conventional image utterly disrupts and deconstructs expected maternal roles.

 

Delightful hysteria and madness in the porcupine scene parallel Hughes’ act of drinking the water from the flower vase. Refusing circumscription by “rational” patriarchal scripts for women, she performs in outrageous excess and abandon, and her body and voice literally symbolize civil disobedience. After drinking the green water from the vase, “there is a sense of waking up, of coming to” (163), as though the irrational and hysterical act recovers knowledge about the body and the past that has been repressed by social forces. The sense of “coming to” echoes in “Clit Notes.” After her first conscious mutual kiss with a woman at the age of twenty, Hughes claims “that the expression ‘coming out’ doesn’t quite cover [it]. In my case, it was more a question of…coming to” (191).

 

Deflating the Phallus

 

The mother takes an active role in ensuring her daughter’s initiation into the pleasures of the body and also models active agency. Saying “Look, girls! A porkie,” Hughes performs the phallic mother. She is the mother with the axe, the castrating female, in a Dionysian Brechtian wild frenzied scene of symbolically tearing men apart. Tales of chivalrous sword-wielding knights who rescue helpless damsels are displaced by a mother who wields an axe, kills an animal, comes into the restaurant with “her hands full of bloody flesh and quills,” and presents it to her daughter as a lesson (160). This scene evokes Hughes’ earlier childhood memory of getting out a “big knife” and “chopping up everything I could get my hands on” (156). Joyful expressions of active female aggression, violence, and agency suggest the possibility of grasping power and cutting apart traditional cultural scripts, as well as deconstructing paradigms of the patriarchally controlled female body. Speaking of “phallic values that of course we’re trying to lop off” (173), Hughes represents woman as a source of danger.

 

In “World Without End,” the biblical Garden of Eden undergoes major revision. At the play’s end Eve queries Adam: “Do you have any idea at all who you are porking? I’m the preeminent lesbian performance artist from southern Michigan!” (179). The Adam performing the “porking” (evoking the porcupine incident) is strategically axed and cut down to size at the start and at the finish.

 

Radically revising the Eve and Adam “master-narrative” and its originary prescriptions and scripts, Hughes places her gestures and radical voice within the first biblical dialogue and within the sociogeographical setting for notions of woman as sinful temptress. The photograph on the front cover of the book parodies such cultural representations of woman. Hughes appears nude except for leaves covering her nipples and pubic area. Four luscious apples hang temptingly from her body, transforming her body into an iconic tree of knowledge. Her face is excessively and luridly made-up and her grin leers from the page. Her body as text to be read revises constricting Christian frames for female sexuality.

 

Hughes decenters and transgressively parodies the site of the phallus; she exclaims,:”Mr. Adam! What is the meaning of that…edifice…I see leaning out of your pants like that? I haven’t seen anything so interesting since my last trip to the Vatican” (178). An “edifice” suggests a construction and thereby implies the possibility for a powerful potential deconstruction, another perspective, or alternative ways of making meaning. Hughes provides an epistemological questioning of the “meaning” of the penis/phallus. The huge pause in the text performs woman’s perception as unwritten and unspeakable. Her satirical derogatory act of looking at Adam’s genitals, judging them, and ridiculing them reverses “normal” masculine ownership of the gaze and authority to define women’s beauty, anatomy, and desires. Hughes remarks: “I wanted to rewrite the Bible” (177), indicating her desire for cultural change.

 

Killing Family Romances

 

Hughes represents the violence and death of spirit and the literal death that are often inherent in heterosexuality and the family romance: “some nights my father would come home drunk. There’d be the sounds of insults. Screams. Breaking glass. You know. The usual family stuff, right?” (155). She expresses the pain of rejection caused by her father’s anger at her public lesbian identification. Stating that her father blamed her for causing his cancer and killing him, Hughes asks: “Anybody want to take a guess what is the worst thing that ever happened to my father? You’re looking at her” (195).

 

Clit Notes extensively details Hughes’ sexual development. She relates her summers at a Christian leadership camp as “a big dyke training ground” (6). She elaborates on her first sexual desires at the age of thirteen for her social studies teacher. Describing the joys of a current relationship, she comments that watching her lover get out of bed is the “moment I come back to the body I thought I’d lost to my father” (203). Reclaiming the body through love and her art is an ever-present theme throughout Hughes’ works. While sardonic, sharp humor imbues Hughes’ writings, there is an underlying frank interrogation of physical and psychic violence contained in culturally circumscribed compulsory heterosexuality.

 

To conclude, I propose that Holly Hughes’Clit Notes creates hope and strength for the transformation of prevalent contemporary cultural misogyny and homophobia. Hughes’ introduction, her two performance pieces, and three plays offer a wealth of experience and support for her readers and performance audiences. Reading her texts promotes deliberation and contemplation and provides the opportunity to make the many interconnections among her writings over the years. The passion and dynamic love of life and sexuality Hughes exudes, her insightful ability to analyze her experiences and female sexuality, and her desire to contribute to others’ sense of being at home in the body and in the world make Clit Notes a pleasure for all to read. In addition, I recommend Clit Notes as an excellent text for classes in Drama, English, Sociology, Psychology, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies.

Works Cited

 

• Freud, Sigmund. “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes.” Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Ed. James Strachey. Volume 19. London: Hogarth Press, 1964. 248-258.
• Hughes, Holly. Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler. New York: Grove Press, 1996.
• —. “Headless Dyke In Topless Bar.” Village Voice. Special Section June 21, 1994: 7-9, 33.
• Schneider, Rebecca. “Holly Hughes: Polymorphous Perversity and the Lesbian Scientist.” The Drama Review 33.1 (1989): 171-83.