Audre Lorde, Karen Finley and Female rage: the most readily available resource in the world.
Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.
– Audre Lorde from The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism, 1981
I come from a long line of self-deprecating women. Women standing in kitchens up to their elbows in soapsuds, craning their necks to yell at kids over their shoulders. Women bitching in whispers over boiling kettles, and pouring crisps into bowls to be delivered to men in the adjoining room. I come from a long line of men sitting blissfully ignorant of the quiet rage their idleness produces, with their feet up on freshly polished coffee tables.
I lost my temper once in one of those adjoining rooms. I was around ten years old and hurtling towards puberty. I don’t remember what sparked my outburst, only that I screamed until I was red in the face, gagging on snot and tears. The brown carpet itched my naked back as I convulsed so fiercely that my summer dress rode right up, exposing my knickers. After my rage burned out, I sat tear-stained on the kitchen linoleum with my auntie as she told me coldly that I wouldn’t be throwing fits for much longer, inferring that puberty would bring an embarrassment of my outbursts. I wasn’t sure I understood how my tantrum differed from my boy cousins fighting in writhing piles on the floor, something they continued to do into their late teens. But as I cleared phlegm from my red-raw throat I knew that my shame was to be uniquely and quietly feminine.
Until I was in my early twenties my favourite authors were all dead white men, some of whom I still enjoy but whose work and lives were inescapably threaded with misogyny. The first woman to blow a hole in my phallocentric reading list was New York based performance artist and writer Karen Finley. Shock Treatment, Finley’s seminal collection of monologues, essays and poems was first published in 1990, around the same time that she gained international notoriety as one of the artists denied National Endowment of the Arts Funding because of controversial obscenity charges. I became hooked on Finley’s visceral embodiment of rage in an instant. Her prose, proudly erupting with sh-t, piss, vomit, cum and blood expanded the physical realities of women’s bodies, turning them into a powerful communicative force. My sheltered upbringing taught me to process female rage in a rigidly derivative and Freudian way, casting aside anger as a symptom of menstruation or a temporary and directionless hysteria. Shock Treatment took this notion of hysteria and held it up like a mirror to the patriarchal, religious moralizers hell-bent on the violent silencing of the female and marginalized population of the time, especially those living with AIDS.
(Karen Finley performing Don't Hang The Angels in 1985 photo by Dona Ann McAdams)
The irony that I am not able to quote most of Finley’s work in this newsletter is not lost on me. Whereas Finley and the rest of the 'NEA Four' publically rallied against the decency clause that stripped them of their NEA funding, censorship in the Internet age by contrast seems impersonal and totalitarian. Before this newsletter reaches its subscribers it must pass through a liminal space where it is scanned for swear words or language deemed pornographic. This cold, algorithmic censorship has the same disregard for context as its previous human incarnations, and although its ideology is less clear, the brunt of it still falls on women, POC and LGBT communities.
Sometimes there is so much to be angry about that it physically depresses me. Grinding me down until my body can’t take any more. I lay like a lump beneath the duvet because the planet is suffocating. I avoid the shower because the cruel relentless beast of fascism is creeping into mainstream thought and vulnerable people are being held in camps across the world. I eat nothing but handfuls of cereal all day because women’s reproductive rights are still up for debate. I stay in the house like a bag of rotting meat because people without enough food or shelter are dying on the streets outside of UK parliament and the hysterical screeching of Brexit continues to dominate social discourse. It is when I become sad and complacent that I try to siphon from the ‘well stocked arsenal of anger’ cited by Audre Lorde in her paper presented at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in June 1981, quoted above. One of the few poems from Shock Treatment that I am able to quote on this platform is ‘The Black Sheep’, Finley’s direct address to the AIDS crisis, its aggravators, those it took and those it left behind:
Black Sheeps’ destinies are not in
necessarily having families,
having prescribed existences –
like the American Dream.
Black Sheep destinies are to give
meaning in life – to be angels,
to be conscience, to be nightmares
to be actors in dreams.
While the importance of shouting and the rallying of bodies in the streets should not be underestimated, tenderness is an equally powerful weapon in the complex arsenal of rage. Finley further harnesses such tenderness in her poem ‘Pussy Speak Out’ from her latest book, in response to the horrors of the Trump administration—aptly titled Grabbing Pussy (2018).
We know your life your body has value, Women
You speak truth
You aren’t lying
You aren’t bringing this on
You didn’t dress this way
You weren’t expecting this
Wherever you work and live
Whatever you do
Whoever you are
Women unite we won’t stand and be raped, groped, abused,
Mocked, and violated.
The female or ‘deviant’ body arouses and offends without even trying. I was taught the expected limitations on my behavior as a woman long before I could fill out an A-cup. My friends were honked at and peered at over changing room doors by men who had also been uncritically subsumed into ugly and prescriptive gender roles. The hysterically funny, dark and salacious tales throughout Finley’s work reclaims the language of sex and violence projected onto societies secret corners from positions of power. Instead rooting it a compassionate tenderness that liberates those whose rage has been strong-armed into a dignified silence, slashing open ancient and oozing taboos in its path.