Kane, submission and the archival body.
The stereotype of a determined woman being so intimidating to men feels overpoweringly archaic, and I have always wanted to live as though those barriers don’t exist, but they do.
-from Dining with Humpty Dumpty by Reba Maybury, 2017.
Kane arrives discretely packaged in a semi-transparent sleeve reminiscent of top-shelf corner shop pornography but less austere. The title is the only tangible information available on the series of found amateur SM images that it contains, the word ‘Kane’ was penciled onto the back of each photograph. I receive my copy of Kane during a particularly uninspiring week in mid-January in which my phone cheerfully tells me that I’ve spent an average of four hours and 13 minutes per day numbing my frontal lobe with reams of algorithmic information designed to make me supple consumer doped up on my own self-doubt. With this in mind I open Kane with the intention of giving each image time and commit a portion of my day to something that isn’t radiating blue light.
I quickly find myself in quiet allegiance with the bound women in the images. Throughout my life I have been perceived as a submissive person because I look younger than my age. My enduringly cherub-like features make me a prime target for patronizing men who either want to explain basic concepts to me, offer completely unsolicited advice or have a disturbing desire to pinch my cheeks. I've often imagined how it would feel to fully embrace the submissiveness that I’ve unwillingly subscribed to and relinquish my physical autonomy to another person. To be bound and gagged in the darkness with the entire weight of my body tied up in rope around my wrists. On looking at the women in Kane, their bodies contorted and sculptural, it strikes me that my perception of submission as a weakness is flawed. The role of the submissive female is so ingrained that the idea of a dominating woman becomes something of a fantasy. In her novella Dining with Humpty Dumpty, political dominatrix Mistress Rebecca takes on a Tory-voting, thirty-something submissive with a feeding fetish and a supposed interest in female supremacy, who she aptly names ‘Humpty’ presumably after his eggshell-thin ego. For Humpty the submissive role is a temporary one, a skin slithered into in order to try and fulfil a lack but a skin that can be peeled off and hung-up for another day. In Mistress Rebecca’s words:
The concept of a submissive coming from the place of cis-male, heterosexual, upper middle class privilege is endlessly fascinating. A total role reversal from everything they’ve been fed. The individual who has everything, every opportunity, every form of gratitude, then superficially rejecting it as they please.
It is this superficiality that removes any traces of genuine eroticism from the relationship between Mistress Rebecca and Humpty. In her essay ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’, Audre Lorde describes the erotic as ‘a knowledge that empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning in our lives.’ Humpty’s privilege and ultimate fabrication of submission creates a power imbalance that feasts at the flesh of any and all erotic potential, rendering him pathetically two-dimensional and sexually repulsive. Humpty is good for nothing but the exploitation of his character and status by Mistress Rebecca for socialist gains.
(Image from Kane published by EVA.C Imprint, 2018)
Kane’s opening page shows the final form of two bound and blindfolded women: one in a corset, ball-gag and suspenders, and the other still in her housecoat, her body hanging by the rope around her wrists with the grace of a dangling marionette. The dominatrix stands above them handling the ropes like a puppeteer. Because of how little is known about the series, and perhaps because its subjects are women the power dynamic in this instance becomes significantly less defined. Without the presence of a photographer the played out notion of the male gaze that often accompanies images with pornographic intent is impossible to apply, and instead the camera’s gaze is turned outward, implicating the viewer. As a narrative Kane moves backwards and as we bear witness to the ritualistic gagging, binding, tying-up and undressing of the three women in the final image the unwavering eye contact of the dominatrix remains constant. Her stare pierces the thin membrane between subject and viewer, rendering us vulnerable and leaving us alone with the images. The intimacy that this creates demands an acknowledgement of our compliance in the voyeuristic act, we exist in our fragile bodies alongside the women and we must accept authority for our autonomy.
(Image from Kane published by EVA.C Imprint, 2018)
Audre Lorde distances the erotic from the purely sexual or the pornographic by describing it as a resource that has been ‘vilified, abused and devalued within Western society.’ Though there is an essential truth in this, it doesn’t mean that so-called deviant or performative sexuality is void of eroticism. The erotic can be unleashed by giving your body over to rope and leather, but it can also exist with the same power in laying down in the dark, sharing poetry or dancing to Prince on a bleach-stained, dive bar carpet in a small-minded town far away from the city. The erotic is an understanding of the responsibility that comes with depth of feeling and not making exceptions for the mediocre and there are myriad ways that it can be deployed in order to retrieve power from sources that have gained theirs by removing it from others. The re-animation of the women in Kane makes them more than just three submissives and their domme captured in stasis in a photograph. In their archival form the bodies are given agency in the form of a yearning to know more about the women beyond their titillating sculptural forms. Are they housewives, mothers, sex workers, actors? Are they queer? Do they masturbate? Are they dead? The possibilities, when put in the hands of the vulnerable and attentive viewer are many, malleable, challenging and endless.
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Burning House Books news:
This Sunday 3rd March Burning House Books will be set up and selling books at Park Lane Market in Shawlands, Glasgow from 11am-4pm. Come along if you're in Glasgow.
Burning House Books is also heading over to Belgium to sell at my FAVOURITE print festival Papier Carbone in Charleroi. The main part of the festival runs from 15th-17th in BPS22 as well as hosting events other venues across the city.
I have curated a selection of books from the Burning House Books archive and current collection for the second outing of the incredible Ways of Learning exhibition which is currently in residence at BALTIC 39 in Newcastle. The exhibition runs until 12th May 2019 and includes a wide range of engaging and enlightening workshops, talks and other events from a diverse selection of artists, writers and organisations. Burning House Books titles will be available to buy from BALTIC 39 for the duration of the exhibition.