CARNAGE IN THE TIME OF GAGA: A ROMP IN THE AESTHETIC FIELD OF GURLESQUE POETICS
A decade ago two Gen X female poets, Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg, identified an emerging trend among disparate female poets born of the same generation. It was not a theory or an organized movement but rather a new approach to femininity and feminism. No two poets were writing the exact same way, nor were they working together to create a particular aesthetic. Yet while reading new collections written by young women publishing at the start of the new millennium, Glenum and Greenberg began to recognize a pattern of similarity. The poems in these collections were “unabashedly girly,” filled with sequins, unicorns, fishnet stockings, rainbows, and dolls.(1) They were also brash, playful, provocative, dark, and grotesque. Glenum and Greenberg saw they were “overtly poems of women’s experiences, of the female body and of sexuality, poems rooted, you could argue, in the understanding of America as a rape culture.”(2) While poems from an earlier generation of women (Second Wave) tackled women’s experiences with a type of serious earnestness, the new Gen X poems were quite the opposite: irreverent, gross, and campy.
Greenberg and Glenum also noted the voices in these poems were simultaneously empowered and marginalized, carnal and innocent, cute and tough.(3) Examining the commonalities between the collections, Greenberg identified three, uniting socio-historic strands: the Carnivalesque, the Burlesque, and the Riot Girls (or alternatively, Girly Kitsch). Glenum and Greenberg named this aesthetic the Gurlesque and started an anthology project and blog about it. They did not limit the poetics to poetry but included other mediums such as visual art and music if they fell within the definition of the Gurlesque aesthetic.
Taken together, the elements create an aesthetic that is about subverting the high-brow, the white masculinist capitalistic imperialistic ideology, and the gendered norms of America’s modern culture by playing with and making fun of it. The Gurlesque questions and ‘talks back to’ cultural/political dynamics of privilege and power, yet does so through playfulness/humor, performance, and exaggerated display. These tactics take their root from the comic rituals and spectacles of the Middle Ages (“Carnival”), which the Russian literary critic and semiotitian, Mikhail Bahktin, termed “The Carnivalesque.”
While many cultures (particularly those with Roman Catholic histories or ties) continue to hold yearly Carnival celebrations, they differ from the Carnivalesque festivities of the Middle Ages Bahktin describes. Some elements, such pageant, parade, costume—and most importantly the overturning of daily life—do remain in modern Carnival, but historically, Carnival’s distinguishing feature was folk humor. According to Bahktin, Carnival was “a boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations that opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture.”(4) The manifestations of this folk humor included ritual spectacles such as carnival pageants, comic verbal compositions such as written parodies, and humorous word play that today we recognize as swearing or cursing. Though the Gurlesque is also defined by Burlesque performance and Girly Kitsch, the comic manifestations of the Carnivalesque ultimately form the foundation of the modern Gurlesque aesthetic.
Modern Americans may recognize their own form of Carnival through New Orleans Mardi Gras, but it must be made clear that Carnival in the Middle Ages was very different. Carnival festivities during that time were sanctioned by authority, consecrated by tradition, and occurred at various times throughout the year, such as harvesting and prior to Lent. Carnival was an opportunity for the ‘common people’ to participate in a “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth” and the “established order.”(5) The rituals and pageants were “sharply distinct from the serious official, ecclesiastical, feudal, and political cult forms and ceremonials.”(6) During Carnival, people were allowed to dress donkeys as heads of Church, wear pants on their heads, or put on mock performances of knighthood initiation for all to laugh at. Hierarchies and rules of power were suspended, and everybody mocked and derided everybody—not only ranked officials, but the other folk and the larger culture within which they lived. This festive folk humor created a logic of ‘the inside out’ and allowed a revival of life through laughter. As we will see in the Gurlesque poems explored in later sections, this reversal and revival is key in the re-appropriation of women’s bodies and sexuality.
The aspect of the Carnivalesque that most deeply informs the Gurlesque and its focus on the body is the grotesque or grotesque realism. Bahktin notes that grotesque realism’s heritage is again folk humor, but with the emphasis on the material bodily principle. Images of “the human body with its drink, defecation, and sexual life” are predominant in grotesque realism, often portrayed with exaggerated effect.(7) While the images might seem ‘gross’ (e.g. scatological imagery), in the Middle Ages grotesque realism was overwhelmingly positive. The body was not seen as separate or private, but “universal, representing all people.”(8) The body and its fluids and excesses were representative of fertility and growth, and by “lowering all that is high, spiritual, ideal,” the grotesque body became, not an abstraction, but human material connected to the earth, animals, and other life forms.(9) As if literally lowering the focus from ‘higher’ stratas of being (the mind, the heavens, the head), grotesque realism follows the life of the lower body, most notably the belly, buttocks, and sexual organs.
The grotesque body, though ugly and monstrous, is also life affirming in its representation of copulation, pregnancy, birth, growth, and finally death and a return to the earth for yet another material transformation. This ambiguity and contradiction inherent in grotesque realism is an expression of the life force itself: as the seasons grow, change, wither and die, so too does the human body/life undergo such transformations, sometimes painful. Perhaps the most obvious element of the Gurlesque is its depiction of the grotesque body, but it is interesting to note that other contradictions are similarly mirrored in the Gurlesque: ugly/beautiful, masculine/feminine, powerful/weak, playful/derogatory. Just as the lower body with its apertures and offshoots (anus, potbelly, phallus, vagina) are not closed, fixed, or contained, neither are the voices in Gurlesque poems straightforward with static identities. Sexuality, especially, is fluid and morphing.
The other two elements of the Gurlesque, the Burlesque and Girly Kitsch, are somewhat related to the Carnivalesque but are modern in their manifestations. Burlesque theater, in its original form (1840s – 1860s), was primarily a “socially explosive” antecedent of vaudeville wherein the female Victorian actresses dressed in “grotesque hybrids” of masculine attire that emphasized gendered dress as a fetishized object.(10) As in Carnival, the acceptable limits of gender and sexuality were transgressed through costume and performance. Burlesque theater saw a revival in the 1930s, and this is when the strip tease was added; today, Burlesque is enjoying another revival as a popular nightlife entertainment in many large American cities. Modern Burlesque theater, while more overtly sexualized, still displays many of its original intentions, which is to play with constructions of gender through extreme hyperbole, performance, and camp. According to Glenum, “in camp performance, the stress is on artifice,” where there is no solid or stable identity but a “raucously messy nest of conflicting desires and proclivities that can be costumed this way or that.” (11) In Gurlesque poetics, there is no narrative ‘Self,’ but a masked persona engaging in an exaggerated performance with the focus on bodily and sexual display.
Girly Kitsch is the ‘costume’ Gurlesque poets don for their hyperbolic performance. Kitsch is “the realm of artificial imagery” and is the opposite of “high art.”(12) Girly Kitsch is “the domain of the Cute” according to critic Sianne Ngai and dovetails with the Riot Grrl aesthetic of the 1990s.(13) Greenberg describes Riot Grrl in the introduction of the Gurlesque anthology as an “indiepunkunderground” subculture of young women taking back language, images from their childhoods, and the punk and indie music scenes then dominated by males.(14) These girls started their own bands and published zines that taught girls how to “make your own glittery guitar strap.”(15) They dressed in combat boots and lace stockings and wore barrettes and carried lunchboxes and wrote “cunt” on their skin. Gurlesque poetics, with its exaggerated bodily performance, uses Girly Kitsch to further make a parody of girlish vulnerability and cuteness.
Since there is no formal movement among Gurlesque poets (and artists working in other mediums), how the elements of the Carnivalesque, the Burlesque, and Girly Kitsch work in any given collection (or individual poem) can vary widely. Zirconia by Chelsey Minnis, The Cow by Ariana Reines, and Maximum Gaga by Lara Glenum, are three poetry collections that greatly differ in form and theme yet offer entertaining and sometimes shocking Gurlesque performances on the page.
Zirconia by its title alone suggests an object that appears to be real, but is in fact a forgery, a sparkling representation of the real (a diamond). The diamond itself occurs naturally in nature and is relatively rare; it is also a highly valued commodity in the global market, and modern diamonds can be laser cut by modern technologies to look almost indistinguishable from natural diamonds. In our culture, diamonds are worn as an adornment and represent wealth and therefore power and status. In America, the diamond engagement ring is also romanticized as a symbol of everlasting love and fidelity, although the majority modern American marriages end in divorce. The zirconia, by contrast, is a cheap imitation of a diamond, an item worn as an ‘affordable’ fashion accessory or even costume jewelry. By titling the collection Zirconia, Minnis immediately attracts the reader’s attention to artifice and fakery, and also draws in associations of wealth/status and romantic ideals of heterosexual love. It is no accident that the book cover is construction paper heart red, further emphasizing romance and ‘the girly.’
The speaker in Minnis’s poems revels in her girlishness, and consciously becomes a spectacle on the page. In “Uh,” the speaker practically rolls in her desire for both sex and clothes as the words and phrases are connected by long ellipses like heavy breathing. It is an exaggerated performance of femininity spiked with violence and the weird. The poem begins, “..uh…….I want to wear hot pants…………………………………………………….….….
……………………………………………………………………………………………….
…………………………………………………………..……..and rest my boot on the back
of a man’s neck.” The word “uh” suggests a stupid speaker, someone slow to gather her thoughts. Her big idea—she wants to wear hot pants—underscores the vapid and perhaps vain personality of the speaker. The long ellipses become a pause while the cogs in her brain struggle to find the next thought. Yet this speaker is not as passive as she first appears. In her hot pants, she will dominate a man with her boot, a fetishized sexual object.
True to the Gurlesque, Minnis’s speaker is not merely a woman who is dreaming of being a dominatrix. For after she has risen from the arctic waters with a spear gun, she declares that “someone should knock me down…and press me against the blue tile………………………
………………………………………………………….and shuck…………………………..
a gold sheath dress………………..off me.” She has two desires, seemingly at odds, to dominate and also be dominated. Greenberg explains in an interview that the Gurlesque has room for many contradictory elements, and in fact “pandemonium should reign in a Gurlesque poem…and this happens best in a poem where the speaker(s) and story are constantly shifting.”(16) The speaker in “Uh” moves from subjugating man to asking for physical violation. But Minnis is also drawing attention here to how women are treated as sexual objects. The gold sheath dress harkens to Hollywood glam girls and the word “shuck” (rather than rip or tear) puts an almost snarky spin on what is essentially rape.
In the final two pages of the four-page poem, Minnis veers away from sex and hones her focus on the violence introduced earlier. She pulls some old men’s beards and gives them hairline fractures, and this makes her “bleed in a sailor suit.” Once in men’s attire, she salutes the old men—a gesture associated with the military and showing respect for rank. She then faints in an act of feminine passivity, and is attacked by the old men because she is “too petulant.” Her head is chopped off, she’s hit with a brickbat, and her face is butterflied with a knife to give her “oral………………maxillofacial kisses” in order to keep her from crying beneath her “cat-eye sunglasses.” Minnis, in a jokey and provocative narrative, plays with notions of power, age, and gender, but also makes a statement about the sexualized violence directed at women in our culture.
In “Sternum,” Minnis looks at the sexualized body through an obsession with the bare sternum showing inside the V‑neck of a t‑shirt. She represents desire not entirely as a natural byproduct of a sexual urge but a made thing produced and enacted by culture. She both loves and hates the desire she participates in—she wants the bone with its “jasmine hint” and “excruciating warmth.” Yet the “hardest….body parts are vulnerable” and she would rather be
be “torn in half…rather than endure…the hurt…of desire.” When reading the poem, there is no clear sense whether or not the speaker is facetious or truly battling with ambivalent feelings regarding her own desire. She seems to be making a political statement while simultaneously admitting she feels the very desire she is criticizing.
Desire in the poem is differentiated from love or intimacy and is presented as a sort of act. The V of the t‑shirt becomes a “rough frame” for the bared sternum, which the speaker says is “a simulated vulnerability.” Further, it’s okay that it’s not real, because “at least simulated vulnerability is bearable…for those…who cannot…withstand unreasonable tenderness.” The sternum becomes a “warrior’s breastplate,” as if the body needed a shield against tenderness and touch. The speaker returns again and again to describing the sternum; however, it is from a distance, as an object that she wishes to touch but does not. In fact, what she loves most is the “open V‑necks of people in photographs,” suggesting that a ‘real,’ in-the-flesh sternum would be emotionally overwhelming.
In the last page and half of the poem, the speaker in “Sternum” makes a political statement about revealing clothes (the V‑neck) by joking about it. The “necklaces are torn off” to reveal the sternum in the V because of the desire to “be released from plain shirts at once and shown to the world.” Yet this unveiling of “bare surfaces” is also a concealment and a “bared void.” It is a “presentation,” and not a real exposure of the human self behind the bone. The revelation of the body is a “flaunt” of “pride,” a thing of the ego disconnected from the sensual life of the body. So while the V‑neck produces desire and is ‘sexy,’ it is a made thing and not rooted in the woman herself.
Ariana Reines also confronts the issue of women’s bodies as sexualized and commodified in her collection, The Cow. In the long poem, “Item,” Reines explores the cultural significance of the cow and its uses. She immediately draws a parallel between the cow and woman. In the English language, to say someone is a cow is to degrade her with abusive language. Reines remarks, “a cow is a name for a heavy woman with or a woman with sloe eyes. Cow is a common epithet for a slow woman or clumsy woman; a woman with a foul smell.” Like cows, women lactate for their offspring, but by a certain age children in our culture do not drink human milk but cow’s milk. The cow is a mass-produced living being whose bodily by-products we market for consumption. To say a woman is a cow not only places a negative value judgment on female weight and intelligence, it is also representative of how the body—meat, flesh—is artificially manufactured to sell.
Reines pays particular attention to language, to how we name things. To have a cow is to freak out, which plays on the cultural assumption that women are irrational and ridiculous. It is also what “you call the meat around a cunt.” This meat is “a witness. Silent.” Like the lazy, grazing cow in a field, the cunt meat is passive. It is ‘pounded’ by another type of meat and lays back and takes it with its large, liquid eye. The meat, and therefore the woman connected to it, is not an autonomous or active thing. It can only be acted upon and observe the action, lacking any language or a voice of its own.
Reines uses a lot of space in the poem describing the biological inner workings of the cow from a scientific standpoint. She lists the compartments of the stomach and explores the microorganisms, bacteria, protozoa, and yeasts inside the rumen. As if the animal were nothing more than a diagram in a textbook, the speaker discloses the cow’s miraculous biology but from a disconnected, rational perspective. The cow is not a living mammal but a sideshow displayed in the name is science. The speaker describes courses in animal husbandry where “a live cow” is cut open at her side, so that “the curious student can observe—with his or her own eyes—at least one stage of the animal’s magnificent digestion.” Like the woman dressed in revealing clothing, the cow is a spectacle for people to watch. The purpose of the cow’s stomachs for digestion and to produce milk for its offspring is made unimportant as the focus shifts to what the cow can do or produce to be marketed and sold. Similarly, the woman’s body is not her own or for her own pleasure; and her breasts (tits, teats) are objects to look at, not to feed human babies or as her own erogenous zone. In each instance, the living being is taken out of context and made into a thing to consume.
The speaker in “Item” is making a statement not only about women’s bodies but also about American consumption in general. Two long paragraphs are devoted to the cow industry itself. The speaker explains, “In the United States, after she has been alive for about six months, and if she is not one of the luxury ‘grass fed’ varietals, the cow lives in a stall in a feedlot in Kansas…she has got to shit where she eats, in the stall.” It is no accident that Reines uses the pronoun “she” or that she makes a distinction between the expensive cow meat/milk (luxury…varietals) and the corn-fed cows most Americans eat from. Though the cow’s natural environment is a field, and what a cow is meant to eat is grass, the mass-produced cows are stuck in a slot and fed “FEED,” or corn combined with rendered animal carcass. The animal is not only placed in an artificial living space, but the space itself is like a prison where the cow has very little movement or any choice over what she ingests. The food she eats is not natural food but a synthetic by-product given an abstract name, “feed.” In essence, the cow is removed from its status as a living being—not even the corn she is given to eat is labeled with a name we would recognize as nourishing food. The cow is only as good as what she can give, what can be produced from her body. Similarly, women in our culture are treated as meat, dressed up in often restricting clothing (such a stiletto heels and tight pants), and used as objects to look at or handle. Women are placed in a sort of ‘gazing pen,’ which as the speaker notes, provides no “room for me in it” (italics mine).
The nature of the feed stalls and its byproducts are explored by the speaker in grotesque detail. The corn feed, being antithetic to the natural grass diet, requires that the cow also ingest antibiotics for without them the corn “would kill her.” However, the antibiotics keep the cow alive and also makes her fat, “which is to say, TENDER. Marbled. HEALTH.” The unnatural feed is deadly but the cow industry pumps the animals full of pharmaceuticals and other synthetic products to produce a meat that is tasty. Yet the delicious, tender meat is deceptive and not healthy for those who ingest the artificially grown meat. The meat from the cow provides the protein to make the meat for our own bodies, but consuming the antibiotic-filled meat makes us fat, too. Carrying excess weight is not only damaging to the human body, but in our society a heavy person—especially a woman—is seen as gross and unattractive. There are many fat jokes in American culture, though a large portion of Americans are overweight. In today’s age, naturally fed meats and other unadulterated food products such as produce are more expensive than the synthetic foods mass produced and so, too, there is an economic divide in who can afford the healthiest foods to manage balanced nutrition and weight.
The slaughterhouse for the cows becomes the center of the poem. In the slaughterhouse, the cow “has shit caked on her,” she is led “down a gently-curved ramp” with hundreds of other cows. She is stunned with a gun and strung up on her hind legs to be bled over a conveyor belt. In the slaughterhouse, “everything happens very quickly. An animal is costly. Industry has an aesthetic.” That aesthetic is economics. When the cow is sliced open the shit from the outside can get in contact with the fresh meat on the inside, creating disease. It does not matter—we will eat the cow anyway and possibly contract Mad Cow Disease. Industry and money are everything. This has implications not only for the woman but for all who ‘eat up’ (accept, digest, take in) the economic ideologies that drive cheap, mass-produced food products.
For the woman caught up in this same economic machine, she may be metaphorically led to slaughter. Reines explains that there are “cow derivatives in absolutely everything,” including lipstick. Make-up, leather, synthetic materials such as plastic, all come from animal by-products. The poem introduces an interesting conundrum: are we eating the cow or are we being eaten up in the same commercial machine as the animals themselves? By wearing the lipstick a woman is made beautiful…but why put on lipstick unless you want to be looked at—devoured? When a woman ‘puts on her face’ and leather heels, is she hanging herself up by her back legs to be bled by the industrial machine? The answer may be found in another of Reine’s poems, “Knocker.” The speaker says, “my body is not my body when they hang me up by my hind legs.” In the same poem, she admits to having a “resinous accretion of pharmaceuticals in her.” At once, the speaker is naming or witnessing the process of subjugation and disease, and also showing how we participate in those very processes that damage us.
Reines emphasizes over and again through this poem and through the whole collection fecal matter or shit. The cows live in their own shit and then they die in brain and shit; characters shit in the corners of their bedrooms or clean the toilets with harsh disinfectants daily; hair under water is like fish shit; the speaker “doesn’t give a shit” and calls out all the “bullshit” in the world; and anal sex predominates. At first Reines’ scatological focus confused me. In a biological sense, shit is a byproduct of the living organism. The organism eats living matter (such as flowers or vegetables) and the matter is converted into blood and energy and guts. The guts and the blood run the organism. What the organism cannot use is divested from the body via an opening—this is the leftover waste, or what we call shit. It is stinky and can be diseased and must not re-enter the organism’s body. However, when shit is put back into the earth, it can be used as fertilizer to regenerate new life at the plant level, which in turn is eaten by a living organism and turned into energy. In this way, there is a natural, circular process of life that feeds into itself so that the cycle always continues and new life is generated from degeneration.
There is an interesting parallel between the natural process of eating and defecation and the unnatural process of the meat industry. The cows in the stalls are kept alive and fed for their milk and when they are no longer useful, they are sent to slaughter for their meat. What happens to the ‘leftovers’ that are not used? In the poem, “Rendered,” Reines describes the process of rendering large animal carcasses. The description is, in fact, taken from a textbook on carcass disposal. Reines does not dilute or regurgitate the text but places it in front of the reader in capital case, perhaps to exaggerate the effect of a voiced ‘authority’ on the subject. It reads, “RENDERING OFFERS SEVERAL BENEFITS TO FOOD ANIMAL AND POULTRY PRODUCTION OPERATIONS, INCLUDING PROVIDING A SOURCE OF PROTEIN FOR USE IN ANIMAL FEED, AND PROVIDING A HYGIENIC MEANS OF DISPOSING OF FALLEN AND CONDEMNED ANIAMLS. THE END PRODUCTS OF RENDERING HAVE ECOMONIC VALUE AND CAN BE STORED FOR LONG PERIODS OF TIME.” To save money, the meat industry re-uses decayed or corrupt meat (that has been touching the brains and shit) to make the synthetic feed that is then fed to the living cows. Of course a reader will find this repulsive to some degree, but there is a political statement here, too: the shit and decaying meat of the slaughtered cows should go back into the earth as waste, but instead it is being eaten as energy. Then we eat the meat of the meat from the shitty decayed cow. It is an artificial cycle and is representative of our cultural disconnect from the earth and the natural life of the body.
Reines is not simply using shit to make a critical argument against the meat industry or economic markets or the commodification of desire, however. In several of the collections’ poems Reines seems to celebrate shit inasmuch as it is related to the anus. As mentioned during our discussion of the Carnivalesque, in grotesque realism there is a focus on the lower strata of the body including the anus. The lower body represents the life-death-life cycle: eating and shitting and fucking and birthing babies. Though it is ‘ugly’ or ‘gross,’ the anus is not only in close proximity to the genitals but is also rigged with nerves for pleasure. In addition providing and intensifying sexual pleasure, the anus as an aperture provides a sort of opening in the body to the outer world. The body is connected to the earth through the anus and shit. In “Blowhole” Reines enjoys the anus and sex in both its violent and gross aspects. This poem very much exemplifies the Carnivalesque as it is hyperbolic, grotesque, and focused exclusively on the material body. The poem contains an ovum, asshole, middle finger, cock, sinus, hand, eye, face, brain, skull, mouth, legs and rear (buttocks). The verbs are predominantly violent, including gasp, burst, and murder, and grind and shoot are repeated twice. Holes and liquids recur in the disjointed narrative. Here we have the open, living body with its apertures and emissions of gases and liquids. It is a body made of bone and flesh—sacks of blood that produce semen, mucous, tears, menstrual tissue, and piss. The mouth breathes air in and out, the anus expels air and shit, and all the holes in the body are open to receive protrusions (fingers, cock) and act as containers for various liquids but also produce liquids themselves. In Reines’ Gurlesque work, sex is not lifting up the white petticoats nor is it tender and romantic with rose petals swirling about. Instead, sex emerges from a material bodily principle that is naturally grotesque in nature.
In “Blowhole,” Reines also plays with expectations of gender performance. In the heterosexual ideal, the woman is a passive object that is acted upon, in a manner either violent (gets fucked/pounded/screwed) or tender (gets made love to). Usually this involves vaginal penetration with a penis, though in Reines’ poem the focus is exclusively on the anus and face holes (including the eye). The speaker writes, “first he spit on my asshole and then start in middle finger and then the cock slid in no sound come out, only gaping, grind hard into ground.” The choppy grammatical structure combined with the violent imagery (gaping, grind, hard) may at first surprise and even seem overtly aggressive or harsh, but in the following sentence the speaker describes this feeling as a “voluminous bounty of minutes sensate and glowing.” The female speaker in the poem takes her sexual pleasure how she wants it, if even it does not conform to our typical ideas of what a woman wants in bed. The experience is presented as is, without any frills or romanticized ideals. Interestingly, while so much of the Gurlesque is about costume and performance, “Blowhole” is more of an unmasking of gender expectations to reveal real sexual desire.
Reines chooses to emphasize gender performance in the poem through her use of title case for the pronouns HE and SHE. Unlike Minnis’s poems where the speaker is beaten and shucked from her dress in hyperbolic acts, the speaker in this poem is both a participant and an observer—a SHE and an I. After the speaker is sensate and glowing with sexual pleasure, she ceases to be a singular “I” but a SHE, harkening to the Carnivalesque idea that the body is not a separate, closed entity, but representative of all people. It is “all signification” and there is “room for all” in it. Gender roles are made fluid, as are the seemingly conflicting desires of the characters. The SHE both “refuses operation” and “want[s] him to have murdered her.” The HE both “grind[s] his stuff with his hand” and breaks “her eye she face brain.” SHE is rooted in her sensual bodily experience: her ‘broken’ face/brain register a “day exist so I can not think.” The mind with its logical thought is set aside in favor of experiencing the body directly.
Lara Glenum’s Maximum Gaga takes gender performance and literally places it within a theater. The collection itself is a play in several acts with a cast of characters set in “The Kingdom of Catatonia.” Catatonia represents an America where biological reproduction occurs through machines, and many of the characters themselves are machines for creating hysteria, paranoia, and schizophrenic mind states. A secret order, “The Visual Mercenaries,” run Catatonia behind the scenes, and these mercenaries are essentially advertising agents marketing desire. The drama is filled with grotesque imagery and Glenum uses language play to draw our attention to both the production of desire and how language itself informs experience.
In Catatonia, the ‘normal’ person does not exist in a natural state but is a type of pathology. He is the “Normopath” exhibiting “Normalcore.” The Normopath is a “normal monster,” “slipping eye-stalks into pre-formed grooves…& calls them fleshlord.” The “pre-formed grooves” can be cultural expectations or a kind of plastic mold into which mas produced objects are poured; and and the eye-stalks suggest the visual element of cultural consumption through advertising and marketing. These societal-created images are the “fleshlord” and rule the Normopath. The Normopath likes his “animals caged” and eats “mammal harm.” Like Reines, Glenum uses the meat industry to represent industrial commercialism at large. Rendered animal byproduct show up in the Normopath’s breakfast jelly, and the “legs/ & hooves & veiny nodes & twitching placenta paste” go onto his toast. He revels in his mammal harm, singing “The herd thanks you/ for your compliance!” Interestingly, the Normopath here includes himself in the herd, underscoring that both animal and human are part of the industrial machine. Though the animal lacks the ability to free itself from its stall and eventual slaughter, the word “compliance” suggests that for the human they are blindly participating in their own subjugation. It is no accident that the eye (sight/observation/understanding/belief) recurs throughout the collection, and in fact the eye becomes the main aperture through which commercialism enters.
In the national anthem, “O Catatonia,” the King, Minus, is a “national eye-con.” Glenum plays with the word “icon” to several effects: the “I” becomes an “eye,” not a self but an organ made to take in and process light. The eye allows vision/seeing, but in Catatonia, the eye is conned or swindled. We think of an icon as a person we look up to or a symbol of something with significance. Yet an icon is also an image or representation signifying something else (such as in a religious icon). An icon is not the real but a thing standing in for the real. The King and Queen of Catatonia do not have real bodies but have to zip themselves into a “carnage suit” or a suit of “pigflesh” to become real. The King “got screwed/ in the eye-socket/ by the Visual Mercenaries” and this “aborted” his vision. He was then “impregnated with…coochie sight/ & all manner of conceptual abstractions.” His “coochie gaze” is “blind” and he cannot see his daughters hanging from the ceiling “in pink meringue….like oscillating mobiles.” This is a ‘cutesy’ way of representing females strung up by their hind legs. The blind King in his carnage suit thus allows the palace to become a “museum” of commodified objects rather than a home to his human family.
In the Kingdom of Catatonia, human females do not birth babies from their stomachs but climb into “miraculating machines” to produce thousands of fetuses at a time. In the cast of characters, The Miraculating Machine is listed as a person and is given a secondary description as “A Desiring-machine (a simulacrum).” The Miraculating Machine doubles as the carnage suit and “must be converted/ into a docile cow” in order to work. It has “four fake stomachs ajar” and it “cranks out a tenderloin” (a baby) inside a larger building called the “Traumadome.” The offspring of the machine are an “ultra-mechanical maze of muscles” with nerves and guts and not much else. The royal sons of Catatonia call the miraculators “bride machines” because they are “cows inside cows.” Again, Glenum is drawing a parallel between commercial industry, women’s bodies, and sexuality. In fact, one part of the play declares, “HEAVY INDUSTRY IS LOCATED IN THE LACTATING BODY.” The lactating body of the cow is not distinguished from the lactating body of woman, as Glenum literally places woman inside the body of a cow in order to reproduce. Human reproduction is not an act of love as romanticized in heterosexual ideals of marriage and making a home with a family. Instead, it is mechanized production that serves the commercial interests of the kingdom. The machine stimulates desire through artificial means, like a slab of meat quivering merely because it is hooked up to electrical wires.
Glenum provides an answer of sorts to the state/State of Catatonia. Midway through the play she says, “To commit artifice is a crime/punishable by dread// To commit orifice is a crime/ punishable by mirth.” The artifice and mechanization of the kingdom blinded by the Visual Mercenaries creates states of pathology and schizophrenia; whereas ‘real’ sex in all its material grossness creates mirth or playful laughter. In the poem, “Feminine Hygiene,” the speaker says that “when I contracted the ‘female disease’/ the Normopath said I would be manicured/ in no time.” Manicure holds a double meaning here as it both suggests the beauty treatment but also to cut away. The feminine is a disease, a dirty thing, and must be cut, shaped, and cleaned to be acceptable. However, the speaker in this poem refuses such flensing and instead basks in the various liquids and body parts commingling in sex. With “semen caked under my fingernails” and “all that jiz crusting to sugar in my ass crevice,” the speaker is no “acetylene virgincake/ waxing mannequin.” She will wear “no facemask made out of pantyliners” and nothing will “cure” her of her “monstrous frame” or “unsightly cocklust.” She will not be a mannequin, which is a plastic representation of an ‘ideal’ human body made by a machine to sell clothes. She will be a real body in all its grotesque aspects and will experience her own bodily desire outside the Traumadome.
The three collections we’ve explored all offer a different take on the Gurlseque aesthetic. While on first read the aesthetic may seem stupidly exaggerated, when plumbed these poems offer a complex perspective on both our modern commercialized culture and the representation of women’s bodies within that culture. It is interesting to note that when I was first researching the Gurlesque aesthetic, I came across a considerable flurry of backlash in blog forums. In the months prior to publishing the Gurlesque anthology, Glenum and Greenberg used their web presence to begin a conversation on the Gurlesque. At the blog Lemonhound, a 2009 post titled “Are we buying the gurlesque?” created a long discussion by readers in which most dismissed the aesthetic as basically dumb. One commenter summed it up by saying, “I too am not buying and also in equal parts bored and offended.”(17) Many of the commenters went on to joke about the aesthetic between them, mostly men. Yet after reading about the Carnivalesque and the burlesque in particular and applying those theories to the poems themselves, I believe the backlash is less critical than it is a knee-jerk reaction to make fun of anything that seems overtly girly. The Gurlesque is a valuable form of feminist poetics that places socio-political commentary at the site of the body. Because it is grotesque, reading the poems becomes a visceral experience for the reader rather than an intellectual exercise. To me, this is just another smart tactic the Gurlesque poets use to make readers aware, as it is difficult to ignore a bodily response (as opposed to a mental exercise or abstract theory). For the reader of the Gurlesque poem, they will ache as the speaker aches, which is to say: they will feel the real.
NOTES
1. “Gurlesque, Part I.” Blog post Delirious Hem 4 May 2008.
2. Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg, eds. Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics. Ardmore, PA: Saturnalia Books, 2010, pp4.
3. “Gurlesque, Part I.”
4. pp. 4
5. Mikhail Bahtkin. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, pp. 10
6. Bahktin pp. 5
7. Bahktin pp .18
8. Bahktin pp. 19
9. Ibid.
10. Glenum and Greenberg, pp.11.
11. Glenum and Greenberg, pp.13.
12. Glenum and Greenberg, pp. 15.
13. Ibid.
14. Glenum and Greenberg, pp6.
15. Glenum and Greenberg, pp. 5.
16. “Gurlesque, Part I.”
17. http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2009/03/are-we-buying-gurlesque.html
Tara McDaniel is currently a student of poetry at the Bennington 
Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in The Cimarron Review, CrabOrchard Review, Marginalia: The Journal of Innovative Literature, and elsewhere. She resides in the arts district of Minneapolis.
