The V-Girls: Feminism and the Authentic Subject | View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture (2024)

A 1989 video still (fig. 1) captures the V-Girls’ performance of “Manet’s Olympia: Posed and Skirted.” Marianne Weems delivers her satirical paper “Manet’s Best Friend: The Paw Print Unseen,” which addressed asubject thathad purportedly “hounded the psychoanalytic institution”: “the gaze of the dog.”¹ The verticality of the image is severe. Weems, seated at the center of along table, leans intoamicrophone. Araking light brightens her face, collared shirt, and nametag. Likethe other women seated at the table, she sports what the critic C. Carr called the V-Girls’ “prim-suited-fresh-from-the-Sorbonne” look.² The tablecloth—otherwise gray, crinkled and prosaic—pours forth beforeher, briefly transformed intoabeacon of white. If the wannabe regal fount of cloth suggests Weems’ importance, so too does her separation fromthe other group members, who are shrouded in darkness. Because the image’s oblique angle reinforces psychological distance by frustrating any attempt to see Weems face-on, the viewer is as separate fromthe speaker as her fellow performers. Furthermore, the diagonal of the table and the tenebristic lighting imbue the scene withdrama, aquality reinforced by not only the dynamic angle of the oversized screen looming aboveWeems’ head, butalso the farcical content of the image projected there: astudio shot of ablack-and-white pup.

The V-Girls, afeminist performance troupe composed of Marianne Weems, Martha Baer, Jessica Chalmers, Erin Cramer, and Andrea Fraser, produced three performances: “Academia in the Alps: In Search of Swiss Mis(s)” (1988–92), “Manet’s Olympia” (1989–92), and “Daughters of the ReVolution” (1993–96). Their works satirize academic egotism and critical theory, withspecial attention to deconstructionist, psychoanalytic, post-structuralist, and feminist thought. “Academia in the Alps” plays on Johanna Spyri’s children’s book Heidi as a“pretext fortalking aboutissues relating to women in academe.”³ Also aspoof academic panel, “Manet’s Olympia” continues the focus on women in the academe butalso homes in on art history. The V-Girls presented “Manet’s Olympia” more frequently thantheir other works, performing it some fourteen times at various art-world and academic institutions in the U.S. and U.K., including the College Art Association in San Francisco (1989) and London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (1990).The group’s last performance, “The V-Girls: Daughters of the ReVolution” (1993-96), is ascripted consciousness-raising session thatexamines generational conflicts betweenthe second and third-waves of feminism while also critiquing post-structuralist theory forits tendency to bolster individual alienation rather thanencourage group collaboration.

Martha Baer joked thatthe V-Girls preferred to “sit longways” duringtheir panels, allowing the audience member to “trace the sweeping, authoritative gesture of [a V-Girl’s] hand withtheir eyes....”⁴ The 1989 video still capturing Weems is suggestive of the group’s concern with, and critique of, the notion of the autonomous subject. Indeed, the V-Girls used humor to both reveal and interrogate each group member’s status as adiscrete subject throughout the performance of “Manet’s Olympia.” If, however, “Manet’s Olympia” presents the idea of the autonomous individual as atool aimed at attaining mastery overthe group, “Daughters” presents the same idea withmuch more ambivalence. In “Daughters,” the autonomous individual continues to be represented as amythical, unattainable ideal loaded withpolitical baggage, yet the work also stages the individual as atool forworking together in order to commit to one’s convictions and fully participate in collective political action.

I pay particular attention to the second-wave critique of the post-structuralist master-individual in order to argue forthe followingposition: the notion thatone’s beliefs are not one’s own is altogether disempowering. Building on the V-Girls’ commentary in “Daughters,” Isuggest thatthe relationship betweensecond-wave feminism—which insisted thatintrospection and mass political action must proceed hand-in-hand—and the humanist ideal of the autonomous self is not as neatly antagonistic as is often assumed. Thus my claim runs counter to afamiliar account of feminism’s relation to the autonomous subject presented in texts such as Jo Anna Isaak’s The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter, a 1996 study thatis particularly topical to the V-Girls’ synthesis of feminist commentary and satire. Women’s laughter contributes to “dismantling ‘the prison house of language’ throughplay,”⁵ Isaak suggests, pointing to anumber of women artists whose cultural production exhibits an “understanding of how all signifying systems operate.” FollowingRoland Barthes’ well-known assertion thatcultural artifacts have “no other origin thanlanguage itself,”⁶ Isaak celebrates the death of the author as autonomous individual and “most of the old verities associated withthe confident bourgeois belief in individualism and absolute property rights.” Because women “never held thisprivileged position,” she suggests, the death of the author was an occasion forcelebration rather thannostalgic mourning.⁷ Yet the last performance by the V-Girls utilizes humor and play to suggest thatthe passing of just thisindividual may not strictly indicate the passing of the “bourgeois belief in individualism”—it may also indicate the passing of authentic self-identification, conviction, and group-action.⁸

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An audio-recording of a1992 performance of “Manet’s Olympia,” performed at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, begins withBaer apologizing: “I’m sorry… I’m so sorry... Beforewe begin thisevening, I’m going to introduce our panelists individually.”⁹ Baer insists on each V-Girl’s status as an individual and acompetitor fromthe start of the performance. She reinforces thisstatus aminute later, introducing Weems as “our next contender—I’m sorry, panelist.” Just as her introduction of Weems emphasizes one-upmanship, her introduction of Fraser is also imbued withacompetitive sentiment. What matters aboutFraser’s papers and lectures is not their content, buttheir quantity: “Andrea has sat on many panels, lectured at museums and universities and written numerous articles.” Thiscomment was adapted fromthe Vs’ first performance, “Swiss Mis(s),” which began withan introduction of Fraser as “a critic and performer” who “has spoken on many panels, lectured at various universities, written numerous articles, served on juries, and preached to the common man.”¹⁰

A more substantive exploration of the individual-as-power-hungry ego comes when the V-Girls interrogate the structure of asexist joke in “Manet’s Olympia.” Erin Cramer presents the joke, claiming thatit has “been going aroundthe department.” It centers on aprolific professor who has been asked to sit on apanel. “So, he gets there,” Cramer explains,

sits down, and when it’s time forhim to deliver his paper, he stands up and pulls out his dick. Well, it’s not very big. In fact, it’s very, very small, and as soon as he takes it out, everyone starts laughing. So he says… Oh, wait asecond. Ican’t tell thisjoke. Some of the men in your audience might get offended, you know, the real serious ones who don’t have asense of humor. Thisis agreat joke, though. If any of you gals want to hear it, drop me aline. Ipromise you, you’ll piss yourself laughing. Oh, and if any of you guys out there think you can take it, feel free to write, too. LikeIsaid, if you can take it, it’s agreat joke. Trust me.¹¹

Here, atired joke (about penis size) is complicated by asecond joke thatis evoked butnot told. Cramer’s jab at the “real serious men” who “might get offended” refers to feminists routinely attacked fornot being able to brush offsexism. Audience members are left in aquandary, forif they laugh, they must laugh all at once at two jokes in which Weems’ status is quite different. In one joke, the professor and “men-in-general” are the butt, while the joke’s teller (identified as afeminist and awoman) and its object (emasculated men) are quite separate. In the evoked joke, however, the un-pliable, unpleasant feminist who just won’t relax is the object—and so is Weems, because she is the butt of what the V-Girls would later describe as “an old joke thatis most generally told at the expense of women.”¹² The distinction betweenthe joke’s teller and object is elided, and the audience must laugh both withand at Weems.

Henri Bergson relays anarrative thatcaptures the us-and-them social dynamic thatcan accompany humor: “A man who was once asked why he did not weep at asermon when everybody else was shedding tears replied: ‘I do not belong to the parish!’ What thatman thought of tears would be still more true of laughter.”¹³ Here, Bergson makes explicit the experience of bonding and exclusion common to many jokes, butthis experience is complicated by Cramer. The audience members of “Manet’s Olympia” are neither members of the parish nor outsiders—they are confused. Weems’ status is also confused, forshe is both subject (the joke’s teller) and object (the butt of the joke). Indeed, the emphasis forCramer is less on the mechanisms of bonding and exclusion, and more on the dissolution of discrete categories themselves—on social groups such as parishioners and non-parishioners, or men and women, audience members and butts of jokes, objects and subjects. Weems’ joke, which deconstructs the category of the self and the group by dismantling and scrambling the constituent parts of each, adds up to an equivocal position thatmakes her both “us” and “them.” By complicating the distinction betweensubject/object, oppressor/oppressed, and male/female, she becomes an impersonal abstraction.

This is not to say thatthe joke is terribly successful. It is coarse and lacks the mostly gentle and non-threatening pedestrianism thatthe V-Girls frequently used to deflate the academic ego (as in the story of how the “gaze of the dog has hounded the psychoanalytic institution”). Still, the joke is of interest because it distills the V-Girls’ worry thatpost-structuralist theory and academic egotism were avolatile mix thatthreatened the egalitarian spirit of feminism. The group took up the issue explicitly in afictionalized interview withthe editors of the journal October, published in 1989. Speaking forthe editors, the V-Girls asked themselves ahard question: “Isn’t there adanger of leveling, or of simply making everything the butt of ajoke?—and an old joke thatis most generally told at the expense of women?” Was there not aworry thatby parodying “theoretical insights coming fromfeminism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, etc., thathave been very useful to women,” the V-Girls’ performances were in fact disempowering to women as awhole?¹⁴

While it is true thatthe joke risks the “danger of leveling” the categorical identifications it presents, Iwould contend thatit is not so much the joke itself as it is the technique of deconstruction thatends up being laid bare forcritique. Insofar as Cramer scrambles categories to tell ajoke in which there is no such thing as aright or wrong response—laughing somehow counts as both trans-valuating an old sexist joke and condoning an old sexist joke—she actually ensures her own position of mastery. Thus it is not thatby “parodying deconstruction” they have leveled atool thathas been “very useful to women.” Rather, the joke inadvertently reveals thatdeconstruction can operate as an effective tool forleveling everything but your own analytic capacities—where analysis here simply refers to breaking downcategories so as to reveal their incoherence.

Later in the performance of “Manet’s Olympia,” the V-Girls focus on the critique of the self as adiscrete category when they administer a“Visual Literacy Test.” The test, which was later reproduced in “The V-Girls: AConversation withOctober,” asks thataudience members make their own drawing of Olympia and answer bogus multiple-choice questions. “Another Manet painting is called … a) Guernica, b) Madame Bovary, or c) Sympathy forthe Devil,” reads one.¹⁵ Designed to humiliate audience members, it parodies the taste-making function of art-world elites and institutions: “here at the museum we are proud… thatour test has several times helped and is still helping the police to detect the criminally uncultivated, purveyors of aesthetic scandal, and nerds,” Chalmers explains.¹⁶ Just afterthe test has been passed out, Martha Baer launches intoaparanoid outburst thatevokes the death of authorship and the associated notion thatlanguage itself, and not adiscrete individual, produces texts. Addressing the audience, she complains:

Hold on, hold on just one minute here. Iwant to get something straight. Are you laughing at me, or are you laughing at what I’m saying? Imean, maybe we ought to stop here and consider the issue of slippage in the production of laughter. Iam not the butt of my jokes. Or maybe you haven’t read Kristeva on Bakhtin. Look, thisis aboutlanguage. Thisis not aboutme, and Iam not me, and if you don’t understand that, Isuggest you should listen more closely.¹⁷

Eve Meltzer’s study of the structuralist turn—a turn she argues was radicalized by conceptual artists in the 1960s and is, in many ways, continuous withpost-structuralism itself—provides adiagnostic tool forthinking throughthe connections betweenthe post-structuralist thought here loosely signified by Baer’s reference to “Kristeva on Bakhtin,” by the broad academic fixation withlanguage, and by the death of the subject thatBaer describes: “This is not aboutme, and Iam not me, and if you don’t understand…”. ForMeltzer, both the original structuralist thinkers, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Jacques Lacan, as well as figures thatserved as the V-Girls’ more immediate intellectual influences, such as Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault,

…looked to systems and language forarevolution in signifying structures. Maintaining thathuman endeavors were inescapably governed by the structural order of the grid, structuralists argued thatall social and cultural phenomena could be mastered througha“science” of the signifier. And it was by way of thisclaim thatstructuralism marked, once and forall, the end of the humanist understanding of the subject as in command of not only himself and aconsciousness fully transparent to itself, butalso the historical process. Perhaps more importantly, structuralism produced and made urgent the problem of the belatedness of subjectivity: the notion thatthe human subject is amere effect of preexisting systems.¹⁸

That the very death of the subject relies on both an understanding of the self as an effect of discourse (“this is aboutlanguage. Thisis not aboutme”), and thatit similarly relies on arelatively standardized way of thinking thataims at mastery and “science” is confirmed by Baer’s outburst. The outburst is, of course, catalyzed by the threat thather authority as apanelist “on the other side of along table” might be undercut. Thatthreat is addressed by beseeching the audience to become as expert as she is: you need to “read Kristeva on Bakhtin” and “listen more closely.”

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The V-Girls’ last performance, “The V-Girls: Daughters of the ReVolution” (1993-96), shows symptoms of the “critical malaise” thathas followed fromthe structuralist approach. By staging aconsciousness-raising session thathighlights the distinctions betweensecond-wave feminism and the more theoretically driven approach taken up by the third-wave, the performers attempt—and not withoutdisplaying agood bit of ambivalence—to harness consciousness-raising’s spirit of female solidarity in order to turn away fromdeconstruction’s inadvertent production of mastery and towardcollectivity. They return to the controversial topic of essentialism, wondering if “women’s experience” is acoherent concept thateach V-Girl can be said to share. Thus the performance is structured by each V-Girls’ attempt to respond to aquestion posed by Chalmers: “Why don’t we talk aboutour pastexperiences withgroups of women…?”¹⁹ The prompt often falls flat, withthe performers proving themselves to be resistant to the prospect of self-revelation and group identification. Indeed, much of the humor of “Daughters” derives fromthe women’s repeated refusal to make their group experiences congeal. Fittingly, the performance is structured by the rhythm of ironic disruption: when Fraser encourages the women to pursue consciousness of their authentic selves throughgroup conversation, forexample, Baer quips, “Can Ijust add thatIfeel so conscious already it’s making me alittle nauseous?”²⁰

While the difference between“Daughters” and the previous performances can easily be demonstrated by comparing close readings of the works, contextual evidence also corroborates my suggestion that“Daughters” stands apart fromthe V-Girls’ other works by virtue of its critique of post-structuralism’s distancing effects. In an essay titled “V-Notes on Laughter,” Jessica Chalmers indicates thatthe group created the performance withthis problem in mind. “The notion of parody seemed used up and the Vs were in the throes of what we viewed as agroup creative impasse,” Chalmers writes, adding:

Privately we discussed our discomfort withthe fact thatlaughter was provoked in the audience at someone else’s expense—generally someone who, in all sincerity, aspired to say or do something. We considered the idea thatour parodic distance fromthat sincerity meant thatwe aspired to nothing butdistance. We also saw thatwe had aspired throughparody to be special, butthat, in spite of our up-to-date commitment to inauthenticity and performance, what we had wanted all alongwas actually abetter authenticity…. What we wanted, we found, was afterall really not thatdifferent fromwhat the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s had wanted—we wanted not to be taken forjust any woman.²¹

With “Daughters,” the V-Girls left behindtheir gleeful exposure of the individual as an ideological farce, collaborating on aperformance thatdocumented their earnest struggle overparody’s capacity to disable those who “aspire to do or say something.” Now, the individual was no longer the object of their critique. Rather, the object of critique was the critique itself, withthe V-Girls hinting thatthe very notion thatthe individual might be boiled downto nothing more thanan illusion is disabling. Now, self-realization seemed necessary forpolitical action and assertion. The V-Girls’ last work mined the second-wave forapath to something beyondeither naïve individualism or the annihilation of the subject. Rather, they reached forthat “better authenticity” which results fromembodying one’s specific personality rather thanbeing “taken forjust any woman.” Thisidealistic ambition—to be a“real” individual and not afalse one—naturally failed. Certainly no such “pure” real exists. The V-Girls’ struggle, however, was no less real forall that.

Plenty of moments within“Daughters” demonstrate the Vs emphasis on struggle forboth group-collaboration and authenticity. Often, their renewed interest in becoming authentic to themselves is coupled withtheir interrogation of “cultural feminism,” which is coexistent withthe emergence of the third-wave and locates oppression at the level of representation rather thanconcrete political phenomena. Insofar as the V-Girls had begun to suspect thattoo much emphasis on “representation” resulted in their unhealthy distance fromthe messy work of becoming “real” political actors, cultural feminism was afitting target fortheir questioning.

The V-Girls’ worries concerningcultural feminism come up, forexample, duringan exchange betweenErin Cramer and Chalmers. Cramer is suspicious thatthe V-Girls may be toying withanostalgic fantasy when it comes to finding inner “authenticity”:

Erin: What are we doing here? Are we acting out some kinky fantasy of wholeness? Do we really believe thatconsciousness-raising will restore us to some authentic self? All right, beforewe go any further, Iwant to ask you guys something: Does anybody here actually believe in the self? …

Jessica: But consciousness-raising isn’t …a “kinky fantasy of wholeness,” as you so, er, nicely put it. No. It’s more likethis: Icome to the group, they are welcoming; I’m crying, they understand; Itell my story, they listen. Consciousness-raising is aboutletting go of oppressive identifications. It’s aboutputting the self intoanarrative of transformation. Liberation isn’t kinky, Erin. It’s textual.²²

The dialogue underscores the fragility and ambivalence withwhich the V-Girls approached the critique of the individual as illusion. Here, Freud’s classic analysis of the fetish can help explicate why Cramer is critical of consciousness-raising as a“kinky fantasy of wholeness.” In Freud’s account, “a part of the body butlittle adapted forsexual purposes, such as the foot, or hair” is made to stand in forthe desired object, no doubt explaining why a“fantasy of wholeness” might be derided as “kinky.” “This substitution is not unjustly compared withthe fetich [sic] in which the savage sees the embodiment of his god,” Freud remarks,²³ associating fetishism withthe false belief thatthe V-Girls established as endemic to the notion of the individual in their early performances. “Does anybody here actually believe in the self?” Cramer asks, pointing to the very superstition of Freud’s so-called “savage” and throwing the Vs back intothe comfort of their earlier role as bubble-busters acting in the service of “critique.” Yet when Chalmers returns consciousness-raising to the “textual,” she does not intend to reveal its structure of false-belief butrather to move away fromthe counter-productive effects of constant critique. “Text” here connotes not the status of the subject as an effect of false belief in ideology (the ideology of the self as discrete and masterful, forexample), butrather arelease fromprecisely those “false identifications.” The older sense of text as a“narrative of transformation,” as aplot withahappy ending, is evoked, and Chalmers suggests thatsuch progress is the product of cooperative social experience (“I come to the group, they are welcoming,” etc.).

This exchange, withCramer catching the Vs indulging their kinky fantasy of authentic self-hood and Chalmers defending such authenticity as the effect of committed social experience, is catalyzed by adescription of aCR inspired conception of the autonomous. Quoting the Radicalesbians’ 1970 manifesto, “The Woman Identified Woman,” Fraser reads the following:

It is the primacy of women relating to women, of women creating anew consciousness of and witheach other which is at the heart of women’s liberation, and the basis forthe cultural revolution. Together we must find, reinforce, and validate our authentic selves. As we do this…we find receding the sense of alienation, of being cut off, of being behindalocked window, of being unable to get out what we know is inside. We feel areal-ness, feel at last we are coinciding withourselves. Withthat real self, withthat consciousness, we begin arevolution to end the imposition of all coercive identifications, and to achieve maximum autonomy in human expression.²⁴

The V-Girls, Iwant to suggest, attempted to “achieve maximum autonomy” by way of precisely thatexperience of “real-ness” and concomitant feeling of being “with each other” thatCR was said (by the Radicalesbians, at least) to proffer. The idea for“Daughters” was provoked by ateary CR session the V-Girls held to resolve the “sense of alienation” growing betweengroup members. As Chalmers later explained, the original session “had ended weepily, withseveral of us interpreting our personal relation to the group in terms of our intimidation by post-structuralist theory. However, transcribed and reedited, the session became infused withthe irony of performance…we altered the content, so that, in addition to sincerity…there was irony.”²⁵ As Ihave suggested, the V-Girls approached the critique of the individual as illusion withfragility and ambivalence. Thatthe V-Girls never resolved their ambivalence and sense of intimidation provoked by post-structuralist theory is documented in the moments of irony later edited intothe transcript. While “Daughters” does good work in clarifying the problems associated withpost-structuralist thought, it by no means presents clear solutions.

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The V-Girls’ re-evaluation of feminism’s second-wave in the wake of post-structuralism was hardly particular to them. Indeed, alook at the special 1995 issue of October in which the script for“Daughters” was printed provides asense of the larger debate thatsurrounded them. Titled Feminist Issue(S), the journal begins withaquestionnaire written by the October editors. In question one, the editors posit thatsome “artists and writers continue to develop ideas, arguments and forms related to 1980s feminist theories focusing on psychoanalysis, acritique of Marxist and related political theories, and poststructuralist theories of cultural identity, [while] others have forged areturn to 1960s and 70s feminist practices…”. The question barely hides its bias, noting that1960s and 70s performative practices “did generate theoretical critiques of its… biological or physical essentialism.”²⁶ Thisbias did not go overwell withmany of the twenty-five authors asked to evaluate the return to the more body-focused practices of the 1960s and 1970s. Yvonne Rainer, forexample, complains bitterly overthe “tired old dichotomies” thatthe question pits, citing the essentialist and the mediated. She concludes her piece withunapologetic sass, referring to herself in the third person: “She won’t apologize forbeing so cranky. Afterall, she’s closing in on age sixty and is minusatit.” ²⁷

Rainer’s biting reference to her abject body does not stand alone in the issue. In her visual and written response, Carolee Schneemann plays on the Lacanian diagram, transforming the image-screen intoavulva. The diagram, titled “How the Circle of Confusion is Caused,” is accompanied by atext, organized in list-form, thatnarrates vulva’s “education.” “Vulva goes to school and discovers she doesn’t exist,” reads the first line. At times, the list registers Schneemann’s dissatisfaction withparticular lines of thought. The line “Vulva decodes Feminist Constructivist Semiotics and realizes she has no authentic feelings at all; even her erotic sensations are constructed by patriarchal projections, impositions, and conditioning,”²⁸ forexample, suggests (like the Lacanian diagram) thatwhat is valuable aboutembodiment—in thiscase, one’s “feelings” and “erotic sensations”—is simply not captured when there is too much emphasis on the science of the sign. Expressing the very malaise thatMeltzer aptly diagnoses, Schneemann questions experiencing subjectivity as an effect, such that“authentic feelings” and “erotic sensations” are constructions. On top of this, Schneemann’s response also includes images thateither suggest or depict the vulva thatare blocked offand arranged intoa(structuralist?) grid. The rigorous and rational organization of the images, however, does not so much suffocate our capacity to see the vulvas. Instead, it acts an invisible vehicle thatencourages the viewer to take notice of the similarities and differences of each body part. Schneemann’s version of “structure” is thus amere mechanism forafuller experience of all that’s delightful and even strange aboutthe variety of vulvas thatthe world has to offer.

What is most curious aboutthe V-Girls’ struggle to move beyondthe impasse they first presented in “Manet’s Olympia” and tried to resolve in “Daughters” is the extent to which the goals of the Radicalesbians mimic the goals thatEve Meltzer refers to as “humanist.” They appeal, forexample, to achieving “maximum autonomy,” synonymous with“the subject as in command of himself” (but withthe important difference thatsuch capacities are being expanded to women). They also call forfreedom from“coercive identifications,” suggesting the free and creative individual thatMeltzer treats as synonymous withthe humanist picture of the artist and antonym to the subject as “an effect of pre-existing systems.” Indeed, Chalmers brings the similarity of these two claims to light when she explains thatthe V-Girls wanted what the feminists of the 1960s and 70s had wanted—not to better understand themselves as identities or social constructions butto move beyondsuch constructedness and not be “taken forjust any woman.” Furthermore, while the humanist subject is “a consciousness fully transparent to itself,” the Radicalesbians’ intention is to attain such consciousness forthemselves despitetheir status as women. They demand self-transparency rather than“being behindalocked window, of being unable to get out what we know is inside.” Seen in thislight, the October editors’ worry, expressed in the Feminist Issue(S) questionnaire, that second-wave feminist politics “employ[s] autobiographical strategies and conceptions of identity…that have been criticized forbeing insufficiently mediated”²⁹ can also double as acritique of the humanist subject that, to borrow Metlzer’s phrase again, is “in command” of a“consciousness fully transparent to itself.”

A skeptic might counter thatacentral subject of the second-wave is the “identity” thatwe call “woman.” What starker sign of the always-already interpellated could be asked for? Yet the V-Girls nonetheless suggest thatthe second-wave aimed forrecovery of a“real” self thatis autonomous and exists on the other side of a“locked window” (to quote the Radicalesbians’ passage above). The reference to the window is harmonious withthe humanist subject thatMeltzer claims strives fora“consciousness fully transparent to itself,” suggesting thatthe second-wave and humanist picture of the subject valued the struggle to move beyondmediation intoauthentic self-hood.

The consequences of the claim thatthe V-Girls understood the second-wave as entailing arevival of the humanist model of the individual are naturally limited. Afterall, Iam presenting areading of the V-Girls’ works, not ahistorical analysis of feminism’s second-wave. Just because one group of performers presented one performance thatsuggests (at least according to thisauthor) thatthe second-wave’s notion of the individual is humanist, does not mean thatthe second-wave’s notion of the individual was humanist. Thatidea would require extensive historical research to affirm.³⁰ Instead, the V-Girls use the provocative and loosely organized form of performative dialogue to advance apicture of the second-wave thatneed not rely on research or the strict conventions of academic argument. Thus we might say thatthey advance apicture of something likea“humanist feminist individual” thatawaits further study if it is to be treated as ahistorical argument. Thatfurther study is called forbecause it would significantly revise our current picture of feminism as areaction to (rather thanabuilding up of) humanist principles.

What would the consequences of such arevision mean forour understanding of the second-wave? It would require altering the received wisdom thatsecond-wave feminism is synonymous withthe standard critique of the humanist, Enlightenment ideal which holds that“the more separate the self is fromothers, the more fully-developed thatself is.” Further, it would not require the total replacement of thatideal forthe notion that“the more connected the self is to others, the better the self is.”³¹ Instead, the brief passage fromthe Radicalesbians shows amore dialectical picture, wherein the separate self thatachieves “maximum autonomy in human expression” is necessarily complimented by apicture of the self as communal woman, of “women relating to women.” The idea, put in the simplest terms, seems to be thatthe two come together, and thatyou cannot have one withoutthe other. What the V-Girls identify and struggle to resuscitate in “Daughters of the ReVolution” is the repressed, humanist underbelly of second-wave feminism—and withit the view thatthe authentic self is not amyth butrather apre-requisite forconviction and political action.

The risks of areturn to humanist-inspired thought, of course, are many. Contemporary readers may find the optimism of the Radicalesbians’ manifesto naïve. Furthermore, the figure of the communal woman comes alongwith essentialism’s historical baggage. Feminist art historians know well thatJudy Chicago, forexample, unified thirty-eight of the thirty-nine women honored in her epic installation, The Dinner Party, withthe repeated image of the vulva, butneglected to depict the vulva on the only non-white woman withaplace-setting, Sojourner Truth. Further, the structure of disruption in “Daughters,” wherein the Vs attempt to identify withone another is constantly deferred, suggests thatthe V-Girls were ultimately unable to resolve their misgivings aboutessentialism.

Their discomfort is reinforced by aphotograph of “Daughters” (fig. 2), captured duringaperformance at the Generali Foundation in Vienna in 1996. The group, sitting on matching stools arranged in asemi-circle formation, are connected by their backdrop—an ambiguous expanse of black thatcreates the illusion of ahorizon. Kissing the top of each of the performer’s seat, it links each of the sitters. If the circular seating arrangement and the photograph’s horizontality suggest the group’s spirit of cooperation and the equality of its members, the women’s matching black cardigans, white skin, and brown hair suggest aless palatable social relation. Their sameness suggests not collaboration butgeneric uniformity, and much of the dialogue in “Daughters” explores what happens when group identification becomes coercive and debilitating. It is telling thatthe performance ends withan exchange betweenBaer and Fraser thatcaptures the V-Girls’ resistance not only to social identification, butalso to the broader specter of returning to the sixties and seventies. Baer asks, “And how is it? How is it done?”. Fraser, however, neglects to answer the question, instead rephrasing it as astatement: “You know, figuring out how to be awoman,” she says.³² The unresolved concluding remarks of “Daughters of the ReVolution” and the V-Girls’ career suggests thatthe old topic of essentialism still needs “figuring out.”