On Three More Punk Graces: Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene, and Helen of Troy

The Three Punk Graces II: Poly, Siouxsie & Helen of Troy

(SA/2025) 

 

 

I. 

 

The Greeks famously have had their Charites, but punk mythology has given us our very own version of the Three Graces: Jordan, Soo Catwoman, and Vivienne Westwood [1]. 

 

In fact, I would argue that those who came of age not in ancient Athens, but London in the mid-late 1970s, were doubly blessed. 

 

For I can easily name at least three other astonishing women who may not have personified Classical notions of charm, beauty, and elegance, but certainly embodied forms of radical alterity [2]: Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene, and Helen of Troy ...   

 

 

II.

 

Not only was Siouxsie lead singer, lyricist and frontwoman of her own very successful band - Siouxsie and the Banshees - but she was a key member of that ultra-hip and ultra-loyal group of fans who followed the Sex Pistols in the very early days and became known as the Bromley Contingent [3].

 

In fact, having never really been much of a Banshees fan - I liked some of the early songs, but only ever bought one single and one album by them - it's Siouxsie's devotion to the Sex Pistols that really makes me feel a good deal of affection for her. 

 

Because of her later career as a performer who experimented with various styles of music - and her association with what is known as goth [4] - many commentators forget just how close she was to Rotten and company and how brilliantly she embodied the pervy punk aesthetic being promoted by McLaren and Westwood; quickly becoming notorious on the London club scene for her SEX inspired outfits (often wearing a cupless black bra, for example, with matching swastika armband).     

 

In September 1976, Siouxsie performed a short (mostly improvised) set on stage at the 100 Club Punk Special (an event organised by Malcolm McLaren); Marco Pirroni was on guitar, Steve Severin on bass, and Sid Vicious on drums.   

 

And then, in December '76, she and three other members of the Bromley Contingent accompanied the Sex Pistols to Thames TV where they were being interviewed by Bill Grundy for the Today programme .... and, well, everyone knows what happened (Go on - you've got another five seconds, say something outrageous ... etc.) [5]. 

 

Now, whilst Grundy was absolutely the cause of his own downfall, it has to be said that if Siouxsie hadn't pretended that she'd always wanted to meet him, then, well, who knows how things might have turned out. 

 

But she said what she said, and thus unwittingly instigated what became known as the Bill Grundy Incident which, in turn, triggered a full media meltdown and moral panic; the Daily Mirror famously putting a picture of her on the cover of one edition (Friday, December 3, 1976) along with the headline: Siouxsie's a punk shocker.    

 

Funnily enough, after all this tabloid fuss, Siouxsie began to distance herself from the scene and stopped following the Sex Pistols after the gig at Notre Dame Hall (London) at the end of December '76, preferring to focus her energy on her own career as a singer and songwriter, releasing her first single with the Banshees in August 1978 [6]. 

 

 

III. 

 

Punk was never really about the music and, to the extent that it was about the music, it was best suited to the singles format rather than the album. 

 

However, that's not to say there weren't great punk albums and one of these is Germ Free Adolescents (EMI, 1978) by X-Ray Spex; a group fronted by the uniquely talented singer-songwriter Poly Styrene.  

 

Poly was unarguably one of the most distinctive sounding and looking individuals to have come out of the punk movement [7] and is widely recognised (along with members of the Slits) as a seminal influence on the underground feminist movement known as riot grrrl in the 1990s.   

 

Funnily enough, whilst never a member of the Bromley Contingent, Poly was born in the town, but grew up in Brixton; the biracial child of a Scottish mother and a Somali father.    

 

At fifteen, she ran away from home and hit what remained of the hippie trail, hitch-hiking across the country from one music festival to another and trying to scrape a living as an alternative fashion designer and pop-reggae singer. 

 

But then, on her nineteenth birthday (3 July, 1976), she saw the Sex Pistols playing at the Pier Pavilion in Hastings and had her punk epiphany; forming her own punk band, X-Ray Spex, soon afterwards and taking the punk-sounding name Poly Styrene (one that reflected her obsession with the synthetic world of plastics and consumer culture that had boomed in the post-War era).   

 

The band released their debut single - 'Oh Bondage Up Yours!' - in September 1977 and although it was not a hit at the time (in part due to the fact that the BBC banned it), it is now (rightly) regarded as significant a punk anthem as 'Anarchy in the U. K.' by the Sex Pistols or 'White Riot' by the Clash. 

 

After this, no one ever again intoned the idea of little girls being seen and not heard (in the music business at least, if not wider society): click here to play [8]. 

 

Miss Styrene left the band in mid-1979 and whilst, to be honest, I was not interested in her later life and career, I was saddenned to hear that she died in April 2011 (aged 53) from metastatic breast cancer.  

 

 

IV.

 

Finally, we come to Helen Wellington Lloyd (née Mininberg), or, as she is better known by lovers of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980), Helen of Troy; one of the most committed members of the Sex Pistols' entourage and very much part of the inner circle around the band, being a longtime friend (and, briefly, a lover) of Malcolm McLaren [9]. 

 

If anyone embodied what I termed earlier in this post radical alterity, then Helen was it; if only due to her achondroplasia - a rare inherited form of dwarfism - which obliged her to confront the ridicule and discrimination that came her way from those of regular stature [10]. 

 

Punk not only provided her with a more accepting community of creative like-minded individuals, but an identity that allowed her as a little person to openly declare her defiance of and contempt for normies (or those she called plebs) with their conventional notions of beauty, for example.  

     

Helen, a talented art student, was not just a pretty face, however; she it was who first came up with the idea of the Sex Pistols using the ransom note style typography for promotional materials (an idea enthusiastically taken up by Jamie Reid); and she it was who famously featured alongside McLaren in the Swindle, including the famous 'You Need Hands' dance sequence set in Highgate Cemetery - click here - surely one of the most touching scenes in British cinematic history.  

  

Again, as with Siouxsie and Poly Styrene, I'm not too interested in what happened to Helen post-punk; she sold her extensive collection of Sex Pistols memorabilia at Sotheby's (London) in 2001 - which included Rotten's 'Anarchy' shirt (as designed by McLaren and Westwood in 1976) - and then, it's believed, she returned home to South Africa. 

 

Obviously, one wishes her well (if she's still alive) - and obviously, dead or alive, she continues to play an active role in my own imagination.   

 

Notes

 

[1] See the post published on 25 August 2025 in which I discuss this trio of figures who were so central to the British punk revolution: click here.  

 

[2] By radical alterity I refer to Baudrillard's understanding of otherness as it appears throughout his work; i.e., something that is in danger of extinction today, but which might still possibly pose a challenge to the arrogance and narcissism of a closed culture when it is invested with force by a movement such as punk. 

      For me, the three figures discussed here are perfect examples of those Peter York once described as the Peculiars; individuals who are proud not to fit in or subscribe to a model of universal understanding, but to be alien and abnormal, as well as sexy, stylish and subversive. 

 

[3] The name was coined by the music journalist Caroline Coon in September 1976 and, despite the fact that several members of the Bromley Contingent weren't actually from this Greater London suburb (located ten miles southeast of the capital), the name was catchy and convenient enough to stick. 

      Core members included: Siouxsie, Steve Severin, Billy Idol, Simon Barker, Debbie Juvenile, Tracie O'Keefe, Simone Thomas, and Bertie Marshall (Soo Catwoman was often associated with them, but was never considered part of the group by other members or, indeed, by herself).    

      Siouxsie and Steve Severin first saw the Sex Pistols play in London in February 1976 and, after chatting to members of the band afterwards, they immediately became devotees.  

 

[4] Siouxsie often expressed her displeasure with this association and felt the term goth - like punk before it - was ultimately reductive and one used by journalists to oversimplify and categorise work they didn't understand.    

 

[5] For those readers who aren't familiar with the details of the Bill Grundy incident, let me briefly summarise: After Queen cancelled their appearance on the live television show Today show at the last minute, the Sex Pistols were offered the spot in order to promote their debut single, 'Anarchy in the U.K.', and explain what punk rock was all about. 

      Things started badly and quickly got worse when it was clear that Grundy was hostile and dismissive of the band and that the latter - particularly guitarist Steve Jones - were not prepared to take his bullshit, nor listen to his creepy sexual innuendo when speaking to Siouxsie. Suggesting to her that they might 'meet afterwards' triggered Jones into calling him a 'dirty sod' and a 'dirty old man'. 

      Stupidly, Grundy then challenged Jones to 'say something outrageous' - which he did; calling Grundy a 'dirty bastard' and a 'dirty fucker'. Grundy responded, 'What a clever boy! to which Jones hilariously replied, 'What a fucking rotter!'

      Predictably, the phone lines to the Thames switchboard lit up and the national press had a field day. Grundy was suspended by Thames and his career effectively ended. The Sex Pistols were fired shortly afterwards by their record label EMI and were now branded as public enemies. The interview - click here - has become one of the most requested TV clips of all time. 

 

[6] Siouxsie and the Banshees, 'Hong Kong Garden' (Polydor Records, 1978): click here. This debut single reached number 7 in the UK chart.  

 

[7] In many ways, Poly is as a uniquely-looking and uniquely-sounding character as Johnny Rotten and both must rank as amongst the most unconventional - but charismatic - performers in rock history. In order to appreciate this fact, here she is singing perhaps my favourite X-Ray Spex song, 'Identity', which was released as the band's third single (on EMI) in July 1978: click here. 

 

[8] It should be noted that the song is not simply a feminist rejection of male sexual oppression as some imagine; rather, as one critic points out, it's also 'an indictment of consumer culture, denouncing the blind impulses of the mainstream shopper', as the lines: Chain store, chain smoke, I consume you all / Chain gang, chain mail, I don't think at all! make clear. 

      See Lauraine Leblanc, Pretty in Punk: Girls' Gender Resistance in a Boys' Subculture (Rutgers University Press, 1999), pp. 45-46.    

[9] Helen met McLaren on enrolment day at Goldsmiths College, in 1969. Later, through her connection with Malcolm she became a regular on the early London punk scene, where she felt happy and secure surrounded by freaks like her who liked to dress up and mess up: 

      'For the first time I didn't try and merge into the background. I wanted people to look at me with my chains, safety-pins, foxtail and black eyes. For once being a dwarf didn't matter.' - Helen, quoted by Stephen Colegrave and Chris Sullivan in Punk: The Definitive Record of a Revolution (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2001), and cited on the page dedicated to her on the Punk77 website: click here. 

 

[10] I'm conscious of the fact that one must be wary of going too far in this; that too often well-intentioned depictions of dwarfs in books or films, for example, suggest that they are not simply people of reduced stature, but individuals who have special (almost magical) powers and status due to their condition. Unfortunately, that's not the case and idealising little people is just as bad ultimately as devaluing, denigrating, or disparaging them due to their size.   

      Those interested in working to create a more inclusive society for those with dwarfism might like to visit the websites of Little People UK (co-founded by the actor Warwick Davis) - click here - and the Restricted Growth Association (RGA) - click here.         

Are We the Gods of Our Own Image? Notes on the Virtual Beauty Exhibition (Somerset House 2025) Part 2 (Sections V-VIII)

 

Qualeasha Wood: It's All For U (If U Rlly Want It) (2024) [a]

Arvida Byström: A Daughter Without a Mother (2022) [b] 

 

Photos taken by Maria Thanassa on her i-Phone at the 

Virtual Beauty exhibition (2025): somersethouse.org.uk

 

'We used to check our reflections in bathroom mirrors. Now, we check them in selfies ... on TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. 

A flick of the screen shows our face, but a little smoother, a little more symmetrical, with a glow. 

In this world, we don’t just see ourselves. We edit ourselves. We curate.' - Matthilde Friis

 

Part One of this post (sections I - IV) can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

V.

 

One of the curators of the Somerset House summer exhibition - Virtual Beauty (23 July - 28 September 2025) - Mathilde Friis, has written a short essay in which she argues that at the heart of the show is a political question; not whether "beauty is liberating or constraining, but how we use it, and who gets to decide" [c].

 

It's almost as if she substitutes the word beauty for another word; one beginning with 'p' that many of those exploring issues around visual culture, sexuality, gender and identity from a post-feminist and post-Foucauldian perspective still insist is the great clue to everything: power.   

 

The problem with this is it's easy to become entangled within a discursive network of power and easy to conceive of the latter in a rather old-fashioned (overly simplistic) manner that fails to recognise its simulated nature and its ultimate dissolution into a realm of seduction and signs without referents (as Baudrillard would say) [d]. 

 

Power is not an underlying structure; nor is it a thing that one can possess and wield. The minute you use the word power in all sincerity you have failed to grasp that it's a kind of convenient fiction and, whether you intend to or not, you reify power as a static entity or object that can be analysed. 

 

And so, if we are to become the playful "makers of our own image" [e], as Friis suggests, let it be in the name of something else other than power/knowledge (one is almost tempted to suggest impotence and forgetfulness).  

 

VI.

 

The strange thing with the Virtual Beauty exhibition is just how indebted to the past it felt at times: a sneaky reference to Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto (1985) here; a little bit of Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth (1990) hinted at there. 

 

Matthilde Friis mentions both authors and both books in her essay. Admitting the limitations of cyberfeminism - techno-utopias tend to always bump against the limits of physical reality - she also wonders if the digital world really offers endless opportunities for reinvention and liberation, or just the same old bullshit repackaged and recycled; "are we escaping the beauty myth, or just rewriting its code?" [f].   

 

Probably the latter: 

 

"The internet didn't erase gender or racial boundaries. It replicated them. Platforms that promised liberation were embedded with old biases. While the medium was new, the pressures remained the same." [g]

 

Thus, whilst beauty in 2025 may no longer just be about makeup, fashion, and hairstyle - but also "pixels, data, and code" [h] - old standards and stereotypes persist and old concerns to do with sexual objectification, for example, or how beauty still plays upon certain racial characteristics, return to trouble us anew. 

 

And so we come to the two works I wish to briefly discuss here: firstly, Qualeasha Wood's It’s All For U (If U Rlly Want It) (2024); and, secondly, Arvida Byström's A Daughter Without A Mother (2022) ... 

 

 

VII.

 

Some readers might be wondering if, as a straight white cis male, I'm qualified - or even entitled - to comment on the work of black queer artist Qualeasha Wood. I understand the concern and admit that there's a racial and sexual history here which, as Mysia Anderson says, simply must be acknowledged and taken into account [i].   

 

Having said that, however, it would seem absurd to pretend I hadn't seen and didn't very much like Wood's contribution to the Virtual Beauty exhibition; a clever and amusing combination of traditional textile techniques and glitch aesthetics [j] that exposes (and critiques) how the femme body is shaped, commodified, and circulated online via popular social media platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram. 

 

Her tapestry cleverly reclaims her own image and, fabricated as it is in woven jacquard (embroidered with glass seed beads), it constitutes a form of defiance to (and subversion of) the relentless digital age and its beloved glass screens.  

 

The medium is the message, as everyone used to say ... [k]

 

  

VIII. 

 

I will always have time for works which involve the use of dolls; some readers may recall my fascination with Amber Hawk Swanson's Amber Doll project (2007-10), for example, that I posted about back in 2013 and which the artist details on her website here. 

 

And so I was naturally drawn to the work of Arvida Byström, a young Swedish artist and photographer who, according to a recent press release, "travels in an aesthetic universe of disobedient bodies, fruits in lingerie, tulips and AI sex dolls" [l].

 

A Daughter Without A Mother (2022) is a mixed media installation that, on the one hand, critically examines how even AI can be used to replicate sexual stereotypes and thus collaborate in the pornification of the female body (and, indeed, the entire culture), whilst, on the other hand, inviting viewers to "contemplate the complexities of identity and intimacy" [m] associated with realistic looking sex dolls.     

 

I wouldn't say it's a great work: or even her best work. But it does return us to a question she has raised before concerning female fantasy figures who lack mothers and might best be described as the daughters of men (i.e., born of the pornographic imagination and styled according to male desires, values, and ideas; Eve, Aphrodite, Galatea, Maria ... et al). 

 

Another theme that Byström's work in the exhibition touches on is the question of why human beings have always dreamed of creating perfect copies of themselves whilst, at the same time, they possess a deep-rooted fear - automatonophobia - of replicants; be they dolls, cyborgs, or clones.     

      

Perhaps that's why, in the end, she seems to get such relief from having ripped off the head of poor Harmony ...

 

 

 

Arvida Byström:  

A Daughter Without a Mother (2022)

Notes

 

[a] Qualeasha Wood: It's All For U (If U Rlly Want It) (2024): woven jacquard, glass seed beads, and machine embroidery. The exhibition label informs us: 

      "Using webcam self-portraits, the artist reclaims visibility, challenging systems of control while highlighting the tension between self-expression and the pervasive influence of socia media and digital technologies." 

 

[b] Arvida Bystrom: A Daughter Without a Mother (2022): mixed media installation, including a short film (36 secs). The exhibition label informs us:  

      "Originally conceived as a performance piece [...] the work critically examines how AI is used to replicate beauty standards, perpetuating the sexualisation of the female body and contributing to its objectification."

 

[c] Matthilde Friis, 'From the Selfie to the Avatar: Beauty, Bias, and the Digital Self' (2025). This essay written to accompany the Virtual Beauty exhibition is available on the Someret House website: click here.   

 

[d] See Jean Baudrillard's Forget Foucault, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Semiotext(e), 2007).

      In 1976, Baudrillard sent an essay with the title Oublier Foucault to the magazine Critique (where the latter worked as an editor). Published the following year, it made Baudrillard a notorious figure within philosophical figures; for not only did he pretty much sum up Foucault's work (on power and sexuality) as a mythic discourse, but he also ridiculed the revolutionary politics of desire being peddled at that time by Deleuze and Guattari.  

       Forget Foucault ecourages readers to move beyond Foucault's cratology, rather than become trapped by its logic and thus prevented from thinking the complex dynamics of contemporary culture in a manner more appropriate to the times.      

 

[e-h] Matthilde Friis, as cited and linked to in note [c] above. 

 

[i] Just for the record, I've been thinking through questions to do with racial fetishism, sexual objectification, the visual representation of female bodies, etc., since 1991: my MA dissertation was on the position and portrayal of women in Nazi Art and Society; my initial PhD proposal was on the figure of the prostitute and the construction of illicit female sexual identity; and there are many posts published on Torpedo the Ark dealing with these and related topics from a perspective informed by my reading of feminist and queer theory (go to labels and find them for yourself).    

 

[j] For my discussion of glitch aesthetics, see the post entitled 'Glitch: the Art of Error and Imperfection' (28 June 2023): click here.  

 

[k] I'm sure I don't need to remind readers that this phrase - 'the medium is the message' - was coined by the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan to suggest that how the message is relayed matters more than the actual content; it's the medium - such as TV or the internet - that ultimately shapes our understanding of the world and ourselves, and how we interact with others, etc.

      See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (1964). The phrase 'the medium is the message' is found in chapter one and suplies the chapter title.    

 

[l] The press release was for an exhibition featuring Byström's work entitled Abyss (26 June - 26 July 2025) at Galerie Kandlhofer (Vienna, Austria): click here.  

 

[m] Quoted from the Virtual Beauty exhibition label describing Arvida Byström's: A Daughter Without a Mother (2022).  

 

Egon Schiele's Portraits on Paper: Poignant, Provocative, or Pornographic?

Egon Schiele: Moa (1911) [1]

Gouache, watercolour and pencil on paper 

(48 x 31 cm)

omertiroche.com

 

'I do not deny that I have made drawings and watercolours of an erotic nature. 

But they are always works of art.' - ES

 

 

I. 

 

I have already shared my thoughts on Herr Schiele as grand Austrian pervert and as someone who didn't treat poor Wally Neuzil very kindly: click here and here respectively.  

 

But, having just returned from an exhibition at the Omer Tiroche Gallery featuring some of Schiele's portraits on paper produced during the period 1910-1918, I thought it might be a good time to say something additional on a figure whose work remains almost as startling now as when first shown.

 

As it says in the exhibition press release: 

 

"The featured works [...] showcase Schiele's remarkable ability to capture and explore the raw emotion and vulnerability of his subjects, pushing the boundaries of modern portraiture with unparalleled intensity and insight." [2] 

 

Whether we might describe these depictions of the human figure as poignant, however, is debatable. 

 

For personally, I think of poignancy as a fairly gentle (and often unintended) stirring of emotion that is very much an individual response; something usually triggered with but a pin prick of detail (Barthes refers to this as the punctum). 

 

Schiele's pictures are, in their unparalleled intensity, just a little too full-on and violently assault the viewer; almost one feels stabbed in the heart. That's not a criticism. It's simply to challenge the use of the term poignant to describe his depictions of the human figure; provocative and a little grotesque, certainly, even at times a little obscene, but poignant ... I think not (or at least: not to me). 

 

 

II. 

 

And by obscene, just to be clear, I refer to a transparent staging of desire; to the way that the above figure, named Moa (an Old Norse word for mother), is overwhelmingly present making it impossible to ever step back and view her with perspective or objectivity (the gaze has been eliminated).

 

In other words, just as there's no poignancy in Schiele's picture, there's no trace of seduction; the veil is rent, the curtain lifted, and everything is explicit and in your face or made shamelessly hypervisible, as Baudrillard would say [3]. 

 

It may be going too far to say that Schiele violates his (often very young) models, or that we as viewers are made complicit in a crime of some kind, but, there's definitely something illicit (and troubling) going on here; way beyond anything produced by his mentor Gustav Klimt.    

 

Does the fact that Schiele's work is obscene also make it pornographic? 

 

Possibly: the judge who sentenced him to jail for a month in 1912 for public immorality and had one of his works burnt certainly thought so; and the writer of the gallery press release also doesn't hesitate to say that his portraits were, at times, "bordering on the pornographic" [4].

 

But it's a word that is too closely tied to sexually explicit material and thus detracts from the philosophically more interesting concept of obscenity as briefly discussed above, so it's not one I would choose to use here.      

 

 

III. 

 

This small exhibition of 14 works is absolutely worth going to visit if you have the chance. It runs until 2 May at Omer Tiroche; a Mayfair gallery, founded in 2014, which specialises in art from the modern, post-War, and contemporary periods.  

 

And speaking of current London exhibitions well worth checking out ... click here for a post on Joan Miró: Monumental Printmaking at Shapero Modern (6 Mar - 4 May 2025). 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Moa (1911), is one of a series of portraits Schiele painted of his friend and cabaret dancer, Moa Mandu. Interestingly, she was the only model he ever identified by name. Unfortunately, not much is is known about Moa, other than the fact she was originally from Bosnia, had large and very beautiful dark eyes. It is believed she was introduced to Schiele by fellow painter (and mime artist) Erwin Osen.

 

[2] From the press release for Egon Schiele: Portraits on Paper (14 Feb - 2 May 2025) at the Omer Tiroche Gallery, 21 Conduit St, London, W1. This text can be read in full on the gallery's website: click here. 

 

[3] My undersanding of what constitutes the obscene is informed by Baudrillard's thinking on this concept. For him, ob-scenity extends beyond the realm of sexuality, encompassing the visual field and the transparency of knowledge and he refers not only to that which usually takes place offstage, but to that which is also against-scene, undermining the conditions necessary for meaning to emerge, thus making it unthinkable.  

      See what Baudrillard writes on the obscene in Passwords, trans. Chris Turner (Verso, 2003), pp. 25-29. And see also the entry by Paul A. Taylor on the obscene in The Baudrillard Dictionary, ed. Richard G. Smith (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), which can be read online by clicking here.

 

[4] From the press release for Egon Schiele: Portraits on Paper ... click here.  

Notes on Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (Part 2: pp. 75-180)

Photo of Maggie Nelson by Jarrett Eakins (2013) 

alongside the cover of her book The Argonauts 

 (Graywolf Press, 2015)

 

 

Note: this post continues from part one (pp. 1-74) which can be accessed by clicking here.

 

 

I.

 

Performativity is a big part of being a writer, says Nelson, and I agree. 

 

But whereas she is keen to stress that this doesn't mean she isn't herself in her writing, or that her writing isn't somehow her - of course it's about me - I'm afraid that I do perform as a writer in a manner that might be branded "fraudulent or narcissistic or dangerous" [75] and which demonically dramatises the ways in which I am not myself, but always becoming-other. 

 

Of course, we should note that it's "easy to get juiced up about a concept like plurality or mutiplicity" [77], or becoming-other, and to use them so often that they become empty of any specificity; one doesn't wish to become like Freud, that is to say, intoxicated with "theoretical concepts that wilfully annihilate nuance" [85] or reality and fall into the white hole of idealism.

 

 

II.

 

Is homonormativity a "natural consequence of the decriminalization of homosexuality" [91]? I guess it probably is. 

 

And I can see how that might be a problem for outlaw fetishists like Bruce Benderson, who see homosexuality as an illicit "narrative of urban adventure" [91]; the chance to find pleasure via the breaking of laws. 

 

For once something is no longer "illicit, punishable, pathologized, or used as a lawful basis for raw discrimination or acts of violence, that phenomenon will no longer be abe to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe in the same way" [91].

 

So where's the (transgressive) fun? 

 

This is why, Nelson informs us, "nihilist pervs like painter Francis Bacon have gone so far to say that they wish that the death penalty was still the punishment for homosexuality" [91] - which is, perhaps, just one more reason why you've gotta love Franny B. 

 

Even Nelson concedes: "In the face of such a narrative, it's a comedown to wade through the planet-killing trash of a Pride parade ..." [91]. However, as she then goes on to say, the binary of normative/transgressive becomes unsustainable at last.

 

 

III.

This line obviously makes smile: "Basking in the punk allure of 'no future' won't suffice ..." [95] Is Nelson advocating an ideal of hope here à la Shep Fairey? [a]

 

And this line also also caught my eye when flicking through The Argonauts: "I find it more embarrassing than enraging to read Baudrillard ..." [98] Well, honestly, there are passages in her book that I find more embarrassing than liberating. 

 

Again, this might be due to my own uneasiness around certain subjects, including what Nelson delights in calling ass-fucking, but I can't help feeling that she suffers from what Lawrence terms the "yellow disease of dirt-lust" [b], confusing the flow of sex with the excrementary functions.

 

"In the really healthy human being", writes Lawrence, "the distinction between the two is instant, our profoundest instincts are perhaps our instincts of opposition beween the two flows.

      But in the degraded human being the deep instincts have gone dead, and then the two flows become identical. [...] Then sex is dirt and dirt is sex, and sexual excitement becomes a playing with dirt ..." [c] 

 

This might explain why Ms Nelson is not interested in "a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics" [106] of her anus, but only interested in ass-fucking and the fact that "the human anus is one of the most innervated parts of the body" [106]. 

 

However, whilst recognising that "the anal cavity and the vagina canal lean on each other" [104], Nelson doesn't assert they are one and the same; what she suggests, rather, is that female sexuality is complex and diverse and not rooted in a single fixed location (and ultimately even Lady Chatterley takes it up the arse and discovers anal sex to be full of redemptive possibility [d]). 

 

IV.

I'm very sympathetic to Nelson's fear of assertion. 

 

Indeed, my writing, like hers, is riddled with "tics of uncertainty" [122]; words like perhaps and maybe, for example, as one attempts to "get out of 'totalizing' language; i.e., language that rides roughshod over specificity" [122] (although Barthes thinks it absurd to try and escape from language's inherently assertive nature by the use of such tics). 

 

V.

I'm also sympathetic to Nelson's (Deleuzian) view of herself as an empiricist; i.e., as a writer who aims to clarify rather than create per se, but who, in clarifying - and in dispelling myths of the eternal or universal - creates the conditions under which something new might be produced (see p. 128).  

  

 

VI.

 

How can deviant sexual activity and/or queerness "remain the marker of radicality" [137] in a pornified culture?  Precisely! 

 

Nelson sees the allure of "exchanging horniness for exhaustion" [138]; of turning to one's partner and asking: What are you doing after the orgy? [e] - but I doubt she'll ever dare whisper this in Harry's ear (even whilst recognising her right to fatigue).

 

 

VII.

 

Maggie may be embarrassed by Baudrillard, but she loves Barthes: particularly his book The Neutral (2007). 

 

And that makes me happy, because I love Barthes too and have recently published a post in gentle praise of this work [f] and of a concept which, "in the face of dogmatism, the menacing pressure to take sides, offers novel responses: to flee, to escape, to demur, to shift or refuse terms, to disengage, to turn away" [139-140].     

 

However, Nelson has also discovered that been born slippy like an otter isn't everything; that "studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure" [140]. 

 

Such as the pleasures of insisting and persisting, for example; and of making a commitment, sticking by what one has said previously, etc. I have to admit, however, that such pleasures continue to escape me and I shan't be singing 'Abide With Me' anytime soon.

 

   

Notes

 

[a] See the post of 6 Feb 2022 entitled 'The Rich Can Buy Soap' - click here. 

[b] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. Jaes T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 242.

 

[c] Ibid.

 

[d] See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), chapter XVI. According to Lawrence, when Connie allows her lover to anally penetrate her she is made a different woman; one free of shame who discovers her ultimate nakedness.

 

[e] The phrase 'after the orgy' is from an essay of this title by the philosopher Nelson finds embarrassing - Baudrillard - and can be found in The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (Verso, 1993), pp. 3-13. 

      The orgy in question was "the moment when modernity exploded on us, the moment of liberation in every sphere [...] an orgy of the real, the rational, the sexual, of criticism as of anti-criticism, of development as a crisis of development" [3]. 

      For Baudrillard, now everything has been liberated, all we can do is "simulate the orgy, simulate liberation" [3], and accelerate in a void. 

 

[f] See the post pubished on 1 April 2025: click here.   

 

Notes on Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (Part 1: pp. 1-74)

Cover of the Melville House edition 

(2016) [a]

 

 

I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: Maggie Nelson is one of those very rare individuals who probably deserves the title of genius; an original and insightful writer who produces work that is both lyrical and philosophical [b].

 

I still think she has an unfortunate tendency to overshare and give us just a little too much personal information, but that might just be me being a bit uptight and prudish [c]. And, for all the times when I want to look away from the page, there are many more occasions on which I'm grateful as a reader for her honesty, courage, and intelligence.  

 

And so, let's take a look at The Argonauts (pp. 1-74), but please note this is more a response to the lines or paragraphs that most resonate with me, rather than a review of the book as a whole (some aspects of which, even if central - such as sodomitical parenthood - I don't really care about [d]).  

 

 

I. 

 

Nelson tells us that before she met the great love of her life, the artist Harry Dodge, she had "spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein's idea that the inexpressible is contained - inexpressibly! - in the expressed" [3] [e]. 

 

It was this profound but paradoxical truth that enabled Nelson to keep her faith in language - words are good enough! - and continue writing. But then Dodge, "equally devoted to the conviction that words are not good enough" [4], obliged her to reconsider the matter; perhaps words were "corrosive to all that is good, all that is real, all that is flow" [4] and that to name is to kill; perhaps we can't conceptualise and articulate the world clearly (and non-destructively) after all.

However, I'm not sure that Nelson, as a writer and poet, ever quite accepts this; a little later she asks: "How can the words not be good enough?" [8].

 

 

II.

Nelson has always thought it a little romantic to allow "an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one" [10]. 

 

And I agree, it is romantic to just love Thelma, Alice, or Nicolas Poussin, rather than identifying oneself in terms of a fixed sexuality, although maybe that's easier for me to say than for someone who is (or has been) persecuted or discriminated against for their queerness; I don't have to worry about how certain pieces of legislation, such as Clause 28 or Prop 8, are going to impact on my life [f].

 

 

III.

 

This is very similar to how I feel and act when it comes to home improvements and domestic chores: I don't want to lift a finger "to better my surroundings" [14], or even keep things ship shape and Bristol fashion. I prefer to literally let things "fall apart all around" [14] and then, "when it gets to be too much" [14], just move on and flee the scene.   

 

IV. 

  

This is an undeniably correct observation (one that reminds me of something Baudrillard might have written, although Nelson credits the idea to Lacan, whose idea of the Real is not quite the same as the former's): 

 

"To align oneself with the real [...] can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis." [17]

 

In other words, whilst aligning with a real or natural identity can be a source of pride and pleasure, it can also bring with it a touch of horror and be impossible to sustain for 24/7; no one can be themselves all day every day, can they?

 

There have to be moments when we don't quite feel ourselves and we take a breather from reality. 

 

 

V.

 

I like the fact that Nelson doesn't just keep banging on about difference and otherness; the fact that she acknowledges that encountering sameness can also be important, "as it has to do with seeing reflected that which has been reviled" [31]. 

 

And this encounter with sameness can also allow self-discovery: "To devote yourself to someone else's pussy can be a means of devoting yourself to your own." [31]

 

And I suppose that matters; although not as much as the "shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy" [31] - the kind of sentence which one simply has to let pass when reading an author like Nelson, who passionately believes that there is "some evil shit in this world that needs fucking up" [33], such as the phallocratic order and capitalism, even if she has "come to understand revolutionary language" [33] as a mixture of fantasy and fetish. 

 

 

VI.

 

This is pure liberalism: "I support private, consensual groups of adults deciding to live together however they please" [37]. 

 

The problem is such groups don't live in a giggly bubble on the moon; they have neighbours and they belong to wider society and so their decisions and lifestyle choices invariably impact others. They also inhabit the planet with other species and, like Nelson, I think our relationship with animals and plants in sacred terms.     

 

 

VII.

 

"Even if women are consulting the same satellites, or reading from the same script: their reports are suspect ..." [47]

 

This remark about the perceived difference in reporting accuracy between male and female weather reporters is interesting. I'm not sure, however, that the reason for it is the one Nelson (and Luce Irigaray) imagine; i.e., that women are somehow removed as a sex from the language game that assures objective coherence and predictive ability.

 

But there does seem to be some sort of difference involved based on sex and a woman's greater attunement to her own body in relationship to the world; it's very rare that the Little Greek, for example, will say it's cold outside (giving reference to the air temperature), preferring instead to tell me she's feeling cold.  

So yes, it's a different (more subjective) way of articulating reality; but I don't think this is the result of patriarchal forces looking to silence women or discredit their weather reportage.

VIII.

 

I'm grateful to Nelson for mentioning the poet and literary scholar Michael Snediker (whom I didn't know of) and his book Queer Optimism (2008). For his critical examination of waxing lyrical - as summarised here - is one I find very interesting.

 

For there is something problematic (and irritating) - particularly to a working class sensibility - when writers indulge in histrionics. Even issues of "maximum complexity and gravity" [56] can be discussed without exaggerated language and overarching concepts which can sometimes negate the "specificities of the situation at hand" [56].

 

(This returns us to Wittgenstein and the idea of speaking plainly.)  

IX.

Is transitioning from one gender to another (or even just floating somewhere in-between) really the same as a becoming as Deleuze and Guattari understand it? 

 

I don't think so. But perhaps Nelson's reading of the above on this topic is superior to mine; more true to the radical spirit of everybody's favourite nomad philosophers and certainly she and Harry Dodge know more about gender, sexuality, and identity issues than I do. 

 

Thus, best perhaps that I say nothing further here: for I don't want to run the risk of being thought presumptuous or another comfortably cisgendered straight white male know-it-all, who has forgotten (or is yet to learn) that "the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality - or anything else, really - is to listen to what they tell you [...] without shellacking over their version of reality" [66].

 

But then, having said that, this sounds suspiciously like an attempt to silence those who don't care about personal truth and refuse to value lived experience above everything else.         

 

X.

On my first day at school, I cried when they pinned a name badge on me and tried to remove it (true story). Ten year later, I smiled when Poly Styrene informed her audience that identity was the crisis (having already seen that) [h]. 

Thus, like Nelson's professor of feminist theory, Christina Crosby, I would be mortified were a student - or anyone else - to hand me an index card and ask me to write on it how I identified and then pin it on my lapel. For like Crosby, I've "spent a lifetime complicating and deconstructing identity and teaching others to do the same ..." [73]  

 

Notes 

 

[a] The Argonauts was originally published in the United States by Graywolf Press, in 2015. The first UK edition, published by Melville House, followed in 2016, and it is this edition to which all page numbers given in the text refer.  

 

[b] In 2016, a year after the publication of The Argonauts, Nelson was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship; known to many as the genius grant. See the two-part post 'Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009)' (5 Sept 2024): click here.   

[c] See the post 'Can a Writer Ever Overshare? On Maggie Nelson's Self-Exposure' (9 Sept 2024): click here. 

[d] I'm sure Nelson would say it's this indifference to parenting - particularly the maternal - that disqualifies me from being a feminist; see pp. 48-52 and the story of a seminar with Jane Gallop and Rosalind Krauss. Nelson stands with the former, but I have to admit, I'm slightly more sympathetic to the latter. 

 

[e] I don't want to split hairs - though some say that philosophy is nothing other than the endless splitting of hairs - but I'm not sure Wittgenstein quite said this. 

      What he said, rather, was that the inexpressible (i.e., that which can be shown and, aguably, that which mysteriously matters most) forms the background against which whatever we can express has its meaning. In other words, context - not containment - is the crucial word here. 

      See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 16. A revised edition of this work, ed. G. H. von Wright, was published by Blackwell in 1998.

 

[f] Like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, I want to use the word queer to include "all kinds of resistances and fracturings and mismatches that have little or nothing to do with sexual orientation" [35]. 

      On the other hand, one feels obliged to acknowledge historical and contemporary prohibitions aimed specificaly against those who identify as lesbian or gay, for example. As Nelson notes, this is kind of like wanting it both ways. 

      But then, there is "much to be learned from wanting something both ways" [36] and Nelson concedes that "annoying as it might be to hear a straight white guy" who is comfortably cisgendered talk about queerness, "in the end it's probably all for the better" [36].

 

[g] I'm referring to the single 'Identity' released by X-Ray Spex (EMI, July 1978): click here. 

Before heading to part two of this post - which can be accessed here -  readers might like to see an earlier post anticipating this one, entitled 'Argonauts' (26 Aug 2024): click here. 

The Revenge of the Mirror People

Elissar Kanso: The Revenge of the Mirror People 

(Homage to Jean Baudrillard) [1]

 

'Behind every reflection, every resemblance, every representation, 

a defeated enemy lies concealed ...'

 

I. 

 

Christmas or not, I'm still thinking about mirror life rather than mince pies and mulled wine; i.e., that hypothetical form of life assembled from molecular building materials found on the left-hand path [2].

 

Whilst this alternative life form has not yet been synthesised, efforts to create mirror-image organisms are doubtless underway in secret labs around the world, despite grave concerns expressed recently by a broad coalition of scientists [3].

 

Recent advances in microbiology, make it almost inevitable that, sooner or later, someone somewhere will announce that they have used enantiomers (i.e., chiral reflections of the molecules necessary for life) to fully synthesise a cell. 

 

 

II. 

 

And, who knows, eventually they may even create a little mirror-image creature. For hypothetically, it may be possible to create a whole ecosystem - even an entire world populated with mirror people (what fans of Superman and Jerry Seinfeld would no doubt gleefully term Bizarro World).   

 

These mirror people would appear similar to us - but be opposite in every sense and every cell of their bodies. And so the question arises of how we'd regard our chiral twins: as beings upon whom to further experiment? As dangerous aliens or anti-kin to be confined on some distant planet? 

 

And if we did treat them poorly - just as we treat embryos and animals and those deemed racially inferior - would the time come when, one day, we witnessed the revenge of the mirror people ...? [4]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Elissar Kanso is a Lebanese-born artist and curator based in France. She is interested in ideas to do with distance and displacement.

      The Revenge of the Mirror People is a series of works consisting of recontextualised media images that are manipulated with digital technology in a manner that deprives them of their perfection, thus giving them back a degree of authenticity. Each image is then transferred from the computer screeen on to Plexiglass. It was submitted to the 'Deserting Reality' exhibition in Milan (2015): click here.

 

[2] As any occultists reading this will know, the left-hand path is Mme. Blavatsky's translation of the Sanskrit term vāmacāra and refers to a spiritual direction leading to a more dangerous form of knowledge than the right-hand path that leads to true enlightenment and moral perfection. 

      Those who follow the left-hand path are often prepared to transgress the codes of conduct and ethical practice that the majority subscribe to and do not accept that scientific research, for example, should always coincide with the interests of humanity or safeguard life on earth in its present form. 

[3] See the post on Torpedo the Ark entitled 'Homochirality: Reflections on Mirror Life' (21 Dec 2024): click here.

 

[4] According to Borges, writing in The Book of Imaginary Beings (1969), there was once a time when this world and the world reflected in mirrors were not, as now, cut off from each other and you could pass from one to the other quite freely. 

      But then the mirror people invaded this world, only to be defeated and imprisoned in their mirror world and obliged from that day on to only reflect the actions of those in this world, stripped of all freedom and autonomy. However, it is said that the day will come when the mirror people awaken once more, refuse their servitude, rise up, and burst through the looking-glass.

      Baudrillard calls this 'the revenge of the mirror people' and by which he refers to the return of otherness; i.e., of all forms "which, subtly or violently deprived of their singularity, henceforth pose an insoluble problem for the social order, and also for the political and biological orders". See Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (Verso, 1996), pp. 148-149.    

 

 

This post is for Elissar Kanso.

 

Starving for Perfection: On the Thinspirational Figure of Karen Carpenter

 Young America at its very best ...

 Karen Carpenter (1950-1983)

 

"Wants to look like a star / but she takes it too far ..." [a]

 

I. 

 

Having recently attended a seminar organised by the Subcultures Interest Group (SIG) at the London College of Communication, where discussion focused on Paul Tornbohm's book on the Carpenters (Sonic Bond Publishing, 2023), I find myself intrigued by the tragic figure of Karen Carpenter. 

 

Not so much her distinctive vocal skills or ability as a drummer, but her will to self-perfection and self-annihilation physically manifested in the form of anorexia; an eating disorder typically found in young women and which, according to Baudrillard, might also be seen as a form of social repulsion; i.e., a means of rejecting a gluttonous and disgusting world of consumption via the ecstasy of emptiness [b]. 

 

George McKay, a professor in media studies at the University of East Anglia, has written on Carpenter, her condition, and its representation in a fascinating 2018 essay which more broadly explores the relation between the anorexic body and popular music, and it's his essay around which I shall centre (a brief) discussion here [c]. 

 

 

II.

 

Drawing on and seeking to develop the work of other commentators concerned with celebrity anorexia, McKay expresses a "critical interest in ways in which the practices and expectations of the music industry set a conformist template of corporeality, particularly for its female stars" [2]. 

 

There's undoubtedly some truth in this idea, though it's not a template that all female artists within the music industry have felt obliged to conform to; one thinks of Big Mama Thornton and Cass Elliot, for example, and I'm pretty sure that even those who set such a template don't expect performers to starve themselves to death; they usually look to protect their investment, even if, in some cases, an untimely death can lead to an increase in record sales [d].  

Whilst it's a little unfair to think of Carpenter as the face of anorexia - she was, after all, one of the great pop voices of the twentieth-century, much admired by her peers and influential on numerous later artists - it was nevertheless her death in 1983 from complications associated with a condition which she began to exhibit symptoms of in 1975 [e], that first brought anorexia into the public arena. 

 

Before then, it was little known outside of showbiz and medical circles and it's for her anorexia that many people remember Karen Carpenter today; particularly those - like me - who are more concerned with matters critical and clinical than (middle of the road) musical.       

 

As McKay notes, anorexia nervosa fascinates because whilst it may be viewed as "a mental health issue leading to or presenting in a diminished corporeality" [4], it can also be regarded as a phenomenon "originating at least in part in the socio-cultural" [4].

 

Its complexity (and ambiguity) doesn't stop there either: as Helen Malson and Jane Ussher have observed, the anorexic body may be "'discursively construed in a multiplicity of often conflicting ways'" [f]. For example, it may "signify both self-production (of idealised body or identity) and self-destruction (symbolically and physically)" [4]. 

 

That's why such a body is often discussed from a political and philosophical perpective; not least of all by feminist authors.

 

 

III.

 

Surprisingly, McKay found fewer than expected mentions or images of Carpenter within the online pro-ana community, where one might have thought she'd have been given special status. He suspects this is because "lyrically there is no obvious mention of eating disorders in the Carpenters' repertoire, not even in song titles" [18]. 

 

Alternatively, it could be because "the music's smoothness is not heard as containing identifiable sonic signifiers of suffering, pain or anger" [18]. In other words, even those who might otherwise acknowledge Karen Carpenter as one of their own find the Carpenters mind numbingly dull.  

Having said that, I think Karen's story is one that should resonate strongly with those who think of anorexia in quasi-religious terms as a spiritual-ascetic practice; those who speak of birds and angels and of the idea that one might take flight if only disciplined enough to achieve purity and perfection in a corrupt and fallen world weighed down by the spirit of gravity [g].

The fact that she died at such a relatively young age - though far too old to join the 27 Club [h] - must surely make Miss Carpenter a martyr-saint in the eyes of those who regard anorexia as a miraculous rather than a nervous condition [i]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Lines from the song 'Never Good Enough' (2006), by Canadian singer-songwriter Rachel Ferguson; a favourite tune with many in the pro-ana community (or subculture): click here. 

 

[b] Long time readers - or those who investigated some of the older posts on TTA - will know that I have previously written with reference to anorexia (at times from a vaguely pro-ana perspective) on several occasions: click here, for example, or here. 

 

[c] George McKay, 'Skinny blues: Karen Carpenter, anorexia nervosa and popular music', Popular Music, Volume 37, Issue 1, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1-21. Page references to this essay will be given directly in the post. Click here to access the essay in the UEA digital repository.

 

[d] McKay notes that by exerting constant pressure to look a certain way and perform in a certain manner, the music industry does bear some responsibility for when its young female stars implode. However, it's worth noting that professional dancers and fashion models have much greater pressure exerted on them to be ultra-thin than pop performers; see David M. Garner and Paul E. Garfinkel, 'Socio-cultural factors in the development of anorexia nervosa', in Psychological Medicine, Vol. 10, Issue 4, (1980), pp. 647-656. Cited by McKay.

 

[e] Carpenter had begun dieting at an early age and weighed around 120 pounds in 1973, when the Carpenters were at the peak of their success. By the autumn of 1975, however, she was below the weight that is popularly branded as that of a weakling - i.e., under 98 pounds - and fans were shocked at her gaunt appearance. Carpenter refused to publicly acknowledge that she was suffering with an eating disorder, however, and dismissed concerns about her health and wellbeing. Some might suggest this indicates anosognosia, but McKay argues (2018, 2):

      "Her lack of public utterance on her anorexia, right up to her death, is understandable, given her lonely and vulnerable position as the global star first and most associated with it. However, it is also problematic, not least since it leaves key male figures [including her brother Richard ...] to shape and control her narrative [...]" 

 

[f] See Helen M. Malson and Jane M. Ussher, 'Beyond this mortal coil: femininity, death and discursive constructions of the anorexic body', in Mortality: Promoting the Interdisciplinary Study of Death and Dying, Vol. 2, Issue 1, (1997), pp. 43- 61. Quoted by McKay.     

 

[g] McKay writes (2018, 12): "Karen seemed to be striving for what she thought of as versions of perfection in voice and in body ..." and he reminds us of the following lyric: 'I know I ask perfection of a quite imperfect world' in the song 'I Need to Be in Love', released as a single from the album A Kind of Hush (A&M Records, 1976). 

 

[h] The 27 Club is made up of popular musicians and other artists who died at the age of 27 and includes, for example, Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse. Karen Carpenter was 32 when she died on 4 February, 1983. 

 

[i] One day, I'll write a post on the holy concept of anorexia mirabilis; an eating disorder common amongst medieval nuns and religiously devoted young women keen to imitate the suffering (and experience the passion) of Christ.  

 

Musical bonus: The Carpenters, '(They Long to Be) Close to You', single release from the studio album Close to You (A&M Records, 1970): click here for the official video on YouTube courtesy of Warner Music Videos.