A Room of One's Own Women and Power in the New America

Muoz, Jos Esteban.

TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 52, Number 1 (T 197) Spring 2008, pp. 136-139 (Article)
Published by The MIT Press

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Figure 1. Coco Fusco as the Interrogator in her play A Room of Ones Own: Women and Power in the New America, P 122, New York, 2006. (Photo by Kambui Olujimi) .S.

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, and an Associate Professor at Columbia University. Her publications include English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusions in the Americas (The New Press, 1995) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (Harry Abrams, Inc., 2003). Jos Esteban Muoz is Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU. He is the author of Disidentications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), and the forthcoming volumes Cruising Utopia: The Performance and Politics of Queer Futurity (NYU Press) and Feeling Brown: Ethnicity, Affect and Performance (Duke University Press). He coedited Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996) with Jennifer Doyle and Jonathan Flatley (Duke University Press, 1996) and Everynight Life: Culture and Music in Latin/o America (Duke University Press, 1997) with Celeste Fraser Delgado. He edited the special issue of Women and Performance (1996) and coedited the special issue of Social Text (2005) with Brian Phillip Harper and Anne McClintock. TDR: The Drama Review 52:1 (T197) Spring 2008. 2008 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Pieces
Coco Fusco introduction by Jos Esteban Muoz
Performing the State of Exception
Coco Fuscos Operation Atropos and A Room of Ones Own Coco Fuscos performance of the state of exception in A Room of Ones Own begins with a loving lyrical tribute to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that sounds like an early American religious hymn. In it, Rice is characterized as a savior delivering the people from Osama Bin Laden, who is portrayed as Satan. This staging of religiositys encroachment on the state is not surprising or particularly jarring. Indeed this blurring of church and state has been an ongoing project. Yet the Secretary herself, after over ve years of national prominence as National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State, still seems like an exception to many. Her role as the black iron-woman of recent and nefarious US policy is unsettling to those who have not totally come to terms with the fully realized phenomenon of black neoconservatism. Equally troubling to people who should know better is the Secretarys gender. Rice seems exceptional and this exceptionality is at the core of the political moment we currently live in, where the state mobilizes political theatre in lieu of truth and often against obvious and open dishonesty. While the single black woman has been the scourge and often scapegoat of the neoconservative and neoliberal movements, Rice stands out as the exception. Within the spectacle of Bushs administration, Rice is the black woman who does not pilfer the nation but instead defends it. She is not Americas greatest liability, but its proudest national asset. Within the conservative movements mindset, Rices presence inoculates the current regime from charges of racism, as have other notable conservatives of color such as Colin Powell, Alberto Gonzalez, and Elaine

A Room of Ones Own

Women and Power in the New America

L. Chao. Furthermore, the exceptional black female face of US foreign policy is meant to do the symbolic work of insulating the current regimes imperialist agenda from charges of systemic violence directed at non-white people throughout the world. Rice is the exception that proves the rule, underwriting the current regimes appetite for conquest and domination in the new world order. Fuscos two most recent art projects, the video Operation Atropos and the performance A Room of Ones Own, are responses to the Bush administrations performance of power. Both the video and the performance are counterperformances that do the work of inhabiting the grain of our current fascist ideological mindset. These counterperformances do more than simply reject the dominant national performance that shores up power at this particular historical moment. Such performances would have limited efcacy because they would not take on the underlying logic of this administrations ideology. Instead, Fusco replicates the performance of power in an attempt to understand its dimensions and larger social repercussions. Fusco inltrates rather than attacks. But hers is not a literal inltration. The Cadre, the group of ex-military men who work as interrogation trainers are not clueless about who Fusco and her six collaborators are or what they represent. They understand that Fusco and company are not interfacing with them to simply afrm them. But they do play a truth game with Fuscos group of feminist artists. Thus a symbolic exchange between feminist artists and ex-interrogators produces new knowledge about our current national situation. This is a critical part of Fuscos project in both the video and the performance. Both
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art projects run in the grooves of a certain ideological record that I have dened above as the US governments performance of the state of exception. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agambens engagement with the work of jurist and political theorist Carl Schmidt is central here. Agamben, in Homo Sacer ([1995] 1998) delineates how the performance of a state of exception secures the sovereigns power. In the sequel to that book, State of Exception (2005), Agamben brings this theoretical model to bear directly on the USs current war on terror and the unethical imprisonment of so called enemy combatants at Guantnamo Bay. Through the declaration of a national emergency, martial law, a terror alert, etc., the state stages the state of exception to naturalize and justify unchecked and abusive manifestations of power amid a general scene of savage social asymmetry. Rather than denouncing this performance of power, Fusco hijacks powers groove, occupying it with a critical difference that denaturalizes the governments ideological camouage. There is a lot of camouage in Operation Atropos and A Room of Ones Own. It is important to remember that this specic mode of patterningtheatrewas invented to mirror the natural world. Its effects are meant to be naturalizing. Fuscos performance enacts a kind of hypercamouage by pushing camouages process of naturalizing. The nations performance of the state of exception, its current Middle East policy, and even its use of words like liberation and freedom are ideological disguises that are meant to be taken as natural. In an effect that can be described as neoBrechtian, Fuscos art interrupts this deployment of mass camouage. The performance and the video also interrogate the militarys logic of gender advancement and womens progress. The video begins by meditating on the presence of female torturers in the Abu Ghraib prison photos. Pvt. Lynndie England and other women were sacriced as aberrations and exceptions by the Department of Defenses public opinion machine. The nation was meant to see England as playing the opposite role from a gure like Pvt. Jessica Lynch. Operation Atropos and A

Room of Ones Own are performative investigations into the role of women in todays military. In her pieces, Fusco goes beyond the binary of England and Lynch to enact the larger stakes for women in the military and the nation. While the advancement of women in the military is often hailed as real progress in the public discourse, Fuscos performances dismantle this logic of progress in much the same way that Walter Benjamin did in his famous Thesis on the Philosophy of History ([1939] 1968). Fuscos art project investigates the grand claims made for the betterment of women both within the US military and its occupied populations. The contemporary price of womens so-called progress is their imbrication in Americas global policing protocol. In the same way that Secretary of State Rice does a certain symbolic work as an individuala black woman in an administration whose policies have been especially brutal to non-white people within the nation and abroadwomen in the armed services seems to speak to a soft logic of gender progress and advancement. The Lynch/ England dichotomy is not dissimilar from the age-old virgin/whore binary that structures knowledge about gender and women. The womens odyssey in Operation Atropos is a performance of inltration into the logic of militaristic interrogation as a form of national defense. Yet it ultimately reveals the imperialist motivations behind such practices. Fuscos title A Room of Ones Own is not just a punning reference to Virginia Woolfs 1929 book, but a commentary on the rewriting of the rhetoric of gender equality and feminism within our state of exception. It is a call to reconsider the terms that now hold sway in the national consciousness. Finally, let me point out that Fuscos artistic practice is not meant to be easily digested or carefree. It rarely offers the audience the comfort of illusion or shadow. Her work intends to be difcult and harsh. It folds back the conceptual camouage that the state continuously produces as it debunks an insidious national order with global consequences. The goal of Fuscos work is to make the spectator feel uncomfortable in the here and now of our political situation. It is also a

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performance of research/research as performancesomewhat like the work of Critical Art Ensemble. Rather than offer entertainment as such, Fusco strives to produce difcult knowledge that strips away the national camouage of the all-too-familiar and patriotic spectacle of stars and stripes to reveal the neoimperial military eld attire beneath. Fuscos performances are in the most immediate sense a feminist commentary aimed at the global status of women. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, in Feminism without Borders (2003), calls for a feminist pedagogy of antigloablization. Mohanty argues for a critique of globalization that resists the ways globalization corrodes the lives of women and girls who suffer most within capitalism and imperialism. Antiglobalization entails the production of new modes of knowledge between the global and the local. Fuscos project represents difcult knowledge that shuttles between the local and the global. By considering the ways in which US womanhood becomes militarized, Fuscos audiences understand how women over here and over there are part of globalizations oppressive script. Fusco interrupts that script with an art practice that presents counternarratives, stories that reveal insurrectionist ways of being in the world. Jos Esteban Muoz
References Agamben, Giorgio 1998 [1995] Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2005 State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

war in Iraq, I had no clear idea of what women actually did in the US military. They are currently operating in contexts that, despite President Bushs assertion that the war ended shortly after the invasion of Iraq, are combat zones. Women constitute 15 percent of the armed forces in Iraq and 35 percent of US military intelligence. These gures are unprecedented for the American armed forces. Media coverage of the experience of American servicewomen has largely characterized them as victimsof sexual harassment and rape by male soldiers and as working mothers troubled by long separations from their children. Even the medias treatment of Lynndie England, one the military police at Abu Ghraib who appeared in several of the infamous photographs depicting abuse of prisoners, characterizes her as a victimof her boyfriend, Army Spc. Charles Graner, and of her circumstances as a workingclass, poorly educated young woman. When the images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib were rst released, I was struck by the presence of women in them as perpetrators of violence. A few months later, stories began to be leaked to the media about how female military interrogators in Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib were using sexual harassment as a tactic to break Muslim detainees. These tactics have been mentioned frequently in detainee testimony, as well as in public statements made by military intelligence ofcers and FBI investigators. Military historian Alfred McCoy (A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, 2006) and journalist Seymour Hersh (Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, 2004) have both argued that the use of sexual harassment by interrogators is part of CIA special operations designed to capitalize on the supposed vulnerability of Arabs to such methods. Research for the development of these operations includes anthropological studies that proffer stereotypical and Orientalist views of the so-called Arab mind. It seemed to me that the phenomenon of instrumentalized female sexual violence raises many disturbing questions, not only for those who are concerned about the use of torture by the US military, but also for feminists who are accustomed to conceiving of women solely as
A Room of Ones Own

Benjamin, Walter 1968 [1939] Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Illuminations: Essays and Reections, edited by Hannah Arendt, 253-64. New York: Schocken Books. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 2003 Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press.

Artists Statement
This play is my reection on the role of female interrogators in the War on Terror. Before the

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