I wrote the essay below in the early 2006 when I worked as a researcher for one British company. While I’m thinking of the different ways to “add value” to the text, I wanted to share what I’ve written all those years ago. Commissions are welcome; criticism is even more so, as I’m sure I’ve missed some aspects of contemplating the ever-lasting connection between politics and sex. However, even though I was thinking of sharing the text for a long time, I was practically compelled to do this after I found out that somebody was searching for ‘burlesconi‘. Given that in the text below I also had to consider the impact of burlesque performers on the modern attitudes, I thought it was a calling… you know what I mean.
A small note: I’ve just realised the text is heavily marked by Italian connections. In the BBC series mentioned below Lady Thatcher was played by Greta Scacchi, an Italian-Australian actress born in Milan. Oh Italia, amore!
The Body Politique.
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| Image courtesy: The Mirror |
On 1 December, 2002, the BBC1 screened a drama Jeffrey Archer: The Truth. It was a fictional rendering of the ‘real’ story behind Archer’s perjury case. According to the plot, Archer first claimed that he spent a night with Baroness Thatcher (still the Prime Minister when Archer’s case broke out), but then changed it to a far-fetched tale of a love affair with Princess Diana, all to provide himself with an alibi for the time he spent with a prostitute. The Western Mail, published in Cardiff, gave out a few details to its readers shortly before the premiere. It said that Thatcher would seduce Archer by performing a striptease on the desk in her cabinet, and that she would also have her hip adorned with a heart tattoo with the letters JA. As the film’s director, Guy Jenkin explained, “…the whole piece is a joke about Jeffrey Archer’s tendency for inaccurate precis”.
So, this would-be obnoxious romp turned out to be a political satire. The BBC used the archaic expression ‘political body’ literally, and admittedly, Archer’s body did not behave ‘politically correctly’ when he was committing adultery. It must yet be noted that in the film Archer did not deny the fact of cheating; he denied the fact of cheating with a prostitute. Bearing in mind that the PM was wearing a tattoo and performed a striptease, one certainly have to ask, exactly what the difference was between her and the prostitute on that occasion. Such confusion shows that today a human body and politics become increasingly intertwined as both can be engaged in “dirty” activity. To treat this as a novelty would be a mistake. One only has to look back at the burlesque tradition in the United States or at the cabaret tradition in Europe, to see the roots of political humiliation through the use of overtly sexual imagery. Overall, however, today notices the tendency to reject the outdated (?) cultural values and identities and to substitute these with the fleeting virtual identities and values, to the extent when politics begins to be perceived as an irrational activity. Let us consider various examples how watching or displaying bodies can in fact be a manifestation of a political stance.
Horrible Prettiness: Social Hierarchy, Burlesque and the Body Politics.
The trait of being ethically rigid is attributed to the English society during so-called Victorian times, but in fact it was never a typically English or a typically Victorian trait. What is interesting, however, is that in the 19th c. across the Continent and across America a sterile mainstream morality co-existed with what Richard Grant White called “the defiance of a system”. The burlesque culture in America represented such defiance. A burlesque performer was a construction of what was called the “low other”: “something that is reviled by and excluded from the dominant social order as debased, dirty, and unworthy, but that is simultaneously the object of desire and/or fascination”.
It can be argued that main political issues of the turn of the 19th and 20th c. were not those related to geopolitics, but those gender-related. Woman was revered and despised at once, and it was arguably down to the artistic movements of the time to support this duality in attitudes. Katie Chopin, an American writer, in the novel The Awakening depicted a sexual self-discovery of a female protagonist, which put her in a strong opposition to the social norms. One of the iconic representatives of the art nouveau, Aubrey Beardsley, illustrated Oscar Wilde’s Salome, showing the reader a horribly beautiful woman who through her outstanding performance murdered the prophet. It is noticeable that these women did not survive the end of the books that told their stories. But it is also evident that women were gradually being invested with power either to define their lives, or to define the lives of the others. The image and story of Salome can be regarded as the best historical example and perhaps an inspiration to the entire culture of female performance that ensued. At any event, the turn of the centuries saw the beginning of power-struggle between men and women. And while it is correct to say that in the English political context the decisive victory came with the right to vote for women, culturally, women found themselves ‘on top’ of men in many continental cabarets and American clubs that offered ‘exotic dancing’.
It is significant that the burlesque culture succeeded in establishing female power through stripping women of their femininity. But although, as Allen tells us, such well-known traits of burlesque as strippers, runways and candybutchers did not appear until 1920s, burlesque and cabaret accentuated the way women could rule men – through offering them satisfaction to their sexual needs. Dance was the ultimate expression on this occasion, as watching it gave both aesthetic and sexual pleasure to the male viewer.
Burlesque is important all the more because it was the arena of acting out the persistent cultural contradiction: women were often mistreated, but without them men would be left unfulfilled. The question “What it means to be a woman?” amply defined the popular objectification of woman as a sexual object that contradicted a common-place hierarchy.
One cannot fail noticing that the burlesque culture at the beginning of its existence did not imbue the same strength of sexual energy, as it came to do at the later stage. What stands out is that these early performers were professional entertainers. However, it is perhaps the later burlesque that shows how feminism would eventually come into being. Whereas before the clubs and cabarets a woman was suppressed as a man’s household ‘slave’, the erotic performance enslaved her sexually. On the other hand, erotic performance in the form of striptease also enslaved men who began to be increasingly regarded as sex-driven creatures, as portrayed with disgust by Valerie Solanas.
Nevertheless, at the beginning the exotic performance was the defiance of an emotionally repressed and hypocrite system, and as such it was effective in attaining a goal that was largely political. At the very least, burlesque performers succeeded in gradually making the society gender-oriented, rather than sex-oriented. It contributed to the fact that today none of the spheres of life is possible without equality in gender representation, which also includes politics.
A Porn Star in Parliament: A Descent in Values or a Political Advance?
In 1987 a Hungarian-born Ilona Staller, aka Cicciolina, was elected to the Italian Parliament, as a Radical Party candidate. While one may have had a vague idea of Ilona, they would definitely know who Cicciolina was, – one of the leading Italian porn actresses of the 1970s and 1980s. Cicciolina has been an amazingly active politician: “she campaigns for a safe future without nuclear energy and with absolute sexual freedom including the right to sex in prisons. She is against all forms of violence including the death penalty and the use of animals for fur or scientific experimentation. She is for the decriminalization of drugs, against censorship of any kind, in favour of sex education in schools, and for objective information about AIDS. She has proposed a tax on automobiles to reduce the damages of smog and fund the defence of nature”. Her recent intention was to run for a post of mayor of Milan in the 2006 elections. When she announced her plans in 2004, she was going to rekindle the city’s economy by opening a casino in a medieval palace in the city centre – despite the fact that the palace is a regular cultural venue.
While an MP, Cicciolina made history by baring her left breast or performing a striptease during press-conferences. A conclusion about her as one of the highly controversial ‘political bodies’ would be an obvious one, but Cicciolina was virtually eager to use her body in the strictly political means: to stop Saddam Hussein, for example, during the Gulf War. It is certainly significant that she was reluctant to use her real name and referred to a better-known stage-name, albeit notorious. And in spite of her ongoing political engagements and a long-ended film career, Cicciolina maintains the website, with zones of explicit content, available to members only.
The question that rises from this sketch is – how should one regard the fact that a hardcore porn actress not only entered the Parliament, but was re-elected despite her explicitly indecent behaviour? Should this point out to the descent in moral values, or is this in fact the proof of political tolerance? The answer will be ambivalent. One can remember Mata Hari, an erotic dancer, who was later convicted as a spy, in which case Cicciolina’s example can be examined from the same perspective. On the other hand, one can remember Madonna’s videoclip on her song American Dream, which was an open critique of the Bush government and the protest against the war in Iraq. As Mrs Ritchie constantly reminds us these days, one of her ambitions was to prove that a woman can be beautiful, sexy and clever all at once. Such view does not exclude a possible involvement in political activity, and Cicciolina is therefore the proof of the society’s recognition of a political potential of a woman.
If we get back to our discussion of how burlesque contributed to the social and political emancipation of a woman, we will notice that it was largely nonsensical. The viewer was never told what he has to make from watching the performer. But what he was expected to do is to throw away any conventionality, because this was the purpose of burlesque: to break social and cultural convention. This is no wonder, for example, that in today’s irreligious or religiously apathetic society a burlesque performer can appear in the nun’s dress only to reveal a heavily tattooed torso. Another example is a performer who swallowed a neon sword. Sword-swallowing is a popular form of entertainment, but it was normally a male prerogative. On this occasion, however, both ‘masculinity’ and seriousness of such performance are mocked, because the sword is not made of steel.
Therefore, one may conclude that when Cicciolina bared her breasts naked, she did not mean to inflict anger – she simply bared her breasts, without any compelling reason or perhaps because she was proud of her previous job, or of her own body. As she said on one occasion, her breasts did the world less harm than Bin Laden’s terrorism. What is indubitable is that through this act she was defying a ‘regular’ image of female politicians, and that she was quite explicitly demonstrating the fact that a half-naked woman can also be a successful and active politician.
Conclusion
Observing these examples, makes one think exactly how we perceive politics and those engaged in it. First of all, it seems that in a democracy where the rights to freedom of speech and freedom of expression are vigilantly monitored by watchdogs and the public alike, it is difficult to reserve a ‘political space’ for politics and politicians, i.e. such space in the social or cultural discourse where politics can be unapproachable. The problem, obviously, is not whether Mrs Thatcher ever had a tattoo or performed a striptease; it is whether the public can or should see a politician’s body bared naked, even in a fictional story. It is also significant that while before it was largely men who were committing adulteries or were engaged in illicit behaviour, women now take an equal share in such activities.
This means not only that everyone can now discuss politics from whatever point of view, but also that everyone can take part in it. Eventually, political ‘wisdom’ that used to be mandatory for any kind of politician in the past is gradually being substituted by ‘common sense’, which opens the doors into politics for representatives of popular culture. What tends to happen, however, is that the public does not want to let go of the traits it cherished in these representatives, and so it wishes the showmen-turned-politicians to preserve these traits, despite the fact that they contradict the ‘serious’ nature of politics. But then, is it not the favourite popular challenge to the ‘old’ culture – to strip it off conventions? If so, then it means that probably politics is no longer serious, – or perhaps that sex no longer matters.