Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Coco Fusco as the Interrogator in her play A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the
New America, P.S. 122, New York, 2006. (Photo by Kambui Olujimi)
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).
José Esteban Muñoz is Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the
Arts/NYU. He is the author of Disidentifications: 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
Pieces
as Colin Powell, Alberto Gonzalez, and Elaine in both the video and the performance. Both
137
art projects run in the grooves of a certain Room of One’s Own are performative investiga-
ideological record that I have defined above as tions into the role of women in today’s military.
the US government’s performance of the state In her pieces, Fusco goes beyond the binary
of exception. Italian philosopher Giorgio of England and Lynch to enact the larger stakes
Agamben’s engagement with the work of jurist for women in the military and the nation.
and political theorist Carl Schmidt is central While the advancement of women in the
here. Agamben, in Homo Sacer ([1995] 1998) military is often hailed as “real progress” in
delineates how the performance of a state of the public discourse, Fusco’s performances
exception secures the sovereign’s power. In the dismantle this logic of “progress” in much the
sequel to that book, State of Exception (2005), same way that Walter Benjamin did in his
Agamben brings this theoretical model to bear famous “Thesis on the Philosophy of History”
directly on the US’s current “war on terror” ([1939] 1968). Fusco’s art project investigates
and the unethical imprisonment of so called the grand claims made for the betterment of
“enemy combatants” at Guantánamo Bay. women both within the US military and its
Through the declaration of a national emer- occupied populations. The contemporary price
gency, martial law, a “terror alert,” etc., the of women’s so-called progress is their imbrica-
state stages the state of exception to naturalize tion in America’s global policing protocol. In
and justify unchecked and abusive manifesta- the same way that Secretary of State Rice does a
tions of power amid a general scene of savage certain symbolic work as an individual—a black
social asymmetry. woman in an administration whose policies
Rather than denouncing this performance of have been especially brutal to non-white people
power, Fusco hijacks power’s groove, occupying within the nation and abroad—women in the
it with a critical difference that denaturalizes armed services seems to speak to a soft logic of
the government’s ideological camouflage. gender progress and advancement. The Lynch/
There is a lot of camouflage in Operation England dichotomy is not dissimilar from the
Atropos and A Room of One’s Own. It is impor- age-old virgin/whore binary that structures
tant to remember that this specific mode of knowledge about gender and women.
patterning—theatre—was invented to mirror The women’s odyssey in Operation Atropos
the natural world. Its effects are meant to be is a performance of infiltration into the logic of
naturalizing. Fusco’s performance enacts a kind militaristic interrogation as a form of national
of hypercamouflage by pushing camouflage’s defense. Yet it ultimately reveals the imperialist
process of naturalizing. The nation’s perfor- motivations behind such practices. Fusco’s title
mance of the state of exception, its current A Room of One’s Own is not just a punning
Middle East policy, and even its use of words reference to Virginia Woolf’s 1929 book, but
like “liberation” and “freedom” are ideological a commentary on the rewriting of the rhetoric
disguises that are meant to be taken as natural. of gender equality and feminism within our
In an effect that can be described as neo- state of exception. It is a call to reconsider
Brechtian, Fusco’s art interrupts this deploy- the terms that now hold sway in the national
ment of mass camouflage. consciousness.
The performance and the video also Finally, let me point out that Fusco’s artistic
interrogate the military’s logic of gender practice is not meant to be easily digested or
advancement and women’s progress. The video carefree. It rarely offers the audience the
begins by meditating on the presence of female comfort of illusion or shadow. Her work
torturers in the Abu Ghraib prison photos. intends to be difficult and harsh. It folds back
Pvt. Lynndie England and other women were the conceptual camouflage that the state
sacrificed as aberrations and exceptions by continuously produces as it debunks an
the Department of Defense’s public opinion insidious national order with global conse-
machine. The nation was meant to see England quences. The goal of Fusco’s work is to make
as playing the opposite role from a figure like the spectator feel uncomfortable in the here
Coco Fusco
Pvt. Jessica Lynch. Operation Atropos and A and now of our political situation. It is also a
138
performance of research/research as perfor- war in Iraq, I had no clear idea of what women
mance—somewhat like the work of Critical Art actually did in the US military. They are
Ensemble. Rather than offer entertainment as currently operating in contexts that, despite
such, Fusco strives to produce difficult President Bush’s assertion that the war “ended”
knowledge that strips away the national shortly after the invasion of Iraq, are combat
camouflage of the all-too-familiar and patriotic zones. Women constitute 15 percent of the
spectacle of stars and stripes to reveal the armed forces in Iraq and 35 percent of US
neoimperial military field attire beneath. military intelligence. These figures are
Fusco’s performances are in the most unprecedented for the American armed forces.
immediate sense a feminist commentary aimed Media coverage of the experience of American
at the global status of women. Chandra Talpade servicewomen has largely characterized them as
Mohanty, in Feminism without Borders (2003), victims—of sexual harassment and rape by male
calls for a feminist pedagogy of antigloabliza- soldiers and as working mothers troubled by
tion. Mohanty argues for a critique of global- long separations from their children. Even the
ization that resists the ways globalization media’s treatment of Lynndie England, one the
corrodes the lives of women and girls who military police at Abu Ghraib who appeared in
suffer most within capitalism and imperialism. several of the infamous photographs depicting
Antiglobalization entails the production of new abuse of prisoners, characterizes her as a
modes of knowledge between the global and victim—of her boyfriend, Army Spc. Charles
the local. Fusco’s project represents difficult Graner, and of her circumstances as a working-
knowledge that shuttles between the local and class, poorly educated young woman.
the global. By considering the ways in which When the images of prisoner abuse at Abu
US womanhood becomes militarized, Fusco’s Ghraib were first released, I was struck by the
audiences understand how women “over here” presence of women in them as perpetrators
and “over there” are part of globalization’s of violence. A few months later, stories began
oppressive script. Fusco interrupts that script to be leaked to the media about how female
with an art practice that presents counternarra- military interrogators in Guantánamo and
tives, stories that reveal insurrectionist ways of Abu Ghraib were using sexual harassment as a
being in the world. tactic to break Muslim detainees. These tactics
—José Esteban Muñoz have been mentioned frequently in detainee
testimony, as well as in public statements made
References
by military intelligence officers and FBI
Agamben, Giorgio investigators. Military historian Alfred McCoy
1998 [1995] Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare (A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from
Life. Stanford: Stanford University the Cold War to the War on Terror, 2006) and
Press. journalist Seymour Hersh (Chain of Command:
2005 State of Exception. Chicago: University The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, 2004) have
of Chicago Press. both argued that the use of sexual harassment
Benjamin, Walter by interrogators is part of CIA special opera-
1968 [1939] “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” tions designed to capitalize on the supposed
In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, vulnerability of Arabs to such methods.
edited by Hannah Arendt, 253-64. Research for the development of these opera-
New York: Schocken Books. tions includes anthropological studies that
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade proffer stereotypical and Orientalist views
of the so-called “Arab mind.”
2003 Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing
Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: It seemed to me that the phenomenon of
A Room of One’s Own
139