Abstract

The body art of two contemporary American women artists--Janine Antoni's 1992 work Gnaw and Jenny Strauss's 1999 work Intake --provides ground for a discussion of orality in a postmodern feminist art context. Both works were made primarily through the act of biting, and both mimicked the eating disorder bulimia. Orality, as the stage in an infant's development when he/she negotiates independence from the mother and the outside world largely through biting and sucking, relates to the mother figure, the notion of the abject, and subjectivity development. The eating disorders of anorexia nervosa and bulimia also relate to orality, the mother-infant relationship, and food. Furthermore, the fasting practices of medieval women mystics substantiate a specific relationship that can exist between women and food in a patriarchal society. Through a discussion of all of these elements, the relationship between orality, food and women is revealed as having always been a site of a complex social and political struggle and efficiency in relation to the mother and to the patriarchal order. For these contemporary artists, enlisting orality and mimicking the infantile state in their artworks has offered a way to address the mother-infant relationship as well as the socio-political underpinnings to women's relationship to food.