Cosey Fanni Tutti, Age and Place

Abstract This chapter focuses on Cosey Fanni Tutti’s 2017 memoir, Art, Sex, Music, in relation to the importance of place in aging and memoir, specifically with regard to transgression and being “difficult.” It argues that the medium/place, or format, of a written memoir combined with the temporal/place, or timing, of the vantage point of an older literary voice does something to the status of the transgressive performances of her youth. There is a change in register enabled by reflection and distance that allows for the processing of such transgressions. In parallel to this process, there is a continuing tension that cannot be wholly suppressed. Tutti’s memoir goes some way to valorizing a non-phallocentric place, by writing into popular cultural history the “fanni” of the opera. This “fanni” is about feminine power in relation to sex, sound, and the body now made legible through twenty-first-century memoir.