Bodies in Sight: Shawna Dempsey (Re)Configures Desire

Solo performance artist Shawna Dempsey (together with her collaborator, Lorri Millan) uses performance in an innovative way - one that exposes, bare(s) witness, and intervenes in the social “performance” of gender roles and also stages lesbian presence. Revealing how misogynist, heterosexist culture is re-produced, and therefore how it can be altered, she states, “in the self-created world of the performance space, our personas have the freedom to make their own self-definitions” (Bennett 9). Dempsey has collaborated with Lorri Millan on the creation of feminist, costume-based performance art since 1989. Her worldwide performances and Dempsey and Millan’s film and video productions critique cultural scripts for “femininity” and the appropriately performed, properly gendered body. Exemplifying Judith Butler’s claim that gender is “real only to the extent that it is performed” (278), Dempsey invites awareness of the performative aspects that produce gender in an ongoing process of cultural construction, including dress, stance, gestures, looks, and voice. Significantly, whether on the stage or in the street, her body and looks are very feminine, her body has the shape that culture tells women to strive for, and her age is within the range where women are provoked to show their bodies.