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Motherhood According to Finley: "The Theory of Total Blame"

1992; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1146183

1531-4715

Lynda Hart,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

ture return in our culture accompanied by spurious appeals to the real. In the summer of I99I, we witness Madonna's Truth or Dare, which purports to show us what the bad girl is like behind the scenes. Its primary focus is to reassure us that the sexually transgressive idol has suitably feminine attributes, maternal ones of course. Madonna plays mommy to her troupe of gay male dancers and her female backup singers, with special attention to her one heterosexual, and virulently homophobic son, who needs special attention, threatened as he is by the gay dancers. One of the most prolonged inside views we see is Madonna's visit to her mother's grave; she lies down next to it, imagining herself buried next to her, cradling her head on the tombstone. When she bows down to her father who joins her onstage, the gesture is almost gratuitous; Madonna has already succumbed to the master discourse on femininity through the excessive rendering of the maternal. In the alternative art world, Karen Finley, who became the media's centerpiece in NEA controversies, appears on the cover of The Philadelphia Inquirer's Sunday magazine (7 April 1991) looking more like a centerfold. The story highlights the contrast between her beastliness onstage and her beauty offstage, captured in a series of photographs by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. On the cover, Finley poses in a black shift with a plunging neckline, one thigh teasingly exposed. Inside, she is photographed in half-shadows, her head thrown back in the classic posture of vulnerable femininity, her neck exposed, her eyes closed. Insets show her peeking out from a sari, performing in a low-cut evening gown, emerging from behind a curtain, bikini-clad. These stills make it impossible to see the ways in which Finley subverts such iconic reproductions of women in her performances.