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Abstract
This article examines what I term the "fleshy" politics of Rebecca Belmore's 2002 Vigil and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's contributions to the 2009 version of the performance project Sins Invalid: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility. Focusing on the embodied performances of both Belmore and Piepzna-Samarasinha, I read the skin of the artist as a site where complex politics develop. This analysis is broken into three sections: the first considers the relationship between the performing body and the performance space; the second attends to specific movements each artist makes; the third focuses on garments worn in each piece. Together, I argue, these components of Belmore and Piepzna-Samarasinha's performances contribute to fleshy politics that reimagine the relationship between individuals and community, corporeality and geography, and the present and the past.
Recommended Citation
Balzer, Samantha. 2014. "Beginning with the Body: Fleshy Politics in the Performance Art of Rebecca Belmore and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha." Journal of Feminist Scholarship 6 (Spring): 47-58. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/jfs/vol6/iss6/4
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