Monella - leaky — Ellis Dowle

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MONELLA - Volume One Leaky

Opening Piece

HAVE I GONE TOO FAR?

Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you? (Spivak, 1990, p.62).

The bright mid-morning sun wakes me abruptly to the early morning hours of 11am. Last night's mascara is stinging my eyes. There is a half-eaten bowl of mysterious takeaway on my desk, and my hair is unbrushed, probably matted and I am hungover. I am sweating slightly, and I have been awake for approximately forty-five minutes. And I am sitting here, damp, dishevelled, slightly rank, asking myself the question that civilization has always wanted women to ask: have I gone too far?
There is a particular kind of woman that culture cannot stand. She is not the woman who drinks too much. She is not the woman who is sad or even a little chaotic — that is palatable, even marketable, if it is understandable as a ‘journey’ before transforming into the ‘perfect’, (perfect in this sense is defined as being conventionally heteronormatively attractive) consumable woman. A clear example of this happening in popular culture is the 1985 teen tragicomedy The Breakfast Club. The originally clothed edgy, messy, gothic, pathological liar Allison is transformed into an acceptable woman where she embraces a presentable femineity that gets her noticed by the jock. She could have undergone the same emotional changes that are signalled without such drastic erasure of her style and therefor identity. The woman the world cannot stand is the one who simply is: disordered, leaking, uncontained and completely unbothered. Julia Kristeva tells us that the abject is that which "does not respect borders, positions, rules" and it is the thing that disturbs "identity, system, order" (Kristeva, 1982, p. 4). The abject is what must be expelled so that the clean, proper subject can exist. And who, in the Western symbolic order, has most consistently been cast as that expellable thing? Women. Bodies that leak, bleed, sweat, overflow. Bodies that bear, as Kristeva puts it, "secretion or discharge", anything that pours out of the feminine form is marked, culturally, as defiling (Kristeva, 1982, p. 71). The messy woman is not a failure of self-discipline but a structural threat of a patriarchy that only concerns itself with docile values and profitable productivity. I think about this every time I forget to blot my cherry red lipstick, or spill coffee on a white top. My stains symbol my womanhood and rebellion. I think about this now, sitting here, hot and unglamorous and deeply human.

Rosalind Gill, writing on postfeminist media culture, identifies something that is perhaps even more insidious than outright disgust: the expectation that femininity is "a bodily property” that a woman's worth is located entirely in the management and presentation of her physical self (2007, p. 149). The body is "presented simultaneously as women's source of power and as always unruly, requiring constant monitoring, surveillance, discipline and re-modelling" (Gill, 2007, p. 149). You have a body, the body is your power, but the body is always already failing due to its biological process, always one armpit hair away from public humiliation. The game is rigged from the start. The surveillance is overwhelming, and the regulation is endless.

I did not choose to be this way, exactly. I chose to stay out too late. I chose to have the fourth glass of cheap Pino Grigio. I chose not to wash my face before bed, to sleep in a bra, to wear yesterday's jeans because they were already on the floor and therefore closer. These are not grand feminist gestures. They are, however, a consistent and committed failure to perform what Gill calls the "self-surveillance, monitoring and self-discipline" that postfeminist culture demands of women as the very condition of acceptable existence (Gill, 2007, p. 155). My bedroom floor is, in this sense, a minor act of political resistance.

Gemma Commane, in her book Bad Girls, Dirty Bodies, reminds us that "dirtiness and stigma do not happen overnight, nor are they aimed sporadically. Dirt, abjection and filth are still terms that ensure the Bad Girl is seen in a negative light" (Commane, 2020, p. 6). There is a history behind every raised eyebrow, every "you're not going out like that," every well-meaning suggestion that I might feel better if I just tidied my room. The label of dirty, messy, too much it sticks. It is designed to stick. It is a mechanism for keeping women small, clean, presentable, manageable. Commane's research participants, women who perform, who transgress, who refuse safe femininity, demonstrate that the Bad Girl is not a lack but a presence. As she writes, "Bad Girls happen to things" (Commane, 2020, p. 76). They are subjects, not objects. They act upon the world; they are not simply acted upon. I find this genuinely moving at 11am while eating a leftover tuna melt wrap. I, too, happen to things.

There is a version of liberation that culture has decided it can tolerate. She is sexually confident but not threatening. She is a bit chaotic but ultimately ‘on a journey’. She cries in the bathroom and then pulls herself together. She is Bridget Jones: lovably messy, endearingly hopeless, but crucially oriented towards self-improvement, towards the man, towards the resolution. Her disorder is temporary. Her abjection is narrative. I refuse the narrative arc. I am not in the second act. I am simply here, in my unwashed jeans, and I am not going anywhere in particular. What Kristeva understood, and what postfeminist culture works very hard to make us forget, is that the object cannot finally be expelled. It keeps returning. The border between clean and dirty, proper and improper, contained and overflowing is never stable. "The abject is the violence of mourning for an object that has always already been lost," she writes (Kristeva, 1982, p. 15). Mess is not the opposite of order. It is what order has always been built on top of, what order has always been trying to suppress. The woman who leaks, who overflows, who leaves dishes in the sink, she is not failing to be clean. She is exposing the fiction that cleanliness was ever the natural state of things.

So yes: I am hungover. I am hot. I smell like last night's perfume and this morning's laziness. I have not responded to several urgent messages. I have, by most cultural metrics, failed what is considered respectable femininity today.

And I find, sitting here, that I simply do not care.

Women will always ask if they have gone too far. The correct answer is not yet.

By Ellis Dowle

Bibliography

Commane, G. (2020) Bad Girls, Dirty Bodies: Sex, Performance and Safe Femininity. London: Bloomsbury.

Gill, R. (2007) 'Postfeminist media culture: elements of a sensibility', European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(2), pp. 147–166.

Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

Spivak, G. C. (1990) The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Edited by S. Harasym. New York: Routledge.

Essay One
Does Carolee Schneemann's Meat Joy (1964) constitute a deliberate feminist dismantling of the cultural mechanisms that discipline and control the female body?

Eating is rarely understood as a neutral act. As Cultural Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins observes, 'food dealings are a delicate barometer, a ritual statement as it were, of social relations, and food is thus employed instrumentally as a starting, a sustaining, or a destroying mechanism of sociability' (1972, p. 215). Food governs social belonging. How one eats signals how civilised, how disciplined and how properly gendered one is. For women particularly, the expectation of bodily restraint at table, to eat sparingly, decorously, never greedily, reflects a much broader cultural demand. This raises a central question: can a performance work deliberately dismantle these mechanisms of control, reclaiming the female body as a site of excess rather than containment? Through analysis of Carolee Schneemann's artistic performance Meat Joy (1964) does precisely this. Schneemann transforms the female body into a site of excess that violates normative feminine discipline. Drawing on Susan Bordo's analysis of the disciplined female body, Iris Marion Young's phenomenology of feminine movement and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection (1982), read alongside Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the grotesque body (1984), this essay will demonstrate that Meat Joy enacts a powerful feminist transgression, one that exposes and dismantles the cultural mechanisms through which women's bodies are controlled.

To appreciate the force of Schneemann's transgression, it is first necessary to establish what she is transgressing against. In Unbearable Weight (1993), Susan Bordo argues that the female body has become a primary 'text of culture' upon which patriarchal anxieties about appetite, control and gender are relentlessly inscribed. For Bordo, the cultural demand that women eat sparingly, manage their hunger and maintain a slender, contained form is not a matter of mere aesthetics; it is a mechanism of power. Drawing on Foucault, Bordo argues that the disciplinary practices directed at women's bodies function to produce docile, self-monitoring subjects who police their own appetites, internalising social norms as personal virtues (1993, p. 66). The woman who restrains herself at table is not simply being polite, she is unconsciously herself as properly feminine through an act of self-erasure. This disciplinary logic is rooted in a much deeper philosophical tradition. When discussing the duality of body and soul, Bordo argues that 'whatever the specific historical content of the duality, the body is the negative term, and if woman is the body, then women are that negativity… distraction from knowledge, seduction away from God, capitulation to sexual desire, violence or aggression, failure of will, even death' (1993, p. 11). This reveals that within Western philosophy, the female body has been situated as a site of danger and disorder, the antithesis of rational, spiritual and moral life. This argument is deepened by Young's phenomenological account of feminine bodily experience. In Throwing Like a Girl (1980), Young observes that women are socialised to inhabit minimal space, to move with inhibited intentionality, experiencing their bodies simultaneously as acting subject and watched object (1980, p. 143). The female body learns, through repeated social conditioning, to hold back from space, from contact and from the full expression of physical capacity. It is precisely this learned restraint that Meat Joy sets out to undo.

Food is employed as a “destroying mechanism of sociability” (Sahlins, 1972 p.215) when it violates the ritual order governing consumption Meat Joy is precisely this destruction, enacted as feminist critique. The shame that would ordinarily discipline a woman who handled raw meat without restraint, who rolled in it, smeared it, shared it with other bodies, is collectively dissolved. Shame, as Bordo (1993 p.57) notes, is the affective mechanism through which women's self-monitoring is sustained; it operates through the internalised gaze of social disapproval. By staging transgression collectively and joyfully, Schneemann renders that mechanism inoperative. There is no isolated, shamed body here, only a shared ceremony of refusal. Meat Joy breaks social rules around food and femininity by exposing those rules as instruments of control. As a result, embracing the body in its raw, exposed, grotesque, and abject forms becomes a valid way for feminist resistance.

The performance opens with a deliberately ordinary social scene that establishes the very norms of gendered decorum and food ritual that the performance will subsequently destroy. A waitress serves four men and four women, creating a composed tableau of social dining in which bodies occupy their expected positions and food circulates through its proper channels. As Sahlins reminds us, food dealings operate as 'a ritual statement of social relations' (1972, p. 215). This opening scene enacts precisely that. It is an orderly performance of social belonging in which femininity is legible, contained and well-behaved. By beginning here, Schneemann makes explicit that what follows is not merely provocation but a direct inversion of a recognisable social script. The audience is first made comfortable, then made to watch that comfort disintegrate, a calculated structure that ensures the subsequent rupture carries its full critical force.

The central rupture of Meat Joy occurs when the waitress begins hurling raw chickens, fish and sausages directly onto the bodies of the performers, violently dismantling the civilised management of food and flesh. After a prolonged period of choreographed movement lasting upwards of forty-five minutes, the waitress abandons her role as a servant of social order and becomes an agent of chaos, launching raw animal matter onto the near-naked performers. The raw, uncooked state of the meat is critical. It has not been processed, plated or aestheticized, simply arriving as flesh. Kristeva identifies raw meat as a primary form of the abject, matter that 'disturbs identity, system, order' (1982, p. 4), and in this moment Schneemann floods the performance space with precisely this substance. The throwing enacts that the ritual of serving and consuming is inverted entirely, becoming an act of transgression rather than communion. This is the performance's answer to the disciplinary order established in the opening scene; where the first sequence staged containment, this one obliterates it.

As the performance intensifies, the performers actively rub raw fish, chicken and sausages across their own and each other's half-naked bodies. This enacts abjection by choosing to inhabit rather than expel what culture deems most threatening. Rather than recoiling from the raw flesh, the performers, already streaked with wet paint and dressed in feather-adorned fur bikinis, draw the animal matter into contact with their skin, stuffing it into their clothing and passing it between one another. The performance refuses the hygienic distance that civilised food culture demands. Schneemann described the work as driven by 'tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent' (Schneemann, cited in Electronic Arts Intermix, 1964), and it is in this phase that repulsion and pleasure become indistinguishable. For Bordo, the disciplined female body is one that maintains mastery over its own appetites and its encounters with matter (1993, p. 166); in smearing raw flesh across their bodies, Schneemann's performers enact the full collapse of that mastery. This physical encounter with raw animal matter is the essay's central image of feminist abjection, not shameful but deliberately and joyfully reclaimed.

The fur bikinis worn by Schneemann's performers are central to this strategy and extend the performance's critique beyond food into the terrain of femininity itself. Fur carries a long and densely layered cultural history. As Faires investigates the history of fur and its closeness to human anthropology. They hypothesize that hair reminds us of our 'original furriness' and our biological and symbolic connection to animals, carrying with it a persistent promise of transformation that has made it one of fashion's most charged materials (2020, pp.15-16). Julia Emberley notes that fur's symbolic value lies in its 'joining of wealth and prestige with an explicitly feminine connotation' (1997, p. 3). However, in this performance Schneemann inverts this entirely, stripping away the prestige and retaining only the animal, refusing the domesticated, status-bearing femininity that fur ordinarily performs. The fur bikini thus places the female performer in a pointed double bind, simultaneously a sexualised spectacle and an animalised creature, collapsing the distinction between woman and beast that civilised femininity is expected most rigorously to maintain. In Bakhtinian terms, the fur-clad, meat-smeared body becomes fully grotesque: open, boundless, merged with flesh that is not its own and irrecoverably beyond the social demand for feminine suppression.

The shame that would ordinarily discipline a woman who handled raw meat without restraint, who rolled in it, smeared it and shared it with other bodies, is collectively dissolved in the ensemble performance. Shame, as Bordo notes, is the affective mechanism through which women's self-monitoring is sustained operating through the internalised gaze of social disapproval (1993, p. 57). By staging transgression collectively and joyfully, Schneemann renders that mechanism of shame obsolete. There is no isolated, shamed body here, only a shared ceremony of refusal. This collective dimension is decisive in answering the essay's central question, because it demonstrates that Schneemann's dismantling of bodily discipline is not the act of an exceptional individual but a structural undoing.

The performers finally collapse into indistinguishable heaps of entangled bodies on the floor, enacting Bakhtin's grotesque body in its most complete form, a body that has dissolved its boundaries and merged with the world and with others (1984, p. 26). Men and women together crawl, roll and writhe across plastic sheeting, their individual identities dissolving into a collective mass of paint, meat and flesh, set to the incongruous soundtrack of The Supremes' Baby Love. The choice of music is itself facilitates intention. The pop song about romantic longing plays over a scene that radically reworks the meaning of bodily contact and desire, suggesting that joy and transgression are not opposites but inseparable. Young observes that women are trained to inhabit minimal space and to restrain their movement (1980, p. 143). The writhing collective of Meat Joys the precise antithesis of this trained inhibition. The body fills space, contacts other bodies and refuses containment; the socialised feminine self-minimisation is physically, visibly and joyfully undone.

This essay has demonstrated that Meat Joy (1964) constitutes a deliberate feminist dismantling of the disciplinary mechanisms that govern the female body. Through close analysis of the performance, from the civilised opening scene to the collective writhing in raw flesh, it has been shown that Bordo's disciplined body, Young's inhibited subject and Kristeva's abject converge with striking coherence in a single work, each theory illuminating a distinct dimension of Schneemann's transgression. Together, they confirm that Meat Joy answers its central question emphatically: yes, a performance work can dismantle the mechanisms of bodily control, and Schneemann does so by transforming the very substances of abjection, raw flesh, animal fur and collective shame, into instruments of liberation. Future scholarship might productively examine how Meat Joy's legacy extends into contemporary feminist performance, particularly in relation to intersectional dimensions of race and class that this essay's framework does not fully address. Ultimately, Schneemann's work insists that having female flesh is not a problem to be managed, but a freedom to be claimed.

Bibliography

Bakhtin, M. (1984) Rabelais and His World. Translated by H. Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Bordo, S. (1993) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Emberley, J. (1997) The Cultural Politics of Fur. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Electronic Arts Intermix (1964) Meat Joy, Carolee Schneemann [online]. Available at: https://www.eai.org/titles/meat-joy (Accessed: 18 April 2026).

Faiers, J. (2020) Fur: A Sensitive History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by L.S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

Sahlins, M. (1972) Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton.

Schneemann, C. (1979) More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings. New Paltz: Documentext.

Young, I.M. (1980) 'Throwing like a girl: a phenomenology of feminine body comportment, motility, and spatiality', Human Studies, 3(2), pp. 137–156.

Essay Two