Gender in (dis)order: masturbatory emancipation in Peaches’s ‘Whose Jizz is This?’

Introduction

In a more-than-human world, how can we reflect on persistent modes of oppression, especially as they relate to those who are unable to speak for themselves? Is there still artistic potential in calling for queer feminist liberation in a patriarchal society? Or do we need new forms that transcend the creative sphere, into the realm of everyday injustices, and elaborate on a utopic form of sexual emancipation? Such questions are an apt starting point for an analysis of the first solo exhibition by the Canadian musician and artist Peaches (b.1966), Whose Jizz is This? FIG. 1 at Kunstverein, Hamburg, in 2019, in which she translated the ethos of her transgressive stage performances into the museum space.

Whose Jizz is This? FIG. 2 centres on a group of ‘double masturbator’ sex toys, which reduce the female body to two openings: a vagina and a mouth. In Peaches’s narrative, however, these bodily surrogates break free from their enslavement and claim a self-determined life of their own.¹ The exhibition, which the artist has described as a ‘deconstructed musical’, is divided into fourteen performative ‘scenes’ that incorporate a combination of photography FIG. 3, textile, video, installation, animatronic sculpture FIG. 4, sound and light.² At the heart of each is the masturbators, which are present in their original, commercial form, as well as rendered in various materials, forms and sizes. As part of their burgeoning revolution, the masturbators come to name themselves Fleshies.

The intended purpose of the Fleshies is demonstrated in a video at the beginning of the exhibition: a review of a double masturbator posted on YouTube, in which the user describes it as ‘a mouth on one end and a pussy on the other […] without the headache’. The following scene is The Glory Hall FIG. 5, a tunnel-like stage set in which the Fleshies are lined up and lit as though in a theatre. In scene 8, The Make it Trio celebrate their gradual independence with a song about their struggles, and the exhibition concludes with a fountain of oversized Fleshie sculptures, in which they have reversed the principle of ‘being jizzed into’ and instead satisfy one another.

At the time, the exhibition gained little attention outside of Germany and was primarily covered in newspapers, rather than art criticism publications. This is probably a result of Peaches’s primary reputation as a musician, known for her provocative lyrics and stage performances, rather than as an artist. Indeed, Whose Jizz is This? exists characteristically somewhere between art exhibition, theatre performance and an erotically futuristic amusement park. The interdisciplinary nature of the project may also have played a part in why it was not much discussed or assessed critically within the art world.

This article will examine Peaches’s exhibition through both an art-historical and queer feminist lens in order to evaluate its contribution to feminist and posthumanist theories. It will analyse the consequences of transferring the approach and content of her sex-positive, electro-punk live concerts into a static, institutional gallery space. In particular, the present author will argue that by utilising the double masturbator as a central, autonomous agent for liberation, Peaches takes a novel approach to feminist claims for sexual emancipation. However, in so doing, the exhibition eludes a more inclusive, posthumanist longing for the unfixed queer body.

From stage to gallery

Since the early 2000s Peaches has been known as a provocative queer feminist voice, whose songs carry overt and sex-positive messages: ‘There’s only one peach / With the hole in the middle’, ‘Some people don’t like my crotch / Because it’s got fuzzy spots / But if you play Moses, you’ll meet burning bush, baby’.³ She is also known for her vivid stage designs and outfits, including rubber breasts, crotchless trousers and, more recently, fur overalls and dancing vulvas FIG. 6.

Peaches is a symbol of sexual permissiveness and queer feminist sex positivity, who is best understood in the context of the American punk scene. From the 1970s punk not only provided an opportunity to engage with DIY aesthetics, but also the freedom to express one’s identity outside of heteronormative culture. In the 1980s and early 1990s it continued to act as a space for sexual liberation and queer empowerment.⁴ In her songs, Peaches advocates for the elimination of shame in relation to sex and sexuality, as well as the ultimate eradication of patriarchal constraints – messages that are also clearly communicated in her exhibition. Therefore, it is possible to place her work within the histories of queer feminism, notably early critiques of the male-dominated art world, and subsequent dialogues on queer embodiment.⁵

The articulation of female or queer feminist embodiment free of the male gaze became especially prevalent in works of art from the 1970s. Artists such as Cindy Sherman (b.1954), Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019) and VALIE EXPORT (b.1940) began to performatively question patriarchal structures and show the body as abject, deformed and fragmented. Although such approaches remained prominent throughout the 1990s and 2000s, today queer feminist theory focuses more strongly on the visibility and acceptance of marginalised queer and BIPOC subjects. This contemporary focus aligns with posthuman feminist thinking, which also includes minoritised non-human and environmental agents.

In Whose Jizz is This? Peaches appoints the sex prosthesis as the central figure of her liberation tale. The Fleshies, which can be purchased easily online, are pink silicone tubes that taper in the middle. One side ends in a pink mouth with slightly parted lips, and the other in a rosy, hairless labia FIG. 7. Peaches’s narrator, therefore, is a white, sexualised, fragmented and depersonalised version of the female body. This ‘female’ stand-in – which is reduced to penetrable openings – is subverted by Peaches in an ironic attempt at prosthetic emancipation.

Here, Peaches builds on historical artistic visions of the female doll, which oscillate between uncanny double and sexually available companion to the male artist. In particular, Hans Bellmer (1902–75) is known for his anagrammatic dolls, which demonstrate a sexual longing for the subjugated, deformed and implicitly female body.⁶ The female-doll-body as sexual and passive ideal became a motif in artistic feminist critique in the 1980s and 1990s, for example Sherman’s photographs of fragmented doll parts that unsettle the implicitly male gaze by obscuring the doll’s gender.⁷ More recently, the artist Anna Uddenberg (b.1982) has created sculptures of absurdly twisted and contorted bodies, challenging the oversexualisation and subservience of the female body.

Unlike the implicit critique in these works, in Peaches’s exhibition the Fleshies announce their injustice aloud in the forms of song and speech. As the scenes progress they begin to distance themselves from sexual enslavement by their male users and form their own liberated counter-community. ‘How can we define ourselves?’, they ask, ‘I’m not calling myself a double masturbator. We need to find a name to unify us. Let’s call ourselves Fleshies’.⁸ In this way, Peaches effectively transforms the passive bodily openings of the masturbator into opportunities for their own sexual gratification, but also emancipation through speech. The Fleshies are a means for Peaches to insert her own sexually liberal voice into the exhibition.

The feminised sex prosthesis

What Peaches shows here is a feminist utopia in which the Fleshies assume the function of surrogate bodies, and at the same time become aware of their status as subjects. This recalls Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg: a figure that liberates itself from the patriarchal system by transcending binary oppositions – human and non-human, male and female, machinic and organic – to become an ironic and perverse representative of a new world order.⁹ In Whose Jizz is This? an attempt at a new sexually liberated prosthetic system is demonstrated by the Fleshies freely performing their sexual desire, as well as by their proclamations of newly found feminist insights. In this narrative, in order to arrive at a new queer feminist utopia, one must distance oneself from heteronormative structures and instead search for queer pleasure. This is emphasised by Peaches in her portrayal of the Fleshies in a self-sufficient search for sexual gratification, without the male ‘users’ they were designed for. Peaches’s concept most closely resembles a lesbian utopia without men, but it also aligns with the cyberfeminist search for emancipation by leaving the patriarchally appropriated female body behind and embracing existence in digital worlds.¹⁰ This idea is enhanced throughout the exhibition by the presentation of the masturbators in womb-like rooms and structures that resemble dimly lit nightclubs, evoking sex-positive and queer spaces.

The soundscape of the exhibition is a fourteen-channel thirty-minute composition, in which the Fleshies celebrate themselves as feminist subjects and reflect on their new social form. Their awareness of their subjecthood seems to function as the first step towards a feminist revolution. The white man as a proxy for ‘humankind’ in European culture and philosophy is here displaced by an inanimate object acting as a surrogate for minoritised and silenced subjects that are still under patriarchal control. This transition from object to subject is visible in the Fleshies themselves as they oscillate between a rubber-like artificiality – which at the same time implies a depersonalised, passive, receptive and oversexualised femininity – and the status of the living that they themselves claim. Even their self-identification as ‘Fleshies’ fluctuates between connotations of sexually available flesh and the implication of a material body.

The mouth becomes not only an instrument for loudly expressing one’s own liberation, but also a means of giving pleasure to others, as is made clear in the climax of the exhibition: the fountain sculpture FIG. 8. Peaches here draws upon older cultural imaginations of the female body as being closer to liquidity and sexual dissolution. In Male Fantasies (1977–78), for example, the sociologist Klaus Theweleit focused on the lives of Freikorps soldiers, connecting their fascism with their simultaneous desires for and hatred of women’s bodies and sexuality. As Barbara Ehrenreich notes in her foreword: ‘men will continue to see the world divided into “them” and “us”, male and female, hard and soft, solid and liquid – and they will, in every way possible, fight and flee the threat of submersion’.¹¹

As Yvonne Volkart outlines, the correlation between women and fluidity dates to the beginning of the twentieth century, when Sigmund Freud described femininity as closely connected to dissolution and death, positioning it as the unknown counterpart to male subjectivity and bodily stability. Cyberfeminist theory builds upon this binary when conceiving of female or queer subjects: appropriating the conception of the fluid female body in a way that adapts to a postmodern and posthuman digitised world, thus allowing them to free themselves from male attempts to delimit the uncontainable female.¹²

Therefore, the image of free-flowing fluid is implicitly female, and it is this that signals the Fleshies’ successful liberation from patriarchal domination.¹³ This is echoed in their language, as they spew words like bodily fluids in a constant gush. As mechanical actors, they take over the function that belongs to Peaches as a musician, proclaiming and acting out her message of sexual liberation more explicitly than would be possible in her stage performances.¹⁴ The liberation of the Fleshies is thus experienced as a scenic spectacle that gains even more explosiveness as they, previously inanimate tools, can articulate their own sexual oppression.

In Countersexual Manifesto (2000), Paul B. Preciado outlines a social structure in which binary gender has been abolished and gender codes can be constantly reappropriated, becoming countersexual practices that reveal and parody heteronormative power structures.¹⁵ Indeed, the Fleshies directly claim for themselves the status and rights of an independent subject, and come to occupy the ambivalent space between organ and object as technological–corporeal entities.¹⁶ In his later ‘testosterone-based, voluntary intoxication protocol […] body-essay’ Testo Junkie (2008) – which records the physiological, political, theoretical and physical changes on his body from the use of testosterone gel – Preciado connects mechanic objectification to degradation in sex work.¹⁷ He writes that ‘the ideal sex worker, the high-tech cock-sucking machine, is a mouth treated with silicone that is silent and politically subaltern and belongs to an immigrant cis-female or transsexual without access to administrative identity and full citizenship’.¹⁸

Although Peaches’s Fleshies cannot be fully aligned with Preciado’s description, the pertinent factor here is Peaches’s use of the mouth. It is no longer receptive and mute, but becomes a mouthpiece in the literal sense, which enables it to be freed from patriarchal instrumentalisation and to collude with other masturbators. In the process, the Fleshies acquire an implicitly female subject quality and, just as in their search for a female pleasure, become more closely aligned with the feminist movements of the 1970s.¹⁹

This recalls such works as Martha Roslers’s Semiotics of the Kitchen FIG. 9, in which the artist announces the A–Z of kitchen objects as a way of confronting the patriarchal notion that a woman’s language should be exclusively concerned with the domestic.²⁰ However, in contrast to Rosler’s cool and analytical enumeration, Peaches’s masturbators do not just announce the status quo of sexual oppression. For them, the possibility to sing and speak is the starting point for unification and the formation of a new world order. In their growing self-awareness, the Fleshies choose to speak and, in various parts of the exhibition, even re-enact the history of feminist movements.

Penetrating through language

The Fleshies not only become an indication of the dissolution of familiar gender orders, but also a symbol of cultural and revolutionary upheavals.²¹ In this respect, Whose Jizz is This? can certainly be tied to cultural-historical symbolism of the female body, in which it is often reduced to reproductive functions, as well as tropes of softness, fluidity and malleability in contrast to the active and stable male body.²² Moreover, whereas theories on technological and posthuman developments often express a fear of the alienation of bodily pleasure due to increasing hostility towards visions of a fully digitalised human, Peaches counters these ideas with a radically body- and sex-positive vision. She revisits such notions of fragmentation, liquidity and excess.²³ This is especially evident in the fountain sculpture, in which enlarged Fleshies direct the flow of water into one another’s mouths and vaginas FIG. 10.

However, in contrast to other theories about the fragmented female body, this is not one reduced to a reproductive function. Rather, the sexual opening of the mouth becomes an orifice that heralds liberation and provides pleasure in a queer feminist lesbian utopia. Previously a mere penetrable opening, it now paves the way for revolution through dialogue and sex. From an art-historical perspective, the mouth is considered an ambivalent organ: on the one hand it is penetrable, and on the other, it itself penetrates through the act of speaking, whereby language can develop a phallic effect.²⁴ Thus, the exhibition can be associated with theoretical positions concerned with the lesbian and queer reinterpretations of this type of power and potency.

Judith Butler laid the groundwork for an exploration of phallic pleasure apart from the male body in their 1993 essay ‘Lesbian phallus and the morphological imaginary’. In it Butler demonstrated that the symbolic phallus, as an imaginary ideal of heteronormative masculinity, can also be appropriated and thus symbolically reinterpreted in non-heteronormative contexts.²⁵ In Countersexual Manifesto Preciado builds upon Butler’s remarks in order to deconstruct biopolitical interpretations of gender and, following a queer understanding, to de-essentialise gender altogether:

Within the framework of the countersexual contract, bodies recognize themselves and others not as men or women but as living bodies. They recognize in themselves the possibility of gaining access to every signifying practice as well as every position of enunciation, as individuals that history has established as masculine, feminine, trans, intersex, or perverse. They consequently renounce not only a closed and naturally determined sexual identity but also the benefits they could obtain from a naturalization of the social, economic, and legal effects of such an identity’s signifying practices.²⁶

In Peaches’s utopia, too, existing power structures and the orifices of the Fleshies – hitherto appropriated for female satisfaction – are reinterpreted in a countersexual manner as lust-generating instruments. Preciado, like Butler, uses the motif of the dildo, which through its altered signification deconstructs the heterosexual order. Peaches, on the other hand, dispenses with the dildo altogether and instead attributes phallic potency directly to the implicitly female sex prostheses.²⁷

At this point, the importance of language comes into play again. In The Make it Trio FIG. 11, the Fleshies sing: ‘I could be with you / you could be with me’, but also the more self-sufficient ‘I could be with me’ and ‘we’ll make it on our own’. In contrast to Peaches’s rousing concerts, in which she repeats her feminist claims to the point that they resemble battle chants – for example when she sings ‘Fuck the pain away’ sixteen times in the chorus of the eponymous song – the Fleshies’ chants take on a quieter insistence, and in some cases an almost lyrical, melodic quality. This different kind of performative staging is underscored by the exhibition setting, in which the Make it Trio is displayed on an illuminated stage FIG. 12, with the rest of the space dimmed. Moreover, the language takes on a quality that it does not have in Peaches’s stage performances. By being directly transferred to the talking double masturbator, the linguistic articulation offers the potential to also demonstrate a new gender and utopian world order; it presents what can only be demanded in Peaches’s songs.

Emancipatory but still binary

However, in their sexual revolution, the Fleshies do not achieve a complete dissolution of gender and identity. The masturbators are, after all, implicit surrogates for a female subject quality, and therefore follow a concept of feminism that is centred on the sexual liberation of the white female body, rather than an understanding of queerness that is more inclusive of other minoritised identities. As a result, Whose Jizz is This? falls short of becoming a space for identities and sexual preferences outside of those that centre on female pleasure. The exhibition most closely aligns with feminist claims of the 1970s and the search for female embodiment and pleasure free from patriarchal restraints, which did not prioritise queer self-expression outside of the modes established in the punk and artistic practices of the 1980s.

Therefore, Peaches follows a strain of feminism that is today replaced by more intersectional and decolonial approaches, as epitomised by Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism (2020). Adopting the style of a manifesto, Russell demands the queer body to become a ‘glitch’, refusing any binary definition, while explicitly including BIPOC identities: ‘Embodying error – an all-consuming joyful failure within a system that never wanted us and that will not make space for us if we simply wait for it – pushes the structures of the gendered binary further toward a breaking point’.²⁸ Peaches’s restaging of the female-implied masturbators remains primarily in line with a feminist critique of the male gaze, and does not incorporate the more recent reconsideration of the inherently binary concept of female body versus male gaze. This is especially true as Peaches’s emancipated masturbators are either a direct incorporation or restaging of the original silicone form, made to satisfy the male body. Even if they use their new-found ability to speak, sing and satisfy, they still remain caught in the body that was created to please male users.

It is crucial that in Peaches’s utopia the fragmented female body is not reduced to its reproductive or sexual function. Rather, the proclaiming mouth is at the centre of the exhibition – a symbol that is of the utmost importance for Peaches as a singer. In Whose Jizz is This?, it is the non-human and yet implicitly feminine that is pivotal to legitimising a revolutionary agenda, instead of giving way to a queer dissolution of gender binaries and a more inclusive understanding of who is affected by sexual oppression. Here, it seems as though the way out of patriarchal subjugation is only possible through a specifically female sexuality, which in turn creates the risk of normalisation, rather than overcoming binaries.²⁹ Peaches, then, restages the demands of most cyberfeminist theorists, who try to imagine a female digital subjectivity aside from societal constraints of the female body and social role.

In contrast to Peaches’s search for feminist emancipation, many theorists and artists of the last two decades have focused on marginalised groups and creating a space for queer longing and development beyond binary-coded bodies. The work of Tai Shani (b.1976) comprises utopic environments and installations in which alternative visions of bodies are performed, opening up new spaces for becoming in and with the world. Another example can be found in the practice of LuYang (b.1984), in particular Doku, an avatar that the artist created as his genderless digital reincarnation. The striving for a queer posthumanist utopia is also present in recent cyberporn fantasy films by the Taiwanese director Shu Lea Cheang (b.1954), such as Fluidø (2017), which shows a fluid sexual longing independent from binary and heteronormative constructions. All of these artists demonstrate an expanded search for new forms of embodiment, sexuality and gender performativity that are distanced from binary readings of the human body. This aligns with a posthumanist pursuit of a more-than-human encounter with the world that is not fixed upon such binaries as male–female and human–non-human.

In Whose Jizz is This?, Peaches demonstrates possibilities of fragmented and fluid sexual longing that conform to mid- to late-twentieth-century conceptions of female embodiment and sexuality. She transcends heteronormative constraints in an implied lesbian utopian world order. At the same time, the limits, not only of the Fleshies’ bodily modifiability but also their linguistic articulation, is revealed here. Precisely because they are read as female, the Fleshies’ demands for sexual liberation appear relevant and urgent, even while they are not truly inclusive in a queer and intersectional sense. Whereas such a political and direct messages in an electropunk concert – shouted by thousands of people in unison – can achieve a revolutionary pull, in an exhibition setting, as part of a wider soundscape and performative interludes, it remains the representation of an emancipation story.

Nevertheless, Peaches’s vision of posthuman participation and equality demonstrates a form of sexual openness that, although already canonised in punk concerts, still has the potential to surprise in a museum context. It illustrates feminist demands that, despite being prevalent in the visual arts and popular culture since the 1970s, have by no means been fully met. Through the figure of the speaking, emancipated masturbator, Peaches encourages new reflections on the persistent issues of female sexual oppression. This discussion is now extended to include entities from a more-than-human world, whose degradation has become more apparent in post-anthropocentric theories and artistic approaches.³⁰