Chris Roper On show in Cape Town
In the catalogue for his exhibition, Stuart Barnes states that ”in a university, library books on the subject of ambiguous sex have suffered a history of violence: they have been mutilated. Pages have been torn and images of intersex genitalia excised from them. As a preventative measure they have been shelved in a locked office behind the library’s reference desk. Still available for loan upon specific request, they have been issued with stamps that state in bold type, ‘to be shelved at the reference desk. Check for mutilation on return.”’
People are notably silent at the opening of Stuart Barnes’s exhibition, Check for Mutilation on Return. It is a space which catches one a little off-guard. Vaguely detached and unassuming at first glance, the act of looking and making one’s way through the installation becomes increasingly intense and disturbing; chilling and perplexing.
It tells of the violation of human rights and the mutilation of human bodies through social systems fixated on an obsessive prerequisite of strict binary sexual categorisation. Intersexuality as a threat to these categories, Barnes notes, is still largely regarded in medical circles as a physiological abnormality in need of ”correction”.
”Intersexuality” is the currently acceptable term for what used to be known as hermaphroditism. But, he suggests, the understanding of what that ”correction” implies has shifted through the consciousness of intersexual activist and support groups, who recognise many of these procedures to be, instead, devastating mutilations, likening them to acts of child abuse.
Medical discourses around ambiguous sex have served and confirmed its tabooed status. Barnes describes this taboo as having resulted in a general rule of silence that is adhered to by doctors and parents, leaving issues of the child’s consent and possibilities of alternative treatment options largely unspoken. ”Instead,” Barnes comments, ”they were surgically realigned in an attempt to adhere to the operative categories of the social order.”
Attached to green surgical sheets, and dispersed along the walls of the cabinet, is a series of disposable nappies, many cut through and inlaid with texts around their genital area. Some of the texts appear to be from medical journals, some from medical records, others personal accounts of physical and emotional loss, distress and violation.
It is an awkward conflation of imagery: the silent innocence of a baby’s nappy, undercut with the sophisticated, sterile articulation of the medical document, or the tormented narrative of the ”corrected” adult. The incisions mark, in a double-play, a double-mutilation. The violence done to library books seems to attempt to remove, from record and from history, any evidence of the intersexual.
The analogy which Barnes invites in this visual play is with ”corrective” surgery, which attempts to deny the feasibility and acceptability of the intersexual child. The ”phenomenon” is deemed illegitimate and confined to the realm of myth. The nullification is both physical and discursive.
What emerges in many of the texts that Barnes includes is a rationalising sentiment that smacks of homophobia. Many of the surgical decisions are based upon the desire to shape and curtail sexuality within the confines of a heterosexual existence. But the personal testimonies included in the work manage to individualise and personalise their existence way beyond the generic stereotype.
In what feels like a quietly triumphant inversion, it is the texts that lie embedded, framed by nappies, instead of their inferred labels ”framing the patient”. It is a reclamation of rights to the body, a call for acknowledgement, tolerance, and responsibility.
Check for Mutilation on Return by Stuart Barnes is on at the Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet in Cape Town until June 13