Performing on and in the Borderlands: Embodiment, Authority, and Knowledge Production in Scientist and Spiritualist Confrontations

This dissertation examines the performances of Spiritualist Mediums and the scientists who sought to debunk them during the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries in Britain and North America. I use archival sources and performance analysis in order to craft a transhistorical study that deconstructs the power dynamics of spiritual performance, knowledge production, and scientific authority. Specifically, I focus on the embodied Spiritualist performances of the Medium Kathleen Goligher, who expelled ectoplasm – believed to be the physical matter of spirits – out of her vagina. Locating these performances in this specific site of the body allows me to analyse the ways in which various signifiers of femininity and antitheatrical discourse aimed at women came to bear on interpretations of Mediums that cast them as frauds. I compare this against the figure of the “man of science,” and the ways in which the professionalization of science in the latter half of the nineteenth century conflated attributes such as objectivity, disinterestedness, and reason with masculinity. I argue that out of this powerful site of authority emerges the figure of the scientist debunker. By analysing what I call “debunker discourse” I show that contrary to patriarchal cultural narratives that cast men as inherently trustworthy and unaffected, these scientific debunkers engaged in highly theatrical performative practices – and in some cases carried on as what some might call drama queens. I then reframe Spiritualist and debunker performances by placing them in conversation with the politics and aesthetics of twentieth-century feminist vaginal performance art. In doing so, I expand previously articulated genealogies of body art, and make an argument for the debunker-as-critic – figures who, I argue, use debunker rhetorical strategies in their attempts to discredit, regulate, and shut-down these performances. Throughout the dissertation I use the interstitial spaces between chapters to build on and extend the work of Gloria Anzaldúa by developing a poetic theory of the Borderlands, a liminal space that exists between the binaries of science/Spiritualism, male/female, life/death, and performance/life (to name but a few). I argue that it is in their very in-betweenness that the Borderlands hold generative potential – for art, theory, and other modes of political expression. The discomfort and destabilization provided by the Borderlands is generative in its ability to draw attention to, and critique, the problematic and divisive foundations upon which such binaries are constructed, and provide a space from which different futures can be imagined.

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