Reading performativity, gender and the fragmentation of narrative voice in Mina Loy's texts and artworks

The work of Mina Loy, a unique and innovative modernist writer, artist, and feminist figure of the early twentieth century, poses various challenges for the reader, not only because of its unusual approach to the work of other modernists, the Futurists in particular, and its unique perspective on feminism, but also because of its multiple, shifting narrative voices and its idiosyncratic and fragmentary style. This study approaches Loy's textual and visual legacy from an interdisciplinary perspective, performatively engaging with its structural, semiotic and intertextual aspects to create and construct a narrative of the complex arguments it represents. The focus is on Loy's selected poetry and prose ("Lions' Jaws" [1919], "Feminist Manifesto" [1914], "Aphorisms on Futurism" [1914], and "Parturition" [1914]) as well as on some of her artworks, Househunting (1950), Christ on a Clothesline (1955-59) Ansikten [ca. 1910s] and Surreal Scene (1930); these are considered in terms of their intertextual relations to her other works as well as to works of her contemporaries that are thematically or visually analogous. The purpose is to rediscover and explore Loy's works in dialogue with contemporary authorial, feminist and modernist trajectories, and, against the critical tradition, to question and consider their biographical contexts (the assumptions made about Loy's personality and life experiences) not as reflections of psychological or historical realities, but as fictive elements of intertextuality. This study's implicit frames of reference therefore include conceptions of modern art (Marinetti, Bréton, de Chirico, Berger); aspects of gender theory, particularly performativity and maternity (Butler, Kristeva, Ettinger); and theoretical engagements with authorship (Barthes, Foucault), intertextuality (Riffaterre), structuralism and semiotics (Saussure, Peirce). Loy's texts shift not only between gender identities, but also between concepts of Futurism and Modernism; and these shifts and transformations are enacted stylistically through her use of fragmentation, interruptions of punctuation, and complex juxtapositions of words or images in the literary and artistic forms through which they are expressed: the poem, the aphorism, the manifesto, the assemblage, and the modernist and Surrealist painting. Loy's works thus engage with almost every avant-garde movement and genre of the early modernist era; and its mental and corporeal female representations are enacted not only thematically, but through theme, style and genre as well. Close semiotic analyses of the texts and artworks reveal their intertextual connections to each other and to other contemporary texts; through these connections, this study focuses on the construction of shifting voices of narrators hidden between signs, as well as on the ways these personas act and evolve throughout the texts. It explores how gender performativity and ambiguous structures of female identity run through these fictive narrative voices, and how ambiguous sexualities (from the androgynous to the feminine) shape Loy's narrators' mental and corporeal identities. These identities satirically fragment into different forms through argumentative personas, anagrammatical names, and an idiosyncratic iconography—on the one hand critiquing stereotypical female roles and manufactured consent, and on the other hand, questioning and displacing the male hegemony represented by Futurism by defining a new version of the "Futurist," and developing a broader, evolutionary feminist agenda for the corporeal, psychic, intellectual and artistic development of culture and society. In Loy's "Lions' Jaws," entanglements between visual and verbal images are investigated in their historical, structural, intertextual and performative aspects; the complex links between the narrators and their engagements with Futurism and feminism are traced through the fragmentary connections of the anagrammatical characters. "Feminist Manifesto" is considered in semiotic relation to two of Loy's artworks, Househunting and Christ on a Clothesline, with a focus on the visual and textual narrators' questioning and displacement of male hegemony and their critique of the contemporary feminist movement: the iconography of Househunting reveals how the visual narrator subverts the manufactured consent of stereotypical domestic roles through a representation of mental space, while Christ on a Clothesline represents the downfall of male hegemony by corporeally subverting the religious image. A chapter on Loy's fragmentary "Aphorisms on Futurism" rearticulates and semiotically links the aphorisms to reveal the dialogical nature of the narrative voice, in relation both to herself and with the implied readers: the "Aphorisms" argue for destroying and transcending retrospective aesthetic forms to construct new ones, and for attaining freedom of consciousness through shifting between Futurism and Modernism. The arguments brought out in these analyses are then developed through a detailed performative reading of Loy's poem, "Parturition," which is taken as representing three embodiments of labor: physical childbirth, artistic creation, and poetic production. In these representations, the narrators fragment into multiple identities—a Feminist-Futurist mother who resists the social domestication and classification of women, an artist who subverts the traditional aesthetic forms, and a creative poet who overthrows conventional language—and these identities undergo various transformations, eventually merging to construct new forms and achieve psychological and physical self-realization. The dissertation concludes with an exploration of semiotic threads and chains of signification in Loy's painting, Surreal Scene: the analysis performs a logic of linking and intertextuality between visual and textual narrators in the painting, and in the other works analyzed, as well as with other artworks of Loy's and of her contemporaries; this represents a first step towards developing an iconography of Loy's art. This study, through its performative interaction with the works in their structural, semiotic and intertextual aspects, provides an alternative to the currently widespread biographical-historical and psychological approaches to Loy, and opens a path for new, alternative constructions of "authorship" and meaning in modernism through the critical performance of reading. And through its focus on the evolutionary nature as well as the polyphonic structures of the narrators, it provides several starting-points for further intertextual studies on Loy's works as well as the works of other modernist and feminist artists and writers.