In her poetical, feminist tracts, French Lacanian theorist Luce Irigaray imagines the female genitalia as a second set of lips, a second mouth if you will, a second means of communication. Playwright and monologist Eve Ensler has certainly taken that proposition to heart in her most performed work to
Orlan is a devoted martyr and a jaded exploitationist, a sincere Feminist and a technological utopianist, a social artist and a shameless self-promoter all rolled into one. Her ongoing Performance art piece, which has been variously entitled "The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan" and "Image -- New Images
"I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form (and to other experience as well) if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgments, if we are eclectic," wrote Pauline Kael, the undisputed queen of journalistic film criticism.
Born in tiny Petaluma, California, Kael went
Almost from the beginning Audre Lorde questioned the fundamental tag of identity: her name. As a chubby, unruly five-year-old, she dropped the "y" from "Audrey," enjoying the aesthetic balance that "Audre Lorde," with its double "e," created on her blue-lined notebook paper. Later in life she would a