A voice of her own:

speaking her narrative through pointure-practices

Abstract

Jacques Derrida’s (2009 [1978]:301-315) metaphor of “pointure” forms a leitmotif in the final narrative series of the Dis-Location/Re-Location exhibition (2007-2008), titled A Room of Her Own (2006-2007). The metaphor of “pointure” itself is doublybound: although pointure-practices may be aligned with actions that connote mastery such as “penetrating”, “piercing”, “pricking”, “puncturing” or “rupturing” a surface, their consequences also “point to” restitution: a conjoining of otherwise discreet elements through stitching, lace-making, binding, braiding and weaving type practices historically associated with femininity and domesticity.

In A Room of Her Own, conceptions of what I propose to be three pointure-type practices – the Victorian construct of needlework, the historically gendered nineteenth-century psychosomatic disorder of hysteria and the contemporary practice of self-mutilation through cutting – as signifiers of passive, self-negating “femininity” are subverted through redefinition as forms of agency. With reference to the ways in which these pointure-practices are played out in A Room of Her Own, and by aligning these practices with Julia Kristeva’s (1995) concept of ‘transgressive writing’, I suggest that they can be read as empowering forms of preverbal, bodilydriven self-expression; a means of “giving voice” to unspoken traumas and speaking in the face of being silenced by nineteenth-century gendered discourses.