Madame
X and the Deterritorialization of Queer Utopia
Em Pastel (UNI '06), an Anthropology major,
will depart in June for Chile to begin a journey to the end
of the world in search of new genders and non-oppressive ways
of being. This paper was written for Professor Grundmann's FT554:
GLBTQ Representations in Cinema.
What does a 1977 independent German film about lesbians dressed
up as extravagant Chinese pirates have to do with a tract of
continental philosophy published in French three years later?
Precisely nothing, and yet it is these works that I wish to
skirt between, in and out of, in an attempt to shed light on
the radical function of cinema in the creation of queer places.
Ulrike Ottinger’s Madame X: an Absolute Ruler provides
the viewer with more than a humorous commentary on women’s liberation,
or a pleasurable fable of queer desires; with the help of Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus,
I argue that it demonstrates the triumph of the body over the
apparatus.
Part I: Becoming Woman
What characterizes the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s
is perhaps less accurately described as “women’s liberation”
than a “women’s becoming,” or becoming-woman; that is, as identity
politics revealed to Western consciousness the very mechanisms
of identity-construction, it became possible to assert such
identities in a non-clinical, non-punitive setting. What followed
was not merely a consciousness of collective oppression, but
an awareness of that collectivity as substantive, creative,
both meaningful and meaning-giving. In Carolee Schneemann’s
performance piece “Interior Scroll” (1975), during which she
reads a feminist manifesto extracted from her vagina, Chris
Straayer observes an assertion of this awareness in the face
of the male-dominated art world, and goes on to comment: “female
sexuality is [no longer] simply the sign of lack . . . inciting
castration anxiety and thus necessitating fetishization and
narrative punishment. . . .”(Straayer 84). However, there is
still a jump to be made between the theoretical creation of
the meaningful, meaning-producing female body that Straayer
terms the “Medusan femme” by Hélène Cixous, Julia
Kristeva and others and the monotony of daily life for real
female bodies in a patriarchal world. The necessary moment of
consciousness, while not experienced by all in an equivalent
manner, is nevertheless an important component in the formation
of female collectives that are represented both satirically
and radically in Madame X.
The concept of becoming-woman describes not only the process
of self-discovery, (the recognition of one’s body as a subject),
but also the ‘liberatory’ process of discovering others (the
recognition of one’s body in relation to a minority). Deleuze
and Guattari use the concept of territorialization to distinguish
between the disempowered state of being-minority and the empowerment
of becoming-minority:
One reterritorializes, or allows oneself to be reterritorialized,
on a minority as a state; but in a becoming, one is deterritorialized.
Even blacks, as the Black Panthers said, must become-black.
Even women must become-women . . . there is no subject of the
becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a minority.
We can be thrown into a becoming by anything at all, by the
most unexpected, most insignificant things. (Deleuze & Guattari
291)
It is indeed a most unexpected thing that throws each shipmate
of the Chinese Orlando into her becoming: Madame X’s call is
read in the classifieds, from a leaflet, on the side of a box
of Brillo pads, and from inside a tin can floating on the South
China seas, and it is broadcasted by telephone and radio. The
call (“Chinese Orlando – stop – to all women – stop – offer
world – stop – full of gold – stop – love – stop – adventure
at sea – call Chinese Orlando – call Chinese Orlando – stop”)
functions as an interpellation as well as a promise, in that
it forces the receiver to constitute herself as a subject (emphasized
by the ‘stop’s), to recognize herself as one of “all women”
(and, not-so-subtextually, as queer – or at least prone to the
homosocial), and to decide between the world she has so far
accepted without choosing, and another world of gold, love,
and adventure. The decision requires no debate or hesitation
from anyone; rather, it is the first in the set of rituals that
the women will enact, the ritual coming-together (the reterritorialization).
This ritual can be interpreted in several ways. In one sense,
it is certainly satirical of the feminist movement’s missionary-like
emphasis on liberation; Ottinger describes her own relation
to such politics in an interview: “I have my own personal history,
and even before feminism it was clear to me that I never wanted
a family, children, a bourgeois life. So I didn’t have to be
liberated” (Grundmann & Schulewitz 40). If the exaggerated
ease with which the characters abandon their former lives mocks
the simplistic essentialism of liberation-ideology, it also
confirms, for the viewer, the overwhelming appeal of the offer.
For the sequence depicting the call-to-piracy follows a significant
opening shot: over an up-shot of the ship’s figurehead (an exact
replica of Madame X carved by a Nubian witch doctor) silhouetted
against the bright blue sky, the story’s narration begins in
a fable-like manner:
Madame X, a harsh, pitiless beauty, the cruel, uncrowned ruler
of the China seas, launched an appeal to all women willing to
exchange an everyday existence of almost unbearable boredom,
though safe and easy, for a world of uncertainty and danger,
but also full of love and adventure.
In her essay on Madame X, Patricia White follows this passage
with the comment, “the promise sounds much like that of cinema
itself – the guarantee of pleasure is the beautiful, cruel woman”
(Gever, Greyson, & Parmar 275). The difference is, White
goes on to argue, that unlike cinema itself, Madame X addresses
the spectator as both female and marginal. This analogy, while
clever, is based upon an indistinction: by equating Madame X
the character’s promise of gold, love, and adventure to Madame
X the film’s promise of spectatorial pleasure, White skirts
a more literal, more dangerous interpretation – that the appeal
is addressed directly to the spectator, challenging her to confront
her own unbearable boredom and embark, after and beyond the
film, upon voyages of her own.
Part II: Madame X, a Body without Organs
If Madame X’s call functions as an interpellation, it is not
a subjectifying one in the Althusserian sense.1 That is, the
call does not trigger a shameful moment of self constitution-as-subject,
but has almost the opposite affect: each woman is pulled out
(but not entirely out) of her loosely constructed identity,
in an act of deterritorialization. Visually, this motion is
illustrated as each character leaves the mise-en-scene of her
‘natural habitat’: Flora Tannenbaum, the German forestress,
walks out of her woodland parlor (she sips from a full tea set
on a table that is set up literally in the forest) toward the
sea; Josephine de Collage, the French artist/academic, roller
skates away from a gallery; Betty Brillo, the middle-American
housewife, bicycles out of her suburban home; Blow-up, the Italian
pin-up girl, leaves her chauffeured convertible; Omega Centauri,
Australian pilot, jumps out of her plane (a most individualistic,
anomic craft), and Karla Freud-Goldmund, the German psychologist,
leaves her doctor’s office in a rickshaw. Two characters constitute
significant exceptions: Noa-Noa,2 the Polynesian islander “rejected
by her husband for infringing a taboo,” and Belcampo, the transgender
minstrel cast off from a yacht, both already come from the sea.
But let us for the moment concentrate on the character of Karla
Freud-Goldman, the psychologist: for the deterritorialization
of the prototypical subjects is enacted through the narrative
structure of the film in its rejection of psychological discourse
and singular conceptions of identity.
From her initial introduction, Karla is identified with the
figure of the biopolitical apparatus: we see her from the shoulders
down pacing beside a patient/servant in a stark-white office,
uttering what sounds like non-sensical jargon (“Repressed sensuality
. . . hyper-reactivation . . . destructive orgies in early childhood…”)
on a loop over the sound of a slow heartbeat. Visually, Karla’s
headless-ness differentiates her from the figure of the ruler
or sovereign (played out here by Madame X); she recalls much
more strongly the impersonal, abstract ideological-machine of
Kafka, as she pronounces absurd judgments that at once regulate
and determine the very pulse of human life. Karla is humanized
to a certain degree when she sits down, bringing her face into
the shot, and reads Madame X’s call from her notes; at this
point the heartbeat pauses as she removes her doctor’s coat,
ritually packs her things, and takes off in a rickshaw pulled
by her patient/servant while the heartbeat returns, faster-paced,
on the soundtrack.
The next important scene with Karla occurs after the crew rescues
a shipwrecked and gender-ambiguous Belcampo, and she performs
a psychoanalytical interrogation to determine whether s/he will
be accepted in the women-only (un)safe space of the Orlando.
From its onset, Belcampo reveals the interrogation to be the
farce it is: s/he wins acceptance not by a sufficiently woman-identified
performance of gender, but by exposing the essential illegitimacy
of the psychoanalytic apparatus itself. This exposure is actually
a double exposure: that the very debate, hotly contested at
the time (and today), about whether transwomen should be allowed
in women-only spaces functions within a certain regime of truth
– that individuals “naturally” fit within a dimorphic categorical
scheme of gender, and that their position can be determined
by an objective set of data (if not by physical characteristics
and genitalia, then by psychological information confessed to
and approved by an expert) – and furthermore, that this regime
of truth is fundamentally false. Belcampo achieves this through
a double-refusal, a “disappearance” from the teleology of the
apparatus:3 she not only refuses to supply Karla with the “proper”
answers to her questions, but furthermore refuses to answer
in a linear narrative fashion. For example, to Karla’s first
question (“Are you an important personality?”) Belcampo replies
with an earlier sequence, in which the crew violently picks
apart a “fish” with chopsticks, played in reverse: not only
does this visually symbolize Belcampo’s refusal to be dissected,
but as White observes, “the trick shot foregrounds the apparatus
[of cinema]” (White 286). Belcampo answers another question
with a shot of a torso with breasts and chest hair against a
black backdrop; this reference to early pseudo-scientific clinical
studies of abnormal sexes and genders is revealed later in the
film to be a shot of Madame X’s own chest – with the implication
that “freakishness,” or marginality, is here the chosen mode
of existence.4 To other questions (“Did you love your mother?”
“Have you always wanted to be a woman?”) Belcampo replies with
revelric dance, laughter, and nondiagetic animal sounds. The
scene ends as the rest of the crew becomes increasingly antagonistic
towards Karla, and ultimately tape her mouth shut while “participating
in general disorder” (White 287).
The third and final confrontation between Karla and the psychoanalytic
machine occurs near the end of the film, after most of the crew
has died or been murdered “for petty reasons.” Again dressed
in her doctor’s coat, Karla writes “a message to mankind” in
which she analyzes the events of the “long cruise on the Orlando,”
concluding:
Isolation in a very restricted space must be considered a further
negative factor leading to conflicts, whilst there is a total
contradiction with the vast space women can attain to by the
force of their imagination. The dreadful murders for petty reasons
which recall the destructive orgies of early childhood that
never took place are here hyper-reactivated in this fashion.
When Madame X was first released in 1977, it was received
by feminists with distrust and disgust. As Ottinger explained,
“At a time when women were spending their last bits of strength
wrenching themselves free of the old patriarchal structure,
the last thing they felt like dealing with was a comedy about
it, a comedy that goes as far as to ridicule and criticize it...
“ (“Minorities and the Majority” 40). In this light, Karla’s
analysis plays a very important function in the film that was
overlooked by its early critics: by articulating its own criticism
of women-only spaces through the voice of the psychoanalytic
establishment, it defies such an interpretation in several ways.
If we accept White’s convincing proposal that the film assumes
a marginal female spectator, then this speech, immediately encoded
as a “message to mankind,” must be read as nothing less than
an attempted mutiny by the “hypothetical dominant heterosexual
male” viewer. The description of the Orlando’s voyage as a “long
cruise” displays a reterritorialization, a return to normality
that coincides with the docking of the junk. However, this move
is resisted: as Karla sneaks off the boat with her letter, stopwatch,
needle, and other implements, she is sighted by Belcampo, and
at Madame X’s command Noa-Noa shoots her (and the native wiseman
she allies herself with) with a bow and arrow.
The murder signifies not only the requisite last step in the
ritual killing of the crew (again, with the exception of Belcampo
and Noa-Noa), but a final victory over psychoanalytic discourse:
Karla’s letter includes each phrase she repeated in her first
scene. The implication is that psychoanalysis itself is circular
and formulaic: its conclusion was anticipated from the start;
the analysis is simply a matter of rearranging a given set of
vocabulary. While this chronological jump implies a rejection
of teleological narrative, the murder of Karla enacts the death
of the psychological body. But without psychology, without “character
structure,” what is left? Something, I think, very similar to
what Deleuze and Guattari term the Body without Organs (BwO).
Defined as “the field of immanence of desire.”5 the Body without
Organs must be understood as intrinsically anti-psychological:
There is an essential difference between the psychoanalytic
interpretation of the phantasy and the antipsychiatric experimentation
of the program . . . the BwO is what remains when you take everything
away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and significances
and subjectifications as a whole. Psychoanalysis does the opposite:
it translates everything into phantasies, it converts everything
into phantasy, it retains the phantasy. It royally botches the
real, because it botches the BwO. (Deleuze & Guattari 154)
Madame X can be viewed as a Body without Organs to the extent
that the fantastic world she offers to “all women” is not in
fact a fantasy but a ritualistic program, a becoming from which
point there is no un-becoming (as in the carnival) but only
becoming-something-else. The non-human qualities that link Madame
X to the BwO display its contradictory ascription as both animal
and inorganic: while the non-synch sound conveys Madame X’s
speech and actions with animal noises (predominantly lion roars
and growls), her omnipresent false hand (she lost her real hand
trying to rescue her lover Orlando from a carnivorous jelly
fish) and her figurehead double present her as a “Body without
Organs” in the most literal sense of the term. To understand
this contradiction is to understand what distinguishes the cyborg
from the storm-trooper, or analogously the SM dominant/submissive
from the historical master/slave: it is a difference that rests
on freedom, not in the sense of “free market” but in the sense
of unpredictability.
In their section on how to become a BwO, Deleuze and Guattari
invoke scenes of extreme masochism, describing a “program” of
“dismantling the self” that includes begging a mistress for
“one hundred lashes at least,” extreme infibulation play, piercing,
and suturing (Deleuze & Guattari 154) This passage could
be criticized as another manifestation of the narcissistic hetero-masculine
masochism prevalent among French intellectuals, in its instrumentalization
of the mistress figure as a silent, obliging tool for the self-(un)realization
of the male sub. However, Madame X provides the perfect terrain
for a more interesting, queerer use of the passage. In order
to posit Madame X as the BwO, we must recognize that the “plane
of consistency specific to desire” (Deleuze & Guattari 154)
encompasses sadistic as well as masochistic desires, and that
the pleasures of dominance can be just as subversive and bereft
of oppression as the pleasures of “becoming-vulnerable.”6 With
this reading, the “quasi-maso-chistic submission of the women”
that Karla observes indi-cates not the failure of the experiment
but its programmic nature: the submission of the women to an
unnamed mistress is the necessary step in their ritual deterritorialization.
The program is completed with the deaths of the apparatus-determined
prototypes and their reemergence in subcultural or marginal
versions.7
White does not emphasize this crucial shift to marginality,
describing the regeneration of the women as “new versions of
their former personae” (White 277, emphasis added): Flora the
Aryan imperialist is inverted into a Black street-sweeper in
prison stripes; Blow-up and Betty Brillo, former pin-up girl
and housewife, are now publically queer and flirt with each
other in utter disregard of the male gaze; Omega Centauri has
left the tourist industry for the zoo8; the jealous, unfulfilled
servant Hoi-Sin is now a femme leatherdyke who stands beside
a motorcycle as the Orlando is docked, waiting for Karla to
die and become her butch counterpart. This final resurrection
of the sadistic psychologist as a leatherdyke simultaneously
confirms the SM advocate’s claim that inside real abusers of
power is a repressed or hidden eroticism9 and divests the BwO
of such problematic connotations.
Part III: Smooth Space, Piracy, and the Nomadic War Machine
Throughout her insightful article on Madame X, White
cites two main historico-theoretical discourses through which
to contextualize and critique the film: cinematic spectatorship,
and carnival. Through and against the language of feminist film
theory, White argues that Ottinger’s queer rendition of a tired
Hollywood genre successfully “displaces [the] assumption . .
. that the female spectator is destined to miss the boat” (White
290). Similarly, she locates the film’s absurd rituals and fetishes
within theories of carnival, but argues that they serve to “recover
[carnival] for the marginal” (White 287). Conspicuously missing
from White’s analysis, and from this paper so far, is any reference
to piracy – not in its cinematic representations, but in its
rawest, most radical forms.
In an essay entitled “Life Under the Death’s Head,” Gabriel
Kuhn draws from Deleuze and Guattari, Pierre Clastres, and Max
Stirner to theorize Golden Age piracy (c. 1690-1720)10 as an
essentially anarchic phenomenon that constituted a “monkey wrench
thrown into the cogs of the colonization process” (Klausmann,
Meinzerin & Kuhn 228). Much of Kuhn’s analysis rests on
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “smooth” vs. “striated” spaces.
Smooth spaces (deserts, tundras, steppes, seas) are defined
as directional rather than dimensional or metric, while striated
space is quantified and divided with maps, grids, and borders.
“Intensive” rather than “extensive,” smooth space is (im)personified
as a Body without Organs:
[Smooth space resembles] a Body without Organs instead of an
organism and organization. Perception in it is based on symptoms
and evaluations rather than measures and properties. That is
why smooth space is occupied by intensities, wind and noise,
forces, and sonorous and tactile qualities... “ (Deleuze &
Guattari 479).
Smooth space and striated space are not fixed, but shift in
motions of de- and re-territorialization. The sea, a “smooth
space par excellence,” was striated through the development
of quantitative methods of navigation; Deleuze and Guattari
insist that before longitude “there existed a complex and empirical
nomadic system of navigation based on the wind and noise, the
colors and sounds of the sea” (479). For Kuhn, the pirates of
the Golden Age thrived in the liminal period when the seas were
rife with colonial merchant vessels but before the “place of
freedom” had been lost. Madame X, too, forms and inhabits a smooth space. There
is no evidence of an interior of the Orlando, or formal navigation
(tools, map) of any kind; instead, the space of the film is
directional (without compass, they head “south-southwest” toward
the yacht, and the film ends with the narration that “they set
sail with a favorable wind behind) and is determined by gazes
and gestures (the three main plot events, the rescue of Belcampo,
plunder of the yacht, and docking are occasioned not with the
help of a map but by sightings and exaggerated pointing by Noa-Noa).
The coming-together(s) and dispersion(s) of the crew recall
not a recruitment but the diversity of molecular bodies specific
to the smooth space, and Noa-Noa and Belcampo (with Madame X,
already nomadic figures) display this diversity in their constant
dance-movements.11
On another level, the film enacts a deterritorialization of
cinema itself: it directly confronts the teleological Western
hetero-patriarchal tradition of storytelling.12 The vessel through
which this challenge occurs highly resembles the nomadic war
machine, whose main function is “not war as slaughter and/or
even combat, but the preservation of smooth space as the space
of freedom.”13 By replacing teleological plot structures with
“nomadic” ones in her films (Ottinger describes her protagonists
as ahistorical wanderers and her stories as modern fairy tales),
Ottinger pulls the concept of voyaging out of the sea and into
the theater: we may recall Deleuze and Guattari’s dictum that
the true nomad doesn’t have to move: “voyaging smoothly is a
becoming, and a difficult, uncertain becoming at that” (Deleuze
& Guattari 482).
Smooth Spaces, Women’s Spaces, Queer Spaces
Let us reevaluate Karla’s analysis: “Isolation in a very restricted
space must be considered a further negative factor leading to
conflicts, whilst there is a total contradiction with the vast
space women can attain to by the force of their imagination.”
From the perspective of the nomadic war machine, this observation
is precisely correct; the film, however, offers a solution to
this double bind in the creation of free spaces themselves.
It does this not through an affirmation of “permanent carnival”
or the allegory of “enlightened rebirth” so much as by revealing
the constant acts of deterritorialization necessary to preserve
the creativity and unpredictability of free spaces, with the
moral that utopic movements cannot be ideological or spatially
isolated or fixed. Furthermore, the film itself carves out such
a space for queer expression, exhibition and pleasure in the
virtual yet striated space of cinema.
References
Califia, Pat. Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex. San Francisco:
Cleis Press, 1994.
Carter, Erica. “An Interview with Ulrike Ottinger.” Screen Education
41 (1982): 34-42.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Klausmann, Ulrike, Marion Meinzerin, and Gabriel Kuhn. Women
Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger. Buffalo: Black
Rose Books, 1997.
Ricco, John Paul. The Logic of the Lure. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2003.
Straayer, Chris. Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies. New York: Columbia
UP, 1996.
Thomas, Robert C. “Becoming-vulnerable: the sensation of Drag.”
1991. <http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~theory/mrt/becoming_vulnerable.html>.
White, Patricia. “Madame X of the China Seas.” Queer Looks:
Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video. Ed. Martha Gever,
John Greyson, and Pratibha Parmar. New York: Routledge, 1993.
