Abstract

Ana Mendieta’s Rape Scene (1973) offers a visceral exploration of sexual, gendered, and racialized violence. Mendieta’s re-enactment of the rape of Sarah Ann Ottens, creates a purposefully traumatic, “triggering” scene for her audience to discover. In “returning to the scene of the crime,” Mendieta produces a critical methodology that facilitates a more complex interaction with the traumatic aftermath of gendered and racialized violence, one that refuses and questions the paltry validation and legitimization of gendered and racialized violence by the law and legal systems. In this article, I argue that Mendieta’s reenactment produces a legal excess, intervening in the juridical distribution of the norm, where the performance disavows the normative, regulative impulses associated with ‘law and order’ by allowing other, alternative traumatic affects into the room, ones which escape how crime scenes, and the law more broadly, try to regulate the emotional and affective aftermath of gendered and racialized violence. Through the performance’s triggering affective surplus, Mendieta draws us towards the site of her own racialized flesh, which, I argue, stages a conversation about the law as a system that both produces and naturalizes the violence that inheres in the gendering and racialization of the body.

摘要

安娜·门迭塔的强奸场景（1973）对性暴力、性别暴力和种族暴力进行了发自内心的探索。门迭塔重演了莎拉·安·奥滕斯被强奸的情景，故意创造了一个创伤性的、“触发”的场景，让观众去发现。在“回到犯罪现场”中，门迭塔提出了一种批判性的方法，促进与性别和种族暴力的创伤性后果进行更复杂的互动，这种方法拒绝并质疑法律对性别和种族暴力的微不足道的验证和合法化。和法律制度。在这篇文章中，我认为门迭塔的重演产生了法律上的过度，干预了规范的司法分配，其中表演通过允许其他替代性创伤性影响进入房间，否认了与“法律和秩序”相关的规范性、调节性冲动，那些逃避犯罪现场和更广泛的法律如何试图规范性别和种族暴力的情感和情感后果的人。通过表演引发的情感盈余，门迭塔将我们吸引到她自己的种族化肉体的现场，我认为，这是一场关于法律作为一个系统的对话，它既产生又自然化了身体性别化和种族化所固有的暴力。