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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathUnruly Bodies
 
White Trash Girl (Reeder, Jennifer), 1995
 
 
 

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and streams of the technologies like the user, too.

The unruly woman as a reflection in the mirror, a copy and product of her times was also the theme of «Artificial Changelings.» The title seems to imply that the two women are interchangeable but it also leaves leeway for the reading that the two are unnatural reproductions, products of their times. Lucas's character might also be a changeling or a foundling, a cyborg from outer space or a mutation. At least, her origin seems somehow‹unnatural.›

Biological Warfare

As I suggested earlier, the idea that unruliness is quasi genetic because resistance as something unconscious is localized in the body itself and initially defies discursivity, is the specific, or rather the specifically female about the notion of unruliness. The examples I have given so far clearly show that I do not intend to naïvely perpetuate this line of associations; I rather want to use them in a strategic and aggressive way because such hypertrophic fiction is powerful, something we might forget or underestimate.

The character «White Trash Girl» from the trilogy

 

of the same title (1995–1997) created by the American video artist Jennifer Reeder is a magnificent and true incarnation of the garbage of our day and age. Like Lucas, the artist plays the protagonist herself; her name is derived from an abusive expression denoting the white lower classes. The opening credits of the first part, «The Devil Inside Me,» starts with the sounds of cars driving and a picture in which an embryo becomes ever more clearly discernible. Text reminiscent of a fairy-tale is added: «Once upon a time there was a little girl who was raped by her uncle. She got pregnant and flushed the baby down the toilet, then killed her uncle and herself. The baby wiggled around in the sewer sludge for a long time. The ooze fed and nourished the baby, it made the baby strong—super strong. Her tiny baby body became more toxic with every tiny baby breath and every tiny baby heartbeat. None knew that this weren't no ordinary baby. This was a super baby. This was WHITE TRASH GIRL. Now, she's all grown up and she's waging biological warfare on any dumb fuck who asks for it. White Trash Girl is turbo charged and she's coming at you faster than you can scream. HATCHET WOUND.

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