Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Enikő Bollobás: (De-) Gendering and (De-) Sexualizing Famale Subjectivities: Woman-Hating and Its Revisions in Literature and Painting

intimately tied to the construction of the woman outside the heterosexual matrix: when a non-gendered and non-sexualized matrix is created for the selves to come out and interact with each other to become text. 3. Drozdik: self love, love of the female selves The processes captured in Droznik's pieces seem all too familiar culturally. Here too, the heterosexual matrix is excluded

—or, more precisely, only evoked satirically, as in her various Love Letters. The one written To a Leyden Jar

, for example, ironically signifies upon heterosexual romance, with all its paraphernalia. The elements of this satirical signifying include the male heterosexual ideal (the jar has "handsome body," "well-set shoulders," with "elegant, sinuous forms"; has "the power of electricity" stored in his body), the genre of yearning love letters, the tradition

—defined by the separation of subject and object, loving and loved

—of "romantic thralldom" ("I have given everything I had to give," she writes) as well as the erotic perception of the desired object (the woman having her "hand slipping up and down your shining surface"). A later work also falls into this category: Young and Beautiful is an ironic representation of genderperformance. Instead of the heterosexual context, we seem to have an ideal of internal double: hermaphrodism is elevated to the status of "perfection" only found in nature, formerly known as the site and embodiment of the heterosexual ized feminine ideal (as in Natural Philosophy, Fragmenta Natural, Taxonomy, The Sexual System of Plants, after Linnaeus, 1990). On many pieces, the autosexual is performed. The female is duplicated, most often it is the female seif who enters into playful interaction with herself (as in Individual Mythology, 1976-77, or the late-70s video Double). The dancers of Individual Mythology are superimposed upon one another, to create a tumultuous world of fleeting woman selves: they seem to enjoy the company of each other, have a very good time there, desiring and satisfying desire at the same time. I hear the prominent African American modernist writer, Zora Neale Hurston, echoed in these pieces: "I love myself when I am laughing." The female experimental artist has primarily her own body to work with; this body is Drozdik's primary material too, capable of 119