The hope is to smuggle these saints back into the public realm. For her blasphemy leads to profanation, with her body as a tool, and through submission she manifests her subversion. In the words of the hagiographer John Capgrave: ‘My labor is to bringe them into o body.’
I will begin by laying out the underlying tenants of Submission Submission and follow with the publishing of two portraits, written out in the vernacular. The life of Christina of Bolsena with her cut tongue in this print magazine and the life of Joan of Arc with her cut hair online.
1. Medieval woman, framed
I have chosen to radically resize the prolific genre of hagiography to medieval women saints as I believe there are some commonalities worth exaggerating. That is, a number of bodily and writerly strategies that can be learned from when facing insurmountable forms of domination. For at the core of their expressions of holiness is a nuanced terrain of submission as a political practice. It is important to point out that during the Middle Ages, a woman’s tongue was often considered venomous and given to spewing lies. She was hatefully blamed, as the descendant of Eve, for being solely responsible for the fall of man. A woman was not permitted to teach, and rarely had access to a decent education. If and when a woman was to defy this widespread misogyny, she would be sure to face numerous denunciations — motivated by the devil, slave to her belly, a liar, a drunkard, and forever guilty — she will pay for everything at the Last Judgement. In order to manoeuvre against these possible attacks, holy women would have to strategically frame their words, body, and actions in order to produce their own forms of compromised authority both during their lifetime and after their death.
2. Submission as subversion, by example
It is best to describe these strategies through examples. One common approach was that a holy woman might announce that it is in fact not her that is speaking when she speaks, but rather that it is God that is speaking through her. If we entertain this performative claim, the holy woman submits her lips and vocal chords to a higher, heavenly power whilst simultaneously validating her own words and making it possible to speak. Another interesting example can be found in the hagiographic writings of Raymond of Capua on the life of Saint Catherine of Siena, where he describes how she constructed (with the help of the holy spirit) an architecture within her own body, an inner cell, in which she could separate herself from the outside world to exist more independently. ‘[…] the Holy Spirit had taught her to erect a little cell in the interior of her soul, whence she resolved never to come forth, notwithstanding her pressing exterior occupations. When she was privileged with a room, she was often obliged to leave it, but nothing could oblige her to leave this interior retreat — external truth has declared that the kingdom of God is within us.’
This invention of an interior architecture is also paralleled in the writings of Saint Teresa d’Avila, in a book literally entitled The Interior Castle, where she says, ‘This magnificent refuge is inside you. Enter. Shatter the darkness that shrouds the doorway… Believe the incredible truth that the Beloved has chosen for his dwelling place the core of your own being because that is the single most beautiful place in all of creation.’ By constructing these interior spaces of spirituality, the saint manages to create the conditions by which she can practice her faith on her own terms. As we can read in the life of Saint Catherine of Siena, she was not privileged with having a room of her own for she was often obliged to leave it. So that even as she submits to an itinerant spiritual practice imposed by the outside, she is nonetheless able to have an interior cell to retreat into. That is, she constructed a conceptual loophole, a place which she could not be denied, to practice her own relation with God.
3. Canonisation, the language of the church
In this project, I focus on the canonised saints exclusively. It is of course a complicated choice which isolates me in a framework of validity chosen by the church. What is clear however, is that I am not interested in researching or validating whether what happens in her story as it was told is true — that is the language of the church. What I am interested in is the plurality of stories that surround her and how I can participate in this narration. My voice amongst others — not as the final deciding one.
4. The portrait, a unit for thinking
According to the specificities of the genre, I handle each saint’s life separately. Each time I begin reading about a particular saint, I try to identify the different strategies (often corporal) that she was using to practice her faith. My common finding was that her body was often the site of her revolt. She might cut her hair off or take out her eyes to avoid a potential marriage suitor or prove her union with Christ by using only the eucharist or even her own breast milk as her sole source of nourishment. Mostly, they are strategies of physical subversion and submission to higher heavenly forms of power that were beyond the strictures of her immediate present. When working on the mode of portraying her story, I often ask myself: how might this strange and delicate exercise of bringing this saint ‘into o body’, against time, and into the secular realm be embodied, performed, and published? But also… how does one perform historiographic and literary research of mystical or spiritual materials with all the tools one has at hand — one’s physical, digital, and extended body?
5. Holy or heretic?
Fascinated by the performativity of these saints, I always try to evoke a similar dynamic with my public or readers. I equate these receivers to the community surrounding the saint. The way she uses her body often brings up the question: is it really God that is motivating her perverse actions or perhaps the devil? I want those that are witnessing or reading to be in the same dilemma, wondering if this person before them is holy or a heretic. I flip between the position of the storyteller (the hagiographer) and the resurrection of the saint herself. An ambivalence of over-identification, penetrating love, and transgressing the limits of the physical body. It is my own small confusion tactic for unsettling a clarity seeking public.
6. The codex
Both for practical and conceptual reasons, Submission Submission employs a modular structure. I make individual portraits only a few of which are presented at a given time. As a metaphor for this structure, I use the image of the medieval codex. Essentially, a codex is a sequence of grouped rectangular surfaces, superposed and sewn together. What is structurally interesting about the advent of this kind of writing surface (as opposed to its precedent, the scroll) is that it engenders what we could call in retrospect ‘random access’ reading — the possibility to access an arbitrary element directly, rather than in sequence as one would read the scroll. It gives birth to the movement of page-flipping and opening up a book to any random page. The possibility for the reader to structure her reading herself, and to renew the order of her reading time and time again, represents a major shift in the reception of text.
“The way she uses her body often brings up the question: is it really God that is motivating her perverse actions or perhaps the devil?”
With this in mind, I like to think of Submission Submission as a work that is always partially viewed. A work that might bind disparate audiences in order to create an imaginary whole. But also, in the tradition of hagiography itself, I’d like to trust a degree of these stories’ transmission to the gossiping lips of those who might receive and move them beyond my own authorial grasp.
7. Rewriting and circulation
Whilst reading medieval hagiographic literature, I was very touched by the tradition whereby text was generated by a communal form of narration that was happening over time. That is, a saint’s life is almost never just written about once, it is written about again and again in various new versions. The aim of a hagiographic text is not necessarily to tell the whole story in all its truth, the desire is to portray the saint in all of her holiness and good deeds and convince all who are reading of her significance. For example, in one story Saint Lucy had her eyes ripped out of her by persecutors, in another story she took them out herself and gave them to a groom that she refused to marry. These variations on a story open up the possibility, or maybe even the imperative, to continue to write and rewrite in the same tradition and open up a continuum between medieval and contemporary narration. Rather than seeing variation as a threat to historical accuracy, maybe instead it can be used as a seductive lure for the reader, propelling her to locate her own desires within the story and tell it once again. On another level, I also think the processes of rereading, rewriting, and reactivating are an important part of contemporary technologies for circulation. Like re-posting, for example. When thinking about narratives, what if publishing is not about putting something in print, but rather circulating it? Additionally, when thinking about the larger-scale imperative for history to be rewritten, I think we have to acknowledge that the entire landscape of writing has changed. It is therefore important to ask the question — how has electronic textuality shifted and expanded our understanding of inscription, erasure, repeatability, variability, and survivability.
“In the tradition of hagiography itself, I’d like to trust a degree of these stories’ transmission to the gossiping lips of those who might receive and move them beyond my own authorial grasp.”
8. The medieval body, dismantled
In reading medieval literature, I often face a moment of non-comprehension or misinterpretation as the paradigms for everything, especially notions of the body, have radically changed. As a reader today, it feels like medieval literature is some kind of textual equivalent to the film genre of Body Horror — low fi and filled with completely awkward scenes of body modification and limb dismantlement. It is written about in such a commonplace way that it doesn’t have the kind of physical or mental shock we might experience in a well-produced psychological horror film. This could be paralleled with the amount of bodily gore that can be witnessed in the writing of saints’ lives. Saint Christina of Bolsena has her tongue cut out, Saint Agatha has her breast cut off, Saint Lucy rips out or has her eyes ripped out and then carries them on a plate. Or perhaps with a bit more nuance, Saint Catherine of Siena who says that her heart was taken out and replaced by the heart of Christ and that she was gifted the foreskin of Jesus as a marriage ring. Presently, I have become interested in medieval theories of resurrection (a much-debated issue at that time), which manage to route the question of what is a body through the question: how will we come back to life before the last and final judgement? What age, height, and sex will we have in the resurrected body? Will all matter that has passed through the body at any point be resurrected? Must bits of matter return to the particular members (for example, fingernails or hair) where they once resided? What is interesting for me in these debates is the overarching question of where does a body begin and where does it end, how do we comprehend the continuity and transformation of self, and what is the relationship between the parts and the whole.
9. Fanfiction
Even if my work has been judged for historical accuracy, it is not necessarily part of my personal criteria for how I hold myself accountable in my work. I rather prefer to treat the historical material I am working with as a fanfiction writer would — imagining alternative endings, fantasising about romances and scenarios unfounded in the original text. If we have been taught to mine a text for authorial intentions, historical content, and indicators of genre and style, we continue to practice modes of creating distance between ourselves and a text. On the contrary, I try to work with text as a decaying corpse inviting readers to move into its tightened tissues and cells to make stabs at animating it, feeling out its contours, and appropriating it for the reader’s own needs. I try to propel these existing narratives by forcing its contents to snap to another grid of desire — the desire of the reader, myself. Opening up the frame wider and wider to accommodate the writing body within the reading of the text.
CUTTONGUE
It should first be said that the existence of Saint Christina of Bolsena is poorly attested. According to extant sources, not very much is actually known about her early life. One local tradition wants her to be born in Bolsena, another wants her to be born in the coastal city of Tyre or modern-day Lebanon. I, however, do not care about her origins. I care about her tongue…
As I hold that muscular organ in my mouth and move it about in its fanged cave, my saliva begins to amass. Extracellular fluid bubbles up extra irregular sentiment. I study the full range of movements I can make with this strange animal: pawing the hard palate, coiling around the uvula, scurrying about between the teeth. Gathering a fresh batch of kisser juice, I ready myself to host more than one in my mouth.
So, can I host your tongue? Will you make out with me? And if our tongues are trained in different tongues, will it language our kiss? If I touch the tip of my tongue to my front teeth to make a ‘th,’ maybe I’d touch your front teeth too, maybe we would ‘th’.
If only I could pass you this text with my very own tongue, in the semi-privacy of a mouth-to-mouth resuscitation of sense. I take a normal breath, I formulate my sentence, I cover and seal your open mouth with mine, I blow. Raise your chest, baby. My air is yours.
But I know you know that our lips are not actually touching. My tongue is already cut off, spit out, and dead. Now, I must continue without one.
I feel like I have lost my mother tongue and my mother’s mother tongue. Growing up in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago, it took me a long time to understand that English was a stained and privileged gift. The town that I grew up in, Mundelein, IL, was forty percent Spanish speaking and the family that I was born into spoke a mixture of Polish, Hungarian, German, and Serbian. My mother being Polish, my Grandmother being Hungarian.
The way my mother speaks English has become a real fascination of mine. There is not a single trace of foreignness to her tongue. Her r’s are perfection, her th’s are seamless, and every syllable is held together with the Chicago inflection of a real American feminine bitch. And yet, I fetishize the moment that I call my grandmother on my birthday and hear her say “hapy birrsday sveety” with a pronunciation I can only dream of reproducing with my own.
When I think about it, I find it strange and yet understandable that I was never encouraged to learn Polish. For my mother, Polish in Chicago represented the lower class. Her parents worked at a factory, her older brother was a German DJ/ limousine driver/gold tooth maker, and her eldest brother worked as a plumber. My mother refined her English, got a scholarship to attend university, become an accountant, and folded easily into American society.
When I try hard enough, though it strains me a bit, I can still sing happy birthday in Polish, I can say ‘goodnight,’ I can say ‘come here,’ I can say ‘kiss me,’ and say ‘I love you,’ I can say other small words but not much more. My mother’s mother tongue has been cut off, and yet when I needed it, I paid a lawyer 2,000 euros to get a Polish passport to stay in Europe.
Since having lived in Germany, then Belgium, now France, my English mother tongue has become both a privileged commodity and yet totally invaded by international English. In time, my accent has entirely changed. Now when I go back to the Northwest suburbs of Chicago, people start asking me where I am from. At my sister’s wedding last year, I was asked to give a speech. People from the other half of the bridal party thought I was a foreign language student that was integrated into the family. To the ears of my childhood, I am an ESL speaker. Sometimes I ridicule myself and say that English is both my first and second language — I am aware that this joke might not be funny for anyone else.
Not very much is known about Christina’s mother or her siblings, almost the entire telling of her story circles around her horrible father, Urbain. Of her family at large, it is said that they were pagan idol worshipers. They were also probably quite wealthy, which in turn gave Christina access to good education and material luxury.
In time, Christina became increasingly disgusted by the luxury that was granted to her and greatly moved by the suffering and poverty of others and so she decided to take it upon herself to break all of the gold pagan idols belonging to her father and distribute them amongst the poor and needy nearby. Upon discovering this act of generosity, Urbain whipped his daughter to rods and locked her up with a few of her pagan girlfriends in a huge tower.
As he holds that muscular organ in his hand, Doctor Julian says, “By the looks of it, your tongue is sick. Let’s take a closer look…”
In my language, when a doctor takes a culture of your tongue, it means that he scrapes off part of the surface for his own testing and keeping. The examination continues…
“Please, can you sit more upright. There you go. Okay, so I want you to touch the tip of the tongue to the roof of the mouth so I can have a look at the ventral surface. Mhmmmm… Now stick your tongue straight out in front of you as far as it can go so I can look for deviation, color, texture, and mass. Okay, very good… stay there. I’m going to glove up. Now I’m going to take this piece of gauze, wrap it around your tongue and palpate it between my thumb and index finger to check for masses and areas of tenderness. Is there any tenderness here? Or here? Ah yes… I see there is some tenderness here. Okay, now I’m going to take a culture of your tongue for further tests. Ready? 1…2…3…”
“Did you say texts?”
“Tests, tests, not texts. Ha, ha, ha. Maybe we should check your ears too.”
“But what do you think it is? I didn’t even suspect that there was something wrong…” “I’d say, it’s a case of candida.”
“But daddy, isn’t candida a normal organism? Can it not exist in my mouth?”
“Don’t call me daddy.”
“Why not…doctor? Everything you are doing to me now reminds me of my father.” “But I am not your father, I didn’t make you with my sperm, I didn’t bring you into this world, I don’t care if you are here or not, I merely scrape.”
“You’re right, you don’t need me here and I’m sorry that my language is so slipped. My tongue isn’t right, you know. That is why I’m here to give you my culture.”
“Thank you for that. Indeed, your tongue is not normal.”
“So what are you going to do Doctor Daddy?”
“I am going to cut it off.”
“All of it”
“Yes.”
In the meantime, Christina had managed to convince many of the pagans in her household to convert like her to Christianity. When Urbain noticed this, he decided to tear her body up with iron hooks and then tied her to a rack beneath which a fire was kindled. It is supposedly God that saved her from these cruelties and turned the flames against her perpetrators. After, she had a stone tied to her neck and was thrown into the lake of Bolsena. God saved her again and her father died.
So…people often ask me why I am interested in saints. I think it’s a fair question. On a personal level, it’s not very extraordinary, I grew up in a Christian household and religion has been a rather divisive factor in my family. One of my sisters and I are not religious, my other sister is very active in the church, my aunt and I are gay, and a portion of my family are Jehovah’s witness. The force of religion, etymologically speaking religar — meaning ‘a binding together’ — just does not hold.
My parents are part of a non-denominational church. We always prayed together before eating and sleeping. I was baptised, passed through communion, and went to church every Sunday. Each time I greet my father at the Chicago Ohare Airport he asks me, “So honey, I just wanted to check in with you to see where you are with your faith.”
Once, when I was back for the holidays and I was attending the Christmas festivities at my parents’ church — my father was quite important in the men’s group there — one of the guys, nicknamed “Cowboy,” approached me after the service. Cowboy is a very strange nickname for someone living in the Midwest. He came up to me while I was walking alone in the parking lot on my way to the car and wrapped his massive arm around my body and locked me into a bind. He said, “You know, your father’s biggest fear is that he will die without knowing you have accepted Christ into your life.”
I love my father and do not want him to die with fears.
Normally the story would end here, but dead Urbain had two successors called Dion and Julian. Dion died after throwing Christina into a burning furnace from which she emerged five days later entirely uninjured. Julian, however, decided to cut off her tongue.
As you hold that muscular organ between your fingers, you laugh because it’s totally fake. It’s actually a shitty Halloween gag that I bought online for a performance of mine.
One night, we used it while we were having sex and loaded it with our dripping sap. Initially, I wrote fluids and when I told you in a message that I wanted a more nasty word, you proposed sève, I proposed sap. Split tongue, serpent shed your used carcass literate on my chest. Anyways, we decided that I would leave my fake tongue with you for a while.
I must say, I’ve never used this tongue as anything other than a performance prop in Submission Submission, The Portrait of Christina of Bolsena. Usually, I hold it between my teeth while Bikini Kill and Heavens to Betsy blasts overhead and extending it into the air, taking it out or snapping it against my face, screaming. And now, I’ve endowed this object to you with the knowledge that this memory will surely resurface in my brain the next time that I play.
It’s good, because I always carry more than one with me at all times. I replay the scenario, we were both naked on the bed and you asked for my fake tongue. I had shown it to you a few times before. You held that lump of lifeless plump in your hands and slowly began to work it against my sex. Pinching it between tense fingers, coating it with your saliva, my body suspended in its pleasure and watched. You begin to run it along my clit. Magic trick, body horror, become my sex toy. Two tongues to my sex, one looking into my eyes. I come.
But how will I hold this sexual act and this performative prop together in my mind — both in sex and on stage?
When Christina stood before Julian with her tongue detached and loose in her mouth. She looked him in the eyes, aimed, and spit the tongue into his face. It hit him in the eye with such precision and force that when the loose tongue fell bloody to the floor, he came to realise that he was blinded. And yet, Christina, with no tongue in mouth begins to stir within her something she wants said. She orchestrates herself into spoken language. And there is the miracle. She is without a tongue and yet she can still speak.
1
Joan arrives unseen, with her horse and her armour. She is a warrior couched in summer-smelling grasses beside the beach. There are no stone walls, nor filthy straw, nor iron bars. She is bright, like the sun. She is going to save this country.
An overwhelming sense strikes her, as if someone just outside her field of vision is watching her. She takes off her armour. She takes off her boys’ clothes.
Joan is methodical in the way she presents herself.
She rolls over and lays on her stomach, shielding her eyes and offering up her unprotected bum to the sun.
Face and fingers in the sand, she feels an invisible hand tenderly brush against her: not a hand, but a thing, a physical sensation like the wind — a summer wind which pets her soft and delicate skin as if she is a days-old kitten. Her head tips back to bare her throat, her back arches to lift up her ass. She is open / to anything offered. Lips waiting to be taken, cheeks and mouth redden as she begins to beg without her words for the sweetness of an angel’s kiss.
2
“Jeanne!”
Joan is accustomed to hearing voices. It reminds her of days spent in a prison cell.
Early on in her trial, they attempted to link her to witchcraft, but it was dropped. Soon seventy charges turned to twelve. The biggest charge was the crossdressing.
“Jeanne!”
This time the voice is closer.
“Jeanne, may an alligator eat your heart and may you, I don’t fucking know, roll a rock up a hill forever, open your eyes and listen to me.”
Joan opens her eyes. Claire, a woman with short black hair stands in front of her, wearing blue denim.
She looks at Joan, tiny in her armour, short hair like a boy, and she feels like her soul is on fire. She reminds Claire of an angel.
“Who are you?” Joan asks.
“Introductions later,” the woman says. “For now, you’ve got two choices for how to get out of here. I’d prefer number one, blow a hole in the side of this cell, but you might like number two, teleport the fuck out of here.”
“Teleport?”
The woman pulls out a small device, shining silver, and presses a button. There is a blinking light and the resonant sound of a pulsing stick. Joan wraps her hand around Claires hand and unclasps the hinged armour. She no longer wants to protect herself. Resting their two hands against her inner thigh, they lock eyes. “Ready?” “Yes” Joan says with a trembling voice. “Do you want me to take you to the next level?” Joan blinks her reply.
(Black)
When Joan can see again, she is back on the beach walking through the sand towards the sea. She is wearing a gold and white bikini which leaves almost nothing to the imagination. She dives in.
Greasy water slimes her mouth. She chokes on it, coughs, spits out the foul stuff and inhales air just as foul. She gags, but does not vomit,
and runs a hand through her now wet hair.
3
“Looking good out there, Joan!”
Joan smiles and approaches the towel that the blonde is sitting on. Heat uncurls through her long hair laying in coils on the towel. Her body is translucent, her eyes wide, her voice almost seems hollow as she speaks. “Hey! I didn’t know you’d be here today.” Blondie brings her hands behind her back, gently playing with one of the lower strands. “It’s a nice day, isn’t it? Plus, the water isn’t too bad. Almost makes me want to stay in it all day.” She kneads her leg, seemingly content.
4
The way the sunlight illuminates parts of Liane’s hair and makes it shine is truly brilliant. The swordswoman is glad to see it hasn’t lost its shine. Joan casually places her hand on Liane. Thinking: this is the softest thing that I have ever held onto.
Liane stirs, shifts to move closer and drape her hand on Jeanne’s back. She runs her fingers through Joan’s short hair over and over again, accepting that dressing as she does might help Joan in her audience with the prince. Joan sighs in affection, looking at her peaceful expression.
5
Blondie leans in even closer and whispers, “You are always too hot.”
Joan feels her nipples stiffen. “You are always too cold.”
Blondie extends her hand and traces her fingers
“Joan, you are aware that if you spend enough time in the water, that white bikini won’t hide anything from anyone that happens to see you, right?”
A soft blush radiates on Joan’s cheeks. She falls silent at the feeling of strong lips pressing against her own. The flame of uncertainty had been extinguished. “Are you okay”
“Yes, I’m more than okay”
6
Christine intensifies the kiss and whispers. “I want you to suck me, Joan.” her hands move down Joan’s back and grip Joan’s cute ass. She reaches for her own bikini bottom letting her stick spring free. Her tongue travels along her lips as she pulls Joan closer.
Joan is on her knees, receiving in the woman’s stick not seeming to care how she got it.
Letting her take her time.
A soft moan escapes her own cunt, as she makes her way around the stick towards the warmth of a cunt.
Its sweetness fills Joan’s mouth, welling up in every place it touches her, blooming here from her throat, here in her hip, from the curve of her back to the bareness of her neck. Joan smiles with a thin strand of saliva connecting the cunt to her lips.
7
Joan finds herself with her back in the sand, pulling her bikini top over her breasts and her bottoms to the side, exposing her cunt buried deep in the sand. “Please… ” Anna nods and doesn’t hesitate. Her tender hands slowly and gently explore Joans body.
She feels Joan’s inner walls tighten around her hand. It is the combination of a hand playing with her breast and a hand moving in and out of her inner walls. She quickly wraps her arms around the blonde’s neck and pulls her into a deep and passionate kiss. The feeling of being sucked is hot enough to send Joan over the edge of her already building orgasm. It is wonderful.
8
Rope after rope of Blondie’s potent cum floods Joan’s walls, painting it cloudy with her seed. The woman very slowly pulls a cunt out of Joan’s cunt as her inner walls clamp down like a vice. Blondie is trying to milk it for all it’s worth. A lustful smile spreads across her features as she wriths and squirms in the sand like there is no tomorrow.
“That felt incredible…”
Her hands are still twitching and she grasps her skirt, wanting more carnage, but it is all over. She rolls over and pushes herself up on hands and knees. She wraps herself in the wool. It reeks of horse.
Her mouth opens in a quiet, sharp breath and all that is left to her is love.
‘Glory,’ Joan says in a hoarse whisper.
9
Part of her never wants to get up from the sand again.
Joan opens the blanket and stares at her own bare chest, thinking of what she has seen swords do to flesh.
Deep down, Joan knows that she breaks everything she touches. As a young girl, she reached for a monarch butterfly, but her fingers held onto the wings and the creature fell to the grass, dead on arrival.
And when morning comes, let her get up, put her armour back on, sheath her sword, and walk back out into those battlements.
Years later, in 1453 the war was over. England had been driven out of France, and France rejoiced.
This girl’s name is on the lips of the entire country.
