The Mimesis Tour -- Docents' Talk
“…Anything you can do (to me) I can do worse, and Anything you can do (to me) I can do first—to myself.” (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling)
Mimesis is a girl congealing as she attempts performances of femininity. She is learning to be a subject, an actor, instead of an action. Here is the social construction of gender writ large. Girl domesticates herself, shaping her outsides through the mark of the feminine.
Elizabeth Grosz describes this process in Volatile Bodies. "The surface of the body, the skin, moreover provides the ground for the articulation of orifices, erotogenic rims, cuts on the body’s surface, loci of exchange between the inside and the outside, points of conversion of the outside into the body, and of the inside out of the body. These are sites not only for the reception and transmission of information but also for bodily secretions …, ongoing processes of sensory stimulation which require some form of signification and sociocultural and psychical representation."