“Power in Position: The Limitations of Women’s Rights in Vanessa Place’s Statement of Facts” by Zoe Butler
In 2018, after decades of a persisting culture of sexual assault in USA Gymnastics, specifically rooted in the team doctor Larry Nassar, Olympian Aly Raisman addressed the Michigan courtroom with her personal testimony. In a YouTube video with 5.9 million views, she decisively recounts her disgust and apathy for the man who assaulted her and many others. Her voice is taut with emotion, and she speaks with direct eye contact to her perpetrator, telling him: “Now, Larry, it is your turn to listen to me.” She holds authority and power, her body positioned in the center of both the trial and the assault. Over the course of a week, 156 women and girls gave victim impact statements directed at Nassar, who was eventually sentenced to 40-175 years in prison on sexual assault charges (USA Today). But while the performance of a legal trial allows minimal room for subjectivity, there remains something artful in listening to Raisman, a hope or a potential for hope. It could be because she is telling her story that she knows is the story of so many other women, or it could be in knowing that the power that was his—and the institution’s—is now hers. Regardless, she claims her right to her position the moment the judge asks her, “What would you like me to know?”
In 2011, conceptual poet Vanessa Place performed an excerpt from Statement of Facts (2010), which is “an appropriation of the appellate briefs that [she] has written for her day job as a lawyer who represents indigent sex offenders” (Against Expression 489). With the flat affect of poet voice, Place recited from original documents of sexual assault trials at the Kelly Writers House (KWH) as part of their FEMINISM/S series, which KWH called “an interdisciplinary series exploring how art, criticism, political action, and community building can create structural and cultural solutions to gender hierarchies” (Kelly Writers House). Place’s appropriation of hyper-emotional experiences told aloud in a confusing tone of banality aims to achieve, she claims, some measure of “uncompromising realism” surrounding sexual assault trials (Against Expression 489). However, Place’s attempt at reframing the emotional as emotionless hinges on the idea that there is one “right,” or purposeful, emotion in law. In Statement of Facts, she ends up performing what she is attempting to criticize, negating the fact that women who have experienced assault on any level know that it unlocks a range of emotions, emotionless sometimes included. And while it remains true that they needn’t put those emotions on display in order to be justified in the court of law, I will argue that if they wish to, that is their right.
Conceptual writing has demonstrated its position in the literary world as both a challenge of self-constraint for the writer and an opportunity for performance. Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith are two figures spearheading this movement, publishing Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing in 2011. In it, Goldsmith justifies this movement as being part of a “literary revolution,” finding its origins in conceptual art of the 1960s, including Andy Warhol’s “uncreativity,” appropriation art of the 1980s, including Richard Prince’s photographs of the cowboys photographed on Marlboro ads, and the emergence of the internet in the 1990s.
One example of conceptual writing is Goldsmith’s Day, in which he spent a year retyping a day’s copy of the New York Times, eventually publishing the work in a 900-page book. It was a process Goldsmith described as “surprisingly sensual,” distinguishing his role as a manager of words, not a creator of words (Goldsmith). Dworkin, however, emphasized the role of the artist’s position as being one separated from the artwork produced, saying that conceptual art’s “willingness to distance the artist from the manufacture of the artwork and to discount traditional valuations of originality” is notable (Against Expression, xxxvii). While Goldsmith is admitting to a kind of self-satisfaction or pleasure from producing this work, Dworkin is admitting a kind of responsibility, or at least acknowledgement, in the role of the artist as being at least situated as part of the work being produced.
I believe conceptual poetry can be done effectively, based on the tenets Dworkin and Goldsmith outline, and also that Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman outline in Notes on Conceptualisms (2009). For example, Trisha Low’s Confessions is a direct transcription of her five consecutive confessions with Catholic priests, in which she “mechanically tells each priest the identical story, mimicking the script set forth in the formal structure of the confession” (Against Expression 352). Part of this work—the part that determines each priest’s personal, emotive responses—is Low confessing having sex with a man who “slapped me around” (Low). As personal as her scripted confessions are, the finished product results in an amusing, avante-garde political statement reflective of the role of women’s bodies and positions in religion. In creating this, Low makes her body both the central object and subject. It is largely due to her control over the entirety of the project and performance that the political messaging is made clear. If Low were to be writing about someone else’s experience, that degree of separation would be felt, and much of the humor allowed to the reader would begin to turn inappropriate, even exploitative.
When this degree of separation from the subject matter allows for the intention of the work to be questioned is when conceptual writing can turn unethical, even dangerous. Paisley Rekdal addresses similar themes in a discussion of cultural appropriation in her book Appropriate (2021). It’s a thoughtful reckoning which addresses the definitions, limitations, and utilizations of cultural appropriation which can be applied to appropriation at large. From Rekdal’s arguments, I would like to frame conceptual writing within the lens of one particular definition of cultural appropriation, which “is the taking of someone else’s ‘intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts’ in order to ‘suit [our] own tastes, express [our] own individuality, or simply make a profit’ (italics mine)” (Rekdal 25).
This can be thought about in regard to Goldsmith’s Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013) in which he hand-picked different national tragedies, including the Challenger space shuttle explosion, the Columbine school shooting, and John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and transcribed different personal accounts, both from radio reporters and people actually experiencing them. When Goldsmith shifted the focus of his writing from the mundane to the traumatic, the theatrics of his constructive process became clear. Where his original appropriations focused on such apolitical subject matters that it didn’t warrant an interest in ethics or authorial intentions, these triggering transcriptions called for a complete reconsideration of both.
Critic Sueyeun Juliette Lee writes that when confronted with this text, “What I experience isn’t boredom, but it’s certainly something like it. I am shocked and fatigued by the writing, and this drives me into a space where as a reader, I simply shut down. My attention turns off” (Lee). Lee elaborates on critic Sianne Ngai’s term “stuplime” which serves to describe works—like Goldsmith’s—which are “simultaneously astonishing and deliberately fatiguing,” and creates a new context to understand the traumatic stuplime (Lee). Lee’s biggest fear in this recontextualization of the traumatic stuplime is that her “sense of fatigue invokes a false sense of closure—that I can somehow recognize the totality of this violence because it has been rendered to me repetitiously” (Lee). This direct effect to the kind of triggering-turned-emotionless events is cause for concern, despite the authorial intent. Because while Goldsmith’s transcriptions of national tragedies may seem like the work of an archivist, it’s in reality a kind of performance. Each project begs the question: Are you just doing this for attention?
The difference between the national tragedies described in Goldsmith’s book and the personal tragedies described in Place’s Statement of Facts is the positioning of the individual, specifically the woman. Because while national tragedies carry a cultural weight that were lived and experienced by a number of individuals, testimonies of sexual assault are unique to the individual who experienced them. As soon as the woman’s story is taken from her and appropriated as something else, it makes her powerless all over again. Authorship is ownership in this sense. And when that right for ownership over her individual story is taken away, it calls into question the ethics of the entire project. Rekdal addresses this responsibility in her book:
As writers, we are both passive and active agents of the state, colonizers and the colonized, outsider and insiders to the systems and identities we critique. Does writing in the voice of another help or worsen these conditions? Does it mute other writers we wish to speak alongside of, or does it bring more voices to the conversation? (Rekdal 90-91).
Place could argue that since Statement of Facts is simultaneously her own writing, and therefore her right to publish, as well as transcripts of words actually said by victims, and therefore not taking away their voices, but amplifying it through publication. But publication does not eliminate her position in the matter, a position of performance nonetheless. Philosopher Judith Butler’s discussions on performativity are largely associated with gender theory, but their theories on performativity can also be understood in the context of the law. PhD candidate Stephen Young wrote on their theory that “law dictates the form of performance, but one performs the law through their expression even if it is not necessarily of their choosing” (Young). The gestural notion of Place’s performance of the court of law outside the court of law both in written and vocal forms is halting and effective, just not in the way she intended.
The flatness of language used in Place’s Statement of Facts is what scholar Hannah Manshel argues is the purpose: to produce non-narrative “resistance around sexual violence that eludes the requirement that victim produce affect as evidence” (Manshel 511). In this sense, Place is politically arguing against the notion that survivors of sexual assualt be victimized, using the necessary language and emotion to “prove” their trauma. For context, between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, “women needed to demonstrate emotional damage in order to support a rape accusation,” what Place refers to as a “hue and cry” in The Guilt Project, another book she wrote pertaining to the American legal system’s way of defining and handling sex offenders. This “hue and cry” was used in place of the physical evidence that we take for granted in rape cases nowadays, and required women to supplement their “torn and bloodied clothes with cries of distress in order to show that she did not consent” (Manshel 514).
Manshel is quick to clarify that while today’s court system no longer has this “hue and cry” clause, “there still exists an insidious compulsion to attest to trauma by producing and performing feeling” (Manshel 515). Through this logic, Place is politically positioning herself in the belief that victims of sexual assault should never have to have their credibility certified through their emotion. Additionally, Manshel argues that Place’s flatness of language used in the writing and performing of sexual assault cases aims to observe rape as larger than a personal problem, thus drawing attention to the race and class issues present in the structural handlings of the court and of rape-prevention measures. It is through these arguments that Place becomes nearly admirable in her political work; in fact, it’s a practical reminder that rape and sexual assault, just becuase they are traumatic, should never be mistaken as uncomplicated.
When Place allows her name to be dragged through this complexity of the most heinous crimes imaginable, she carries with her a façade of bravery. The cost of this risk, however, is that she missed the mark. While she justifiably points out the variety and uncertainty of different situations involving rape and sexual assault, she forgot about the necessity of delicacy. Place reaches a little too forcefully for objectivity, and instead of her writing and reading being interpreted as flat, it results in the singular emotion of callousness. Her refusal to perform emotion is still a performance, especially considering that these stories are not her own. After all, if women want to “hue and cry,” that is their right. What matters most is not for one artist to maintain her ethos through stringent “poetics,” but for those who are defending their case of sexual assault in the court of law to maintain their rights and regain their positions of power.
The dangers of these institutional powers of control can possibly be better understood in the context of someone not typically associated inside the literary world. In celebrity-model Emily Ratajkowski’s essay, “Buying Myself Back,” which was first published in New York magazine and is now featured in her new book of essays, My Body (2021), Ratajkowski experiences a range of emotions resulting from different violations and appropriations. She’s “incredulous when she is sued for posting a paparazzi photo to Instagram; horrified when hackers leak her nudes on 4chan; furious when Jonathan Leder, who she says digitally penetrated her without her consent, publishes Polaroids of her with an allegedly forged release form” (Chu). The point here is that whichever emotion seems to occupy her throughout these violations, despite them being non-sexual, is her right to both experience and relate them. Throughout her essay and her book, Ratajkowski outlines numerous times she has been both exploited by men and by the institution of modeling, involving herself in multiple lawsuits pertaining to those who stole or appropriated her images. However, it should be noted with equal importance that she has no interest in victimhood: “her experiences are neither disintegrating, even when traumatic, nor especially unique; the point is simply that they are no one’s but her own” (Chu). The reality of Ratajkowski’s sought-after autonomy is that it takes numerous paths, all abundant with a variety of emotion. No one is claiming to know how to navigate them correctly, everyone is only eager to be able to do it their way.
It is impossible to discuss the rights of women without also acknowledging the power and curse of female desire. Writer Andrea Long Chu has written about female desire and a similar distrust in the “hue and cry” notion that Place is working against, only Chu has done so in the context of vaginoplasty surgery. Chu is transgender, and in 2018, she underwent surgery to get a vagina. But the political sphere historically and presently offers many frameworks for why surgeries like this should not be accessible to people like Chu. As she writes in an opinion article for the New York Times, both conservatives and liberals weary to offer surgery “engage in what we could call ‘compassion-mongering,’ peddling bigotry in the guise of sympathetic concern. Both posit a medical duty to refrain from increasing trans people’s suffering—what’s called nonmaleficence” (Chu). Chu argues, though, that whether the surgery makes her “happy” or not should not serve as the parameter by which she is allowed this surgery. She explicitly relates this when saying she believes that “surgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want,” understanding that any following reactions or feelings are her human rights (Chu). Place, while exercising a similar desire for belief, fails in her attempt because of a refusal to acknowledge her position. Where Chu’s own position in undergoing vaginoplasty surgery echoes the voices of others undergoing the same procedure, Place’s voice strips the women testifying of theirs.
Place, like many, has the desire to be perceived in a particular way. I believe she wishes this perception to be as characteristically rebellious as Chu’s, but with the added edge of being a bit villainous. Both Chu and Place can be uncomfortable to sit with for a variety of reasons, regardless of their likability or unlikability, but the main difference between them in their work and in their desires is that Chu feels productive while Place feels stuck. Chu’s argumentation can serve as evidence that your claims, or even intent, don’t necessarily need to be “neat” or fully-formed to warrant space, but that your position in issues matters. Because she is honest about her sometimes contradictory, but nevertheless strong, convictions and experiences, I feel compelled to listen to her. Conversely, Place’s objective often feels muddled behind her intentionally provocative persona. The times I feel most drawn to what she has to say are when she writes about herself; when I can better understand her position, I can understand how much I do not understand due to my own position. I have never been nor ever plan to be a defense attorney for convicted sex offenders. She, on the other hand, does understand this position, saying in The Guilt Project that “you may hate my clients, and you may be right” (Place 10).
It is difficult to blame Place, one woman, for doing what she must believe to be important work in broadening the scope by which our society views the legal process of rape cases. It would be much easier to blame an institution, and only an institution, like the American legal system. But I believe a critique and responsibility is due for Place, just as it is due for the legal system as a whole. Place has been given the opportunity to personally involve herself in this institution, to take up a position that can be striving for justice in the fullest sense of the word. This may be why it is a sincere disappointment to witness how she has utilized this opportunity; she has fulfilled a kind of self-interest instead of using her position as a means of elevating the public’s understanding of the court of law. Place is taking the opposite approach to the argument that women must perform in order to be trusted or listened to, or, worse than both, believed in the court of law. But by doing so, she positions herself within the same framework, admitting defeat in regard to being able to stand outside of it:
They—we—want frames. Instead, I make traps and stand in them and wave, and often get caught, but that’s part of standing in a trap. To me, that’s more illuminating than acting as if I could stand outside of the trap, or fashion the frame. We all have our own traps, which we bait with what we like and which are baited with things we like. If we could agree on our complicity, then there might be a possibility of having a different kind of conversation. (Place).
This kind of submission to the “trap” aligns with her submission to larger frames of our society, capitalism included. In Notes on Conceptualisms, Place justifies this submission by saying that “because institutions of poetry and progressive writing already wield so little cultural and economic capital, conceptual writing has been increasingly shifting its attention to mass media...Note the potential for collusion” (Place & Fitterman). So if, as Place reiterates in Notes of Conceptualisms, the purpose of conceptual writing is failure, then Place perhaps achieved her goal afterall.
But the problem remains that the overarching power still lies within the institution of American law. Place’s writing, and even more so, performing, of the women’s testimonies in Statement of Facts perpetuates this institution’s power, reinforcing their voicelessness. In a way, Place is taking advantage of the very thing she is critiquing the same way Ratajkowski is; for Place, this pertains to “the regime under which conceptual writing has flowered is the repressive market economy” (Place 30). This pessimism surrounding being able to work outside the realm of late capitalism serves paramount in her motivation for continuing her work. She affirms this doubt by saying: “Note that there is no escape from this regime, which will banalize and commodify any mass attempt at subversion” (Place 30). So she decides to participate in it, the same way Ratajkowski decides to commodify her body and her image in the hopes of feeling free “to do whatever the hell I pleased” (Ratajkowski).
If uncompromising realism is the feat Place is striving to achieve, then it’s worth examining her work outside of the moral, or even ethical, lens, as Steven Zultanski did in his statement on Statement of Facts. Place has consistently denied calls for her to defend or even interpret her work for the reader, but her defenses of conceptual writing, in general, may serve as general guidelines of how she views this work. For example, she aligns conceptual writing with a kind of “contemplative materialism,” if thinking about it in Marxist terms (Zultanski). In an interview, Place explains this writing: “The stuff of conceptualism, the textual thing, is the most static of objects, inert, inutile. Dead as a doorknob.” Zultanski combines these theories of texts to understand Place to understand “the world as matter, as opposed to movement...in which a concept were an object, as opposed to a movement of thought” (Zultanski). In this notion, Place is inviting the readers to read Statement of Facts in the legal position of herself, as a defender of sex offenders, presenting material “that almost dares the reader to disbelieve, and forces him or her into a far more uncomfortable position” (Zultanski).
Again, Place’s work can be interpreted as admirable in this way, even purposeful, because instead of allowing the reader moral and ethical comfort, she is forcing us into a conundrum dealt with every day in court: “It confronts us with a deadlock: to approach as fiction that which we most desperately, with all of our moral fiber, want to regard as irreducible reality” (Zultanski). But where Zultanski describes Place’s work as being truly difficult is in the undeniable power maintained by the state, or the institution, regardless of both the power the sex offender originally wielded and regardless of the power the victim attempts to regain. Zultanski points to this means of control: “if certain acts of speech are always already authenticated by the social position of the speaker, then that social position is maintained as a natural fact, which, like all natural facts, are merely materials to be managed by the state” (Zultanski). It’s in this way that Place’s appropriation of the survivor’s voices becomes the most bleak; their voices are not only stolen by this one poet, but by the court of law. Despite all the ethical and moral dilemmas Statement of Facts brings to light, what is most concerning is the theft of voice which is power. This is why it remains clear that above all else, the law, while attempting to maintain objectivity, must also maintain space for women to take up their position. To feel space is to feel room to breathe, room to not always get things right, room to think, to feel. Room to be heard. Room to be seen. Place, by appropriating these women’s voices, is stealing that space. She is shoving them off the stage to grant herself more room to perform.
Vanessa Place has appropriated the traumatic stories of women who have endured sexual assault, benefitting fiscally, but maybe even worse, self-righteously. Her performances of their stories include a flatness of voice, which harbors the same logic that she is supposedly working against: that women must offer up some kind of affect in order to be believed in the court of law, whether that affect be total emotion or total lack of emotion. She is ruthless in this pursuit. But while sensitivity would benefit her cause, it should not be mistaken for timidity; radical change can and has been made through radical sensitivity. With this radicality, I am not arguing that we shoot down the conceptualists, like Valerie Solanas did with Andy Warhol. Rather, I am calling for a radical shift in the metrics by which we think of female rights in the court of law. Heralding a performance, including the very writing I am delivering to you now, should never be necessary in ensuring women have the space to use their voice. That being said, when performances are made, they should be in pursuit of carving that space back out for those who it has been taken from. This is the opposite of what Place has done in Statement of Facts, which is working to institutionalize the age-old story of being female; “By ‘female,’ I mean the condition of having someone else do your desiring for you” (Chu).
In 2011, conceptual poet Vanessa Place performed an excerpt from Statement of Facts (2010), which is “an appropriation of the appellate briefs that [she] has written for her day job as a lawyer who represents indigent sex offenders” (Against Expression 489). With the flat affect of poet voice, Place recited from original documents of sexual assault trials at the Kelly Writers House (KWH) as part of their FEMINISM/S series, which KWH called “an interdisciplinary series exploring how art, criticism, political action, and community building can create structural and cultural solutions to gender hierarchies” (Kelly Writers House). Place’s appropriation of hyper-emotional experiences told aloud in a confusing tone of banality aims to achieve, she claims, some measure of “uncompromising realism” surrounding sexual assault trials (Against Expression 489). However, Place’s attempt at reframing the emotional as emotionless hinges on the idea that there is one “right,” or purposeful, emotion in law. In Statement of Facts, she ends up performing what she is attempting to criticize, negating the fact that women who have experienced assault on any level know that it unlocks a range of emotions, emotionless sometimes included. And while it remains true that they needn’t put those emotions on display in order to be justified in the court of law, I will argue that if they wish to, that is their right.
Conceptual writing has demonstrated its position in the literary world as both a challenge of self-constraint for the writer and an opportunity for performance. Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith are two figures spearheading this movement, publishing Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing in 2011. In it, Goldsmith justifies this movement as being part of a “literary revolution,” finding its origins in conceptual art of the 1960s, including Andy Warhol’s “uncreativity,” appropriation art of the 1980s, including Richard Prince’s photographs of the cowboys photographed on Marlboro ads, and the emergence of the internet in the 1990s.
One example of conceptual writing is Goldsmith’s Day, in which he spent a year retyping a day’s copy of the New York Times, eventually publishing the work in a 900-page book. It was a process Goldsmith described as “surprisingly sensual,” distinguishing his role as a manager of words, not a creator of words (Goldsmith). Dworkin, however, emphasized the role of the artist’s position as being one separated from the artwork produced, saying that conceptual art’s “willingness to distance the artist from the manufacture of the artwork and to discount traditional valuations of originality” is notable (Against Expression, xxxvii). While Goldsmith is admitting to a kind of self-satisfaction or pleasure from producing this work, Dworkin is admitting a kind of responsibility, or at least acknowledgement, in the role of the artist as being at least situated as part of the work being produced.
I believe conceptual poetry can be done effectively, based on the tenets Dworkin and Goldsmith outline, and also that Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman outline in Notes on Conceptualisms (2009). For example, Trisha Low’s Confessions is a direct transcription of her five consecutive confessions with Catholic priests, in which she “mechanically tells each priest the identical story, mimicking the script set forth in the formal structure of the confession” (Against Expression 352). Part of this work—the part that determines each priest’s personal, emotive responses—is Low confessing having sex with a man who “slapped me around” (Low). As personal as her scripted confessions are, the finished product results in an amusing, avante-garde political statement reflective of the role of women’s bodies and positions in religion. In creating this, Low makes her body both the central object and subject. It is largely due to her control over the entirety of the project and performance that the political messaging is made clear. If Low were to be writing about someone else’s experience, that degree of separation would be felt, and much of the humor allowed to the reader would begin to turn inappropriate, even exploitative.
When this degree of separation from the subject matter allows for the intention of the work to be questioned is when conceptual writing can turn unethical, even dangerous. Paisley Rekdal addresses similar themes in a discussion of cultural appropriation in her book Appropriate (2021). It’s a thoughtful reckoning which addresses the definitions, limitations, and utilizations of cultural appropriation which can be applied to appropriation at large. From Rekdal’s arguments, I would like to frame conceptual writing within the lens of one particular definition of cultural appropriation, which “is the taking of someone else’s ‘intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts’ in order to ‘suit [our] own tastes, express [our] own individuality, or simply make a profit’ (italics mine)” (Rekdal 25).
This can be thought about in regard to Goldsmith’s Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013) in which he hand-picked different national tragedies, including the Challenger space shuttle explosion, the Columbine school shooting, and John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and transcribed different personal accounts, both from radio reporters and people actually experiencing them. When Goldsmith shifted the focus of his writing from the mundane to the traumatic, the theatrics of his constructive process became clear. Where his original appropriations focused on such apolitical subject matters that it didn’t warrant an interest in ethics or authorial intentions, these triggering transcriptions called for a complete reconsideration of both.
Critic Sueyeun Juliette Lee writes that when confronted with this text, “What I experience isn’t boredom, but it’s certainly something like it. I am shocked and fatigued by the writing, and this drives me into a space where as a reader, I simply shut down. My attention turns off” (Lee). Lee elaborates on critic Sianne Ngai’s term “stuplime” which serves to describe works—like Goldsmith’s—which are “simultaneously astonishing and deliberately fatiguing,” and creates a new context to understand the traumatic stuplime (Lee). Lee’s biggest fear in this recontextualization of the traumatic stuplime is that her “sense of fatigue invokes a false sense of closure—that I can somehow recognize the totality of this violence because it has been rendered to me repetitiously” (Lee). This direct effect to the kind of triggering-turned-emotionless events is cause for concern, despite the authorial intent. Because while Goldsmith’s transcriptions of national tragedies may seem like the work of an archivist, it’s in reality a kind of performance. Each project begs the question: Are you just doing this for attention?
The difference between the national tragedies described in Goldsmith’s book and the personal tragedies described in Place’s Statement of Facts is the positioning of the individual, specifically the woman. Because while national tragedies carry a cultural weight that were lived and experienced by a number of individuals, testimonies of sexual assault are unique to the individual who experienced them. As soon as the woman’s story is taken from her and appropriated as something else, it makes her powerless all over again. Authorship is ownership in this sense. And when that right for ownership over her individual story is taken away, it calls into question the ethics of the entire project. Rekdal addresses this responsibility in her book:
As writers, we are both passive and active agents of the state, colonizers and the colonized, outsider and insiders to the systems and identities we critique. Does writing in the voice of another help or worsen these conditions? Does it mute other writers we wish to speak alongside of, or does it bring more voices to the conversation? (Rekdal 90-91).
Place could argue that since Statement of Facts is simultaneously her own writing, and therefore her right to publish, as well as transcripts of words actually said by victims, and therefore not taking away their voices, but amplifying it through publication. But publication does not eliminate her position in the matter, a position of performance nonetheless. Philosopher Judith Butler’s discussions on performativity are largely associated with gender theory, but their theories on performativity can also be understood in the context of the law. PhD candidate Stephen Young wrote on their theory that “law dictates the form of performance, but one performs the law through their expression even if it is not necessarily of their choosing” (Young). The gestural notion of Place’s performance of the court of law outside the court of law both in written and vocal forms is halting and effective, just not in the way she intended.
The flatness of language used in Place’s Statement of Facts is what scholar Hannah Manshel argues is the purpose: to produce non-narrative “resistance around sexual violence that eludes the requirement that victim produce affect as evidence” (Manshel 511). In this sense, Place is politically arguing against the notion that survivors of sexual assualt be victimized, using the necessary language and emotion to “prove” their trauma. For context, between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, “women needed to demonstrate emotional damage in order to support a rape accusation,” what Place refers to as a “hue and cry” in The Guilt Project, another book she wrote pertaining to the American legal system’s way of defining and handling sex offenders. This “hue and cry” was used in place of the physical evidence that we take for granted in rape cases nowadays, and required women to supplement their “torn and bloodied clothes with cries of distress in order to show that she did not consent” (Manshel 514).
Manshel is quick to clarify that while today’s court system no longer has this “hue and cry” clause, “there still exists an insidious compulsion to attest to trauma by producing and performing feeling” (Manshel 515). Through this logic, Place is politically positioning herself in the belief that victims of sexual assault should never have to have their credibility certified through their emotion. Additionally, Manshel argues that Place’s flatness of language used in the writing and performing of sexual assault cases aims to observe rape as larger than a personal problem, thus drawing attention to the race and class issues present in the structural handlings of the court and of rape-prevention measures. It is through these arguments that Place becomes nearly admirable in her political work; in fact, it’s a practical reminder that rape and sexual assault, just becuase they are traumatic, should never be mistaken as uncomplicated.
When Place allows her name to be dragged through this complexity of the most heinous crimes imaginable, she carries with her a façade of bravery. The cost of this risk, however, is that she missed the mark. While she justifiably points out the variety and uncertainty of different situations involving rape and sexual assault, she forgot about the necessity of delicacy. Place reaches a little too forcefully for objectivity, and instead of her writing and reading being interpreted as flat, it results in the singular emotion of callousness. Her refusal to perform emotion is still a performance, especially considering that these stories are not her own. After all, if women want to “hue and cry,” that is their right. What matters most is not for one artist to maintain her ethos through stringent “poetics,” but for those who are defending their case of sexual assault in the court of law to maintain their rights and regain their positions of power.
The dangers of these institutional powers of control can possibly be better understood in the context of someone not typically associated inside the literary world. In celebrity-model Emily Ratajkowski’s essay, “Buying Myself Back,” which was first published in New York magazine and is now featured in her new book of essays, My Body (2021), Ratajkowski experiences a range of emotions resulting from different violations and appropriations. She’s “incredulous when she is sued for posting a paparazzi photo to Instagram; horrified when hackers leak her nudes on 4chan; furious when Jonathan Leder, who she says digitally penetrated her without her consent, publishes Polaroids of her with an allegedly forged release form” (Chu). The point here is that whichever emotion seems to occupy her throughout these violations, despite them being non-sexual, is her right to both experience and relate them. Throughout her essay and her book, Ratajkowski outlines numerous times she has been both exploited by men and by the institution of modeling, involving herself in multiple lawsuits pertaining to those who stole or appropriated her images. However, it should be noted with equal importance that she has no interest in victimhood: “her experiences are neither disintegrating, even when traumatic, nor especially unique; the point is simply that they are no one’s but her own” (Chu). The reality of Ratajkowski’s sought-after autonomy is that it takes numerous paths, all abundant with a variety of emotion. No one is claiming to know how to navigate them correctly, everyone is only eager to be able to do it their way.
It is impossible to discuss the rights of women without also acknowledging the power and curse of female desire. Writer Andrea Long Chu has written about female desire and a similar distrust in the “hue and cry” notion that Place is working against, only Chu has done so in the context of vaginoplasty surgery. Chu is transgender, and in 2018, she underwent surgery to get a vagina. But the political sphere historically and presently offers many frameworks for why surgeries like this should not be accessible to people like Chu. As she writes in an opinion article for the New York Times, both conservatives and liberals weary to offer surgery “engage in what we could call ‘compassion-mongering,’ peddling bigotry in the guise of sympathetic concern. Both posit a medical duty to refrain from increasing trans people’s suffering—what’s called nonmaleficence” (Chu). Chu argues, though, that whether the surgery makes her “happy” or not should not serve as the parameter by which she is allowed this surgery. She explicitly relates this when saying she believes that “surgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want,” understanding that any following reactions or feelings are her human rights (Chu). Place, while exercising a similar desire for belief, fails in her attempt because of a refusal to acknowledge her position. Where Chu’s own position in undergoing vaginoplasty surgery echoes the voices of others undergoing the same procedure, Place’s voice strips the women testifying of theirs.
Place, like many, has the desire to be perceived in a particular way. I believe she wishes this perception to be as characteristically rebellious as Chu’s, but with the added edge of being a bit villainous. Both Chu and Place can be uncomfortable to sit with for a variety of reasons, regardless of their likability or unlikability, but the main difference between them in their work and in their desires is that Chu feels productive while Place feels stuck. Chu’s argumentation can serve as evidence that your claims, or even intent, don’t necessarily need to be “neat” or fully-formed to warrant space, but that your position in issues matters. Because she is honest about her sometimes contradictory, but nevertheless strong, convictions and experiences, I feel compelled to listen to her. Conversely, Place’s objective often feels muddled behind her intentionally provocative persona. The times I feel most drawn to what she has to say are when she writes about herself; when I can better understand her position, I can understand how much I do not understand due to my own position. I have never been nor ever plan to be a defense attorney for convicted sex offenders. She, on the other hand, does understand this position, saying in The Guilt Project that “you may hate my clients, and you may be right” (Place 10).
It is difficult to blame Place, one woman, for doing what she must believe to be important work in broadening the scope by which our society views the legal process of rape cases. It would be much easier to blame an institution, and only an institution, like the American legal system. But I believe a critique and responsibility is due for Place, just as it is due for the legal system as a whole. Place has been given the opportunity to personally involve herself in this institution, to take up a position that can be striving for justice in the fullest sense of the word. This may be why it is a sincere disappointment to witness how she has utilized this opportunity; she has fulfilled a kind of self-interest instead of using her position as a means of elevating the public’s understanding of the court of law. Place is taking the opposite approach to the argument that women must perform in order to be trusted or listened to, or, worse than both, believed in the court of law. But by doing so, she positions herself within the same framework, admitting defeat in regard to being able to stand outside of it:
They—we—want frames. Instead, I make traps and stand in them and wave, and often get caught, but that’s part of standing in a trap. To me, that’s more illuminating than acting as if I could stand outside of the trap, or fashion the frame. We all have our own traps, which we bait with what we like and which are baited with things we like. If we could agree on our complicity, then there might be a possibility of having a different kind of conversation. (Place).
This kind of submission to the “trap” aligns with her submission to larger frames of our society, capitalism included. In Notes on Conceptualisms, Place justifies this submission by saying that “because institutions of poetry and progressive writing already wield so little cultural and economic capital, conceptual writing has been increasingly shifting its attention to mass media...Note the potential for collusion” (Place & Fitterman). So if, as Place reiterates in Notes of Conceptualisms, the purpose of conceptual writing is failure, then Place perhaps achieved her goal afterall.
But the problem remains that the overarching power still lies within the institution of American law. Place’s writing, and even more so, performing, of the women’s testimonies in Statement of Facts perpetuates this institution’s power, reinforcing their voicelessness. In a way, Place is taking advantage of the very thing she is critiquing the same way Ratajkowski is; for Place, this pertains to “the regime under which conceptual writing has flowered is the repressive market economy” (Place 30). This pessimism surrounding being able to work outside the realm of late capitalism serves paramount in her motivation for continuing her work. She affirms this doubt by saying: “Note that there is no escape from this regime, which will banalize and commodify any mass attempt at subversion” (Place 30). So she decides to participate in it, the same way Ratajkowski decides to commodify her body and her image in the hopes of feeling free “to do whatever the hell I pleased” (Ratajkowski).
If uncompromising realism is the feat Place is striving to achieve, then it’s worth examining her work outside of the moral, or even ethical, lens, as Steven Zultanski did in his statement on Statement of Facts. Place has consistently denied calls for her to defend or even interpret her work for the reader, but her defenses of conceptual writing, in general, may serve as general guidelines of how she views this work. For example, she aligns conceptual writing with a kind of “contemplative materialism,” if thinking about it in Marxist terms (Zultanski). In an interview, Place explains this writing: “The stuff of conceptualism, the textual thing, is the most static of objects, inert, inutile. Dead as a doorknob.” Zultanski combines these theories of texts to understand Place to understand “the world as matter, as opposed to movement...in which a concept were an object, as opposed to a movement of thought” (Zultanski). In this notion, Place is inviting the readers to read Statement of Facts in the legal position of herself, as a defender of sex offenders, presenting material “that almost dares the reader to disbelieve, and forces him or her into a far more uncomfortable position” (Zultanski).
Again, Place’s work can be interpreted as admirable in this way, even purposeful, because instead of allowing the reader moral and ethical comfort, she is forcing us into a conundrum dealt with every day in court: “It confronts us with a deadlock: to approach as fiction that which we most desperately, with all of our moral fiber, want to regard as irreducible reality” (Zultanski). But where Zultanski describes Place’s work as being truly difficult is in the undeniable power maintained by the state, or the institution, regardless of both the power the sex offender originally wielded and regardless of the power the victim attempts to regain. Zultanski points to this means of control: “if certain acts of speech are always already authenticated by the social position of the speaker, then that social position is maintained as a natural fact, which, like all natural facts, are merely materials to be managed by the state” (Zultanski). It’s in this way that Place’s appropriation of the survivor’s voices becomes the most bleak; their voices are not only stolen by this one poet, but by the court of law. Despite all the ethical and moral dilemmas Statement of Facts brings to light, what is most concerning is the theft of voice which is power. This is why it remains clear that above all else, the law, while attempting to maintain objectivity, must also maintain space for women to take up their position. To feel space is to feel room to breathe, room to not always get things right, room to think, to feel. Room to be heard. Room to be seen. Place, by appropriating these women’s voices, is stealing that space. She is shoving them off the stage to grant herself more room to perform.
Vanessa Place has appropriated the traumatic stories of women who have endured sexual assault, benefitting fiscally, but maybe even worse, self-righteously. Her performances of their stories include a flatness of voice, which harbors the same logic that she is supposedly working against: that women must offer up some kind of affect in order to be believed in the court of law, whether that affect be total emotion or total lack of emotion. She is ruthless in this pursuit. But while sensitivity would benefit her cause, it should not be mistaken for timidity; radical change can and has been made through radical sensitivity. With this radicality, I am not arguing that we shoot down the conceptualists, like Valerie Solanas did with Andy Warhol. Rather, I am calling for a radical shift in the metrics by which we think of female rights in the court of law. Heralding a performance, including the very writing I am delivering to you now, should never be necessary in ensuring women have the space to use their voice. That being said, when performances are made, they should be in pursuit of carving that space back out for those who it has been taken from. This is the opposite of what Place has done in Statement of Facts, which is working to institutionalize the age-old story of being female; “By ‘female,’ I mean the condition of having someone else do your desiring for you” (Chu).
Works Cited
Chu, Andrea Long. Females: A Concern. Verso Books, 2019.
---. “The Emily Ratajkowski You'll Never See.” New York Times, Nov. 2021.
Dworkin, Craig Douglas, and Kenneth Goldsmith. Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Northwestern University Press, 2011.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Being Boring.” University of Pennsylvania.
---. Day. The Figures, 2003.
---. Seven American Deaths and Disasters. PowerHouse Books, 2013.
Lee, Sueyeun Juliette. “Shock and Blah: Offensive Postures in “Conceptual” Poetry and the Traumatic Stuplime.” Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics, Issue 41, May 2014.
Low, Trisha. Confessions [of a Variety.]. Gauss PDF, 2010.
Manshel, Hannah. “The Desire for Fact: Anti-Racist Ethics in Discourses of Sexual Violence.” Criticism, vol. 60, no. 4, 2018, pp. 511-531.
Place, Vanessa, and Robert Fitterman. Notes on Conceptualisms. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013.
Place, Vanessa. The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality, and Law. Other Press, 2015.
---. Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts. Blanc Press, 2010.
---. “Vanessa Place on Her Work with Rape Jokes.” Artforum International Magazine, 4 Apr. 2017, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/vanessa-place-on-her-work-with-rape-jokes-67539.
Ratajkowski, Emily. My Body. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2021.
Zultanski, Stephen. “Short Statement in Five Parts on 'Statement of Facts'.” Jacket2, Oct. 2012, https://jacket2.org/reviews/short-statement-five-parts-statement-facts.
Chu, Andrea Long. Females: A Concern. Verso Books, 2019.
---. “The Emily Ratajkowski You'll Never See.” New York Times, Nov. 2021.
Dworkin, Craig Douglas, and Kenneth Goldsmith. Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Northwestern University Press, 2011.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Being Boring.” University of Pennsylvania.
---. Day. The Figures, 2003.
---. Seven American Deaths and Disasters. PowerHouse Books, 2013.
Lee, Sueyeun Juliette. “Shock and Blah: Offensive Postures in “Conceptual” Poetry and the Traumatic Stuplime.” Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics, Issue 41, May 2014.
Low, Trisha. Confessions [of a Variety.]. Gauss PDF, 2010.
Manshel, Hannah. “The Desire for Fact: Anti-Racist Ethics in Discourses of Sexual Violence.” Criticism, vol. 60, no. 4, 2018, pp. 511-531.
Place, Vanessa, and Robert Fitterman. Notes on Conceptualisms. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013.
Place, Vanessa. The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality, and Law. Other Press, 2015.
---. Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts. Blanc Press, 2010.
---. “Vanessa Place on Her Work with Rape Jokes.” Artforum International Magazine, 4 Apr. 2017, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/vanessa-place-on-her-work-with-rape-jokes-67539.
Ratajkowski, Emily. My Body. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2021.
Zultanski, Stephen. “Short Statement in Five Parts on 'Statement of Facts'.” Jacket2, Oct. 2012, https://jacket2.org/reviews/short-statement-five-parts-statement-facts.