Disarming Venus

Irish artist Mary Duffy, who was born without arms, laid herself bare in a 1995 live performance. The performance displayed multiple acts of exposure: personal, political, and corporeal. Posing in the nude, Duffy revealed verbally how her disabled body is defined by medicine and society as lacking, inadequate, and undesirable. She reflected upon her confrontations with medical and social gazes and described how they impacted her sense of self. Duffy’s performative act transgressed the boundaries between representation and everyday life, as it simultaneously refigured histories of art and performance. Duffy’s body as an armless nude invoked the Classical Venus de Milo, while at the same time offered itself as a vulnerable human being and naked, medicalized specimen. The performance showcased disability as the source and site of creative production and the disabled body as a work of art, while Duffy projected an empowered, self-mediated body image into the social arena. In a self-objectifying act, Duffy explained how her body was already objectified in society, and in the act of talking back, Duffy’s monologue became social dialogue.