Physical Education

plays in The Young and Evil

(10 mins)

video

Physical Education is essentially a film about the cultural insistence on controlling the horror of women's bodies, and the ways in which this collective anxiety is visited upon teenage girls at the institutional level of public education. These issues are especially acute within the P.E. class environment, where we are (were) most aware of our own bodies and the bodies of others, where excess and failure are (were) the most difficult to mask, and where the importance of control and standardization of our bodies is (was) the most strictly enforced. The voice-over for Physical Education narrates various stories based on my own experiences in P.E. class; unlike mainstream Hollywood's version, female viewers of this piece are not required to subscribe to a male fantasy/nightmare of feminine horrific-ness but rather invited to consider the implications of that all-too-pervasive fantasy/nightmare and its role in the performance of female adolescence.

As the Hot Zombies tramp through puberty they gradually learn to disassociate from their own bodies, affecting the unengaged visages and flattened identities endemic to the undead and those who hope to successfully navigate an adolescence directed by homogenizing media forces. In Physical Education I make use of graphically campy zombie make-up in the form of bruises, gashes, and fake blood to address this cultural disgust with female genitalia and menstruation, and to literalize the horror so often cinematically located in the excess produced by women's bodies. Writer Carol J. Clover asserts that within the visual language of horror films, and arguably popular culture at large, the more open a female-gendered body is, the more dangerous that figure becomes. In this sense, a gang of dead teenage girls with gaping wounds all over their bodies is extremely dangerous, so that the Hot Zombies are somehow deriving a distorted kind of empowerment from the closed logics that conspire to oppress them. Exaggerated make-up and costumes are also employed as a method of disidentifying with feminine gender presentation, seeking to recalibrate the rituals of putting on one's face and getting dressed up so that they might serve to reevaluate, or at least refract, the idea that women should modify and adorn themselves in order to achieve successful gender identities; a kind of female on female drag.

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