Figure 1.

Coco Fusco as the Interrogator in her play A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the
New America, P.S. 122, New York, 2006. (Photo by Kambui Olujimi)

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, and an Associate Professor at Columbia
University. Her publications include English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusions in the
Americas (The New Press, 1995) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self
(Harry Abrams, Inc., 2003).

José Esteban Muñoz is Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the
Arts/NYU. He is the author of Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
(University of Minnesota Press, 1999), and the forthcoming volumes Cruising Utopia: The
Performance and Politics of Queer Futurity (NYU Press) and Feeling Brown: Ethnicity, Affect and
Performance (Duke University Press). He coedited Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996) with Jennifer Doyle
and Jonathan Flatley (Duke University Press, 1996) and Everynight Life: Culture and Music in Latin/o
America (Duke University Press, 1997) with Celeste Fraser Delgado. He edited the special issue of
Women and Performance (1996) and coedited the special issue of Social Text (2005) with Brian
Pieces

Phillip Harper and Anne McClintock.

TDR: The Drama Review 52:1 (T197) Spring 2008. ©2008

136 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Pieces
A Room of One’s Own
Coco Fusco
Women and Power in the New America
introduction by José Esteban Muñoz
Performing the State of Exception
Coco Fusco’s Operation Atropos
and A Room of One’s Own
Coco Fusco’s performance of the state of
exception in A Room of One’s Own begins with
a loving lyrical tribute to Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice that sounds like an early
American religious hymn. In it, Rice is
characterized as a savior delivering the people
from Osama Bin Laden, who is portrayed as
Satan. This staging of religiosity’s encroach-
ment on the state is not surprising or particu-
larly jarring. Indeed this blurring of church
and state has been an ongoing project. Yet the
Secretary herself, after over five years of
national prominence as National Security
Advisor and then Secretary of State, still seems
like an exception to many. Her role as the black
iron-woman of recent and nefarious US policy
is unsettling to those who have not totally come
to terms with the fully realized phenomenon of
black neoconservatism.
Equally troubling to people who should
“know better” is the Secretary’s gender. Rice
seems exceptional and this exceptionality is at
the core of the political moment we currently
live in, where the state mobilizes political
theatre in lieu of truth and often against
obvious and open dishonesty. While the single
black woman has been the scourge and often
scapegoat of the neoconservative and neoliberal
movements, Rice stands out as the exception.
Within the spectacle of Bush’s administration,
Rice is the black woman who does not pilfer
the nation but instead defends it. She is not
America’s greatest liability, but its proudest
national asset. Within the conservative
movement’s mindset, Rice’s presence inoculates
the current regime from charges of racism, as
have other notable conservatives of color such
as Colin Powell, Alberto Gonzalez, and Elaine
L. Chao. Furthermore, the exceptional black
female face of US foreign policy is meant to do
the symbolic work of insulating the current
regime’s imperialist agenda from charges of
systemic violence directed at non-white people
throughout the world. Rice is the exception
that proves the rule, underwriting the current
regime’s appetite for conquest and domination
in the new world order.
Fusco’s two most recent art projects, the
video Operation Atropos and the performance
A Room of One’s Own, are responses to the Bush
administration’s performance of power. Both
the video and the performance are counterper-
formances that do the work of inhabiting the
grain of our current fascist ideological mindset.
These counterperformances do more than
simply reject the dominant national perfor-
mance that shores up power at this particular
historical moment. Such performances would
have limited efficacy because they would not
take on the underlying logic of this administra-
tion’s ideology.
Instead, Fusco replicates the performance of
power in an attempt to understand its dimen-
sions and larger social repercussions. Fusco
infiltrates rather than attacks. But hers is not
a literal infiltration. The Cadre, the group of
ex-military men who work as interrogation
trainers are not clueless about who Fusco and
her six collaborators are or what they represent.
They understand that Fusco and company are
not interfacing with them to simply affirm
them. But they do play a truth game with
Fusco’s group of feminist artists. Thus a
symbolic exchange between feminist artists
and ex-interrogators produces new knowledge
about our current national situation.
This is a critical part of Fusco’s project
Pieces
in both the video and the performance. Both
137
 art projects run in the grooves of a certain
ideological record that I have defined above as
the US government’s performance of the state
of exception. Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben’s engagement with the work of jurist
and political theorist Carl Schmidt is central
here. Agamben, in Homo Sacer ([1995] 1998)
delineates how the performance of a state of
exception secures the sovereign’s power. In the
sequel to that book, State of Exception (2005),
Agamben brings this theoretical model to bear
directly on the US’s current “war on terror”
and the unethical imprisonment of so called
“enemy combatants” at Guantánamo Bay.
Through the declaration of a national emer-
gency, martial law, a “terror alert,” etc., the
state stages the state of exception to naturalize
and justify unchecked and abusive manifesta-
tions of power amid a general scene of savage
social asymmetry.
Rather than denouncing this performance of
power, Fusco hijacks power’s groove, occupying
it with a critical difference that denaturalizes
the government’s ideological camouflage.
There is a lot of camouflage in Operation
Atropos and A Room of One’s Own. It is impor-
tant to remember that this specific mode of
patterning—theatre—was invented to mirror
the natural world. Its effects are meant to be
naturalizing. Fusco’s performance enacts a kind
of hypercamouflage by pushing camouflage’s
process of naturalizing. The nation’s perfor-
mance of the state of exception, its current
Middle East policy, and even its use of words
like “liberation” and “freedom” are ideological
disguises that are meant to be taken as natural.
In an effect that can be described as neo-
Brechtian, Fusco’s art interrupts this deploy-
ment of mass camouflage.
The performance and the video also
interrogate the military’s logic of gender
advancement and women’s progress. The video
begins by meditating on the presence of female
torturers in the Abu Ghraib prison photos.
Pvt. Lynndie England and other women were
sacrificed as aberrations and exceptions by
the Department of Defense’s public opinion
machine. The nation was meant to see England
as playing the opposite role from a figure like
Coco Fusco
Pvt. Jessica Lynch. Operation Atropos and A
138
Room of One’s Own are performative investiga-
tions into the role of women in today’s military.
In her pieces, Fusco goes beyond the binary
of England and Lynch to enact the larger stakes
for women in the military and the nation.
While the advancement of women in the
military is often hailed as “real progress” in
the public discourse, Fusco’s performances
dismantle this logic of “progress” in much the
same way that Walter Benjamin did in his
famous “Thesis on the Philosophy of History”
([1939] 1968). Fusco’s art project investigates
the grand claims made for the betterment of
women both within the US military and its
occupied populations. The contemporary price
of women’s so-called progress is their imbrica-
tion in America’s global policing protocol. In
the same way that Secretary of State Rice does a
certain symbolic work as an individual—a black
woman in an administration whose policies
have been especially brutal to non-white people
within the nation and abroad—women in the
armed services seems to speak to a soft logic of
gender progress and advancement. The Lynch/
England dichotomy is not dissimilar from the
age-old virgin/whore binary that structures
knowledge about gender and women.
The women’s odyssey in Operation Atropos
is a performance of infiltration into the logic of
militaristic interrogation as a form of national
defense. Yet it ultimately reveals the imperialist
motivations behind such practices. Fusco’s title
A Room of One’s Own is not just a punning
reference to Virginia Woolf’s 1929 book, but
a commentary on the rewriting of the rhetoric
of gender equality and feminism within our
state of exception. It is a call to reconsider
the terms that now hold sway in the national
consciousness.
Finally, let me point out that Fusco’s artistic
practice is not meant to be easily digested or
carefree. It rarely offers the audience the
comfort of illusion or shadow. Her work
intends to be difficult and harsh. It folds back
the conceptual camouflage that the state
continuously produces as it debunks an
insidious national order with global conse-
quences. The goal of Fusco’s work is to make
the spectator feel uncomfortable in the here
and now of our political situation. It is also a
performance of research/research as perfor-
mance—somewhat like the work of Critical Art
Ensemble. Rather than offer entertainment as
such, Fusco strives to produce difficult
knowledge that strips away the national
camouflage of the all-too-familiar and patriotic
spectacle of stars and stripes to reveal the
neoimperial military field attire beneath.
Fusco’s performances are in the most
immediate sense a feminist commentary aimed
at the global status of women. Chandra Talpade
Mohanty, in Feminism without Borders (2003),
calls for a feminist pedagogy of antigloabliza-
tion. Mohanty argues for a critique of global-
ization that resists the ways globalization
corrodes the lives of women and girls who
suffer most within capitalism and imperialism.
Antiglobalization entails the production of new
modes of knowledge between the global and
the local. Fusco’s project represents difficult
knowledge that shuttles between the local and
the global. By considering the ways in which
US womanhood becomes militarized, Fusco’s
audiences understand how women “over here”
and “over there” are part of globalization’s
oppressive script. Fusco interrupts that script
with an art practice that presents counternarra-
tives, stories that reveal insurrectionist ways of
being in the world.
—José Esteban Muñoz
References
Agamben, Giorgio
1998 [1995] Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare
Life. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
2005 State of Exception. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Benjamin, Walter
1968 [1939] “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”
In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,
edited by Hannah Arendt, 253-64.
New York: Schocken Books.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade
2003 Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing
Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Artist’s Statement
This play is my reflection on the role of female
interrogators in the War on Terror. Before the
war in Iraq, I had no clear idea of what women
actually did in the US military. They are
currently operating in contexts that, despite
President Bush’s assertion that the war “ended”
shortly after the invasion of Iraq, are combat
zones. Women constitute 15 percent of the
armed forces in Iraq and 35 percent of US
military intelligence. These figures are
unprecedented for the American armed forces.
Media coverage of the experience of American
servicewomen has largely characterized them as
victims—of sexual harassment and rape by male
soldiers and as working mothers troubled by
long separations from their children. Even the
media’s treatment of Lynndie England, one the
military police at Abu Ghraib who appeared in
several of the infamous photographs depicting
abuse of prisoners, characterizes her as a
victim—of her boyfriend, Army Spc. Charles
Graner, and of her circumstances as a working-
class, poorly educated young woman.
When the images of prisoner abuse at Abu
Ghraib were first released, I was struck by the
presence of women in them as perpetrators
of violence. A few months later, stories began
to be leaked to the media about how female
military interrogators in Guantánamo and
Abu Ghraib were using sexual harassment as a
tactic to break Muslim detainees. These tactics
have been mentioned frequently in detainee
testimony, as well as in public statements made
by military intelligence officers and FBI
investigators. Military historian Alfred McCoy
(A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from
the Cold War to the War on Terror, 2006) and
journalist Seymour Hersh (Chain of Command:
The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, 2004) have
both argued that the use of sexual harassment
by interrogators is part of CIA special opera-
tions designed to capitalize on the supposed
vulnerability of Arabs to such methods.
Research for the development of these opera-
tions includes anthropological studies that
proffer stereotypical and Orientalist views
of the so-called “Arab mind.”
It seemed to me that the phenomenon of
A Room of One’s Own
instrumentalized female sexual violence raises
many disturbing questions, not only for those
who are concerned about the use of torture by
the US military, but also for feminists who are
accustomed to conceiving of women solely as
139