We Keep Our Victims Ready, 1990
78 min, Betacam SP PAL, couleur, son, anglais
In her performance We Keep Our Victims Ready, Karen Finley explores the intersections of trauma, vulnerability, and power, offering a critique of sexual objectification and the violence inflicted on women. The piece addresses how certain individuals – particularly women – are conditioned to exist as potential victims within a violent patriarchal system. In a minimalist scenography, Finley embodies both survivors of sexual violence and their aggressors, working from a script that allows for moments of improvisation during which the American artist uses food items to break away from the auto-eroticism often associated with nude performance. In her essay on Finley’s work, writer Mélissa Bertrand notes, for example, that the performer “puts jelly in her bra on the pretext that her breasts aren't big enough. She teases the audience and, through both speech and gesture, encourages the observation of her gendered attributes.” [1]
Finley then covers her body with chocolate in reference to the story of Tawana Brawley, an African American teenager who was found alive in a garbage bag in 1987, her body smeared with feces and racist slurs. After accusing four men of raping her and leaving her in that state, Brawley was later accused of having staged the attack herself. Finley reframes this case through an extreme metaphor – the chocolate symbolizing feces – in order to question what might have led Brawley to such a desperate act: “Was that the best choice? What was the worst? What was the other choice?” In a final sequence, the artist wraps her body in Christmas garlands, declaring with biting irony, “No matter how badly a woman is treated, she always knows how to dress for dinner.”
Finley confronts her audience with unsettling truths about the exploitation of the female body, through a breathless, incantatory form of speech punctuated by direct address and stage actions, in which her own body becomes the vehicle for a visceral political expression. The bulimic cycle of consumption and expulsion, sustained by the recurring use of food, turns her corporeal presence into what theorist Cynthia Carr calls a “monster of orality, [a] devouring woman.” [2] The body thus becomes a site of resistance, a place of deliberate defilement that has nothing to do with conventional cosmetic practices: the food that coats it does not aim to beautify, but rather to reveal its vulnerability—its exposure to both social and symbolic violence. By combining stark language, performative nudity, and the subversion of everyday materials, Karen Finley makes We Keep Our Victims Ready a radical feminist work. She denounces the ongoing violence inflicted on women’s bodies while exposing the cultural and media mechanisms that invisibilize or fetishize them.
Nicolas Ballet
2025
[1] Mélissa Bertrand, "Usages ‘anti-cosmétiques’ de la nourriture dans les performances de Karen Finley, Rébecca Chaillon et Nadège Grebmeier Forget," Les chantiers de la création, 16 | 2023, posted on October 30, 2023, accessed on June 29, 2025. Online: http://journals.openedition.org/lcc/6493
[2] Cynthia Carr, On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993, p. 130.