Abjection, the performative and creativity in the works of Suzan Pitt, Tabaimo and Miwa Matreyek

With a focus on animation installation and performance, I first introduce a (post)feminist framework (McRobbie, Tasker & Negra) to locate a set of spatial politics. This is followed by a comparative analysis of the works of three women animation artists. I revisit a now often maligned theoretical framework, psychoanalytic theory – that was extremely generative for feminist film studies – to explore issues of creativity, desire and gender, of cultural specificity, critique and difference, and of alienation. Focussing specifically on libido and abjection, and Japanese gendered cultural behaviours, I undertake a comparative analysis of Suzan Pitt's seminal feminist work Asparagus (1979) and the young Japanese artist Tabaimo's recent animation installations. Then, after introducing Miwa Matreyek's recent Dreaming of Lucid Living (2007-) performance, in which the female figure is central, but it is not a simulacrum or drawn representation, I use this analytic apparatus to establish resonances and distinctions between these three artists, proposing that the trope of inside/outside specific to their animated and gendered worlds is a postfeminist strategy. I will also examine formal and aesthetic convergences and distinctions in their works, a set of dichotomies and tensions, that relate to observations about feminist concerns, concluding with brief reflections on the viewer's response to the works.