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Free Lunch with the Stench Wench: Toward a Synaesthetics of Poverty and Shame in Catherine Hoffmann's Performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Alexandra Kokoli
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Abstract

Catherine Hoffmann's Free Lunch with the Stench Wench is a performance of abjection and self‐abjection through poverty with an apotropaic aspiration: to shed the shame through sharing, and to create opportunities for a common social subjectivity that refuses to be silent about the struggle of its own creation and maintenance. Despite its title, Free Lunch does not come with a free lunch for the audience but creates an olfactory situation, through the onstage cooking of hot chocolate and the presence of a dead rat, which complements Hoffmann's narration and stage presence into a synaesthetic portrait of poverty and its psychosocial fallout. Drawing on the psychological foundations of shame studies, sociological approaches and social‐theoretical responses to austerity and social division, I propose to examine the gendered embodiment of shame and its exorcism in Hoffmann's performance, focusing on its physical codification in and beyond the visual. I explore the potential of shame to be re‐weaponized against those who originally inflict it, and consider the shame that haunts every creative act, especially those with high political stakes: the failure to make a connection, the fear of being misunderstood.

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Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 33 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Gender and the Politics of Shame , Summer 2018 , pp. 485 - 499
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Hypatia, Inc.

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