1. For example, see Linda Montano's compilation detailing artists' work with food as a medium in the 1980s: Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties: Sex, Food, Money/Fame, Ritual/Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

2. For example, an 1981 performance with Brian Routh at the Theatre of the World Festival in Germany found the two playing Hitler and his mistress, and featured butcher shop leavings such as bones and animal parts, as well as sausages and sauerkraut. At one point, Finley and Routh smeared chocolate pudding on their rear ends, and sniffed at each other like dogs. At the first performance, the German audience, deeply offended, chased them off the stage. A more well-publicized use of food came in Finley's 1986 performance I'm an Ass Man in a monologue called “Yams Up My Granny's Ass.” Finley played a drug addict abusing his grandmother on Thanksgiving, and emptied a can of sugared yams over her backside as part of the act. The Village Voice ran a pair of pieces based around Finley's performance; Cynthia Carr's piece described it as provocative and Pete Hamill's scornfully dismissed it. Before the chocolate-smearing, Finley was most known for this use of yams. See Karen Finley, A Different Kind of Intimacy: The Collected Writings of Karen Finley (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000), 23.

3. When Matthew Roudané asked about her use of food in performance in a 2006 interview, she replied, “I employ the symbolism of food as a device to evoke emotion, whether it is hunger for the body, or desire. Food is primal.” Finley recognizes and acknowledges the power of food in performance to draw symbolically on the personal, social, and cultural aspects associated with it, while also pointing out its ability to affect a spectator more deeply in the live moment of performance. She continues by highlighting the excessive, sensually provocative possibilities food carries: “When I am performing powerful, emotional material I don't want the audience response to be, ‘Oh, she really acted like she was being raped well.’ I use food to replace pretending, in place of action, to effectively channel a taboo scene.” Finley's performances use food to replace bodily violation with another sensually explicit discomfort, as though they are emotionally related. She does not simulate or enact the degradation—rape or murder or castration—that she speaks about in her monologues to provoke shocked or empathetic spectator responses. Instead, she banks on eliciting spectators' gut reaction to the (mis)use of food. It is this aspect that allows Finley's work to take shape as both sensually provocative and highly meaningful. She associates the visceral responses of her spectators to the use of food with extreme acts of emotional and physical violation. She elaborates, “Food provided a primitive, visceral, almost gruesome element. It helped to convey to the audience the ways in which the characters I portrayed were being violated.” Food acts in two ways for Finley: it provides a visceral reaction in its presence as a real substance, but it also provides symbolic meaning in the way it is used. Her work brings these two aspects together for a common purpose. In Roudané, Matthew, “An Interview with Karen Finley,” Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art 11.3 (2007): 20–37, at 29Google Scholar; Finley, Different Kind of Intimacy, 23.

4. Schuler, Catherine, “Spectator Response and Comprehension: The Problem of Karen Finley's ‘Constant State of Desire,’” TDR 34.1 (1990): 131–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Ibid., 132.

6. Ibid., 139.

7. Ibid., 141.

8. Finley, Karen and Schuler, Catherine, “The Constant State of Frustration,” TDR 34.2 (1990): 9–12, at 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There is a certain irony to reading this exchange today. Within a few short years, Finley would become the poster child for artistic freedom when the National Endowment for the Arts denied her grant based on her work's obscenity.

9. Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997), 100–4.

10. Pramaggiore, Maria T., “Resisting/Performing/Femininity: Words, Flesh, and Feminism in Karen Finley's The Constant State of Desire,” Theatre Journal 44.3 (1992): 269–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. C. Carr. “Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts: The Taboo Art of Karen Finley.” In Acting Out: Feminist Performance, ed. Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 141–52.

12. See also Erickson, Jon: “Appropriation and Transgression in Contemporary American Performance: The Wooster Group, Holly Hughes, and Karen Finley,” Theatre Journal 42.2 (1990): 225–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hart, Lynda, “Motherhood According to Finley: The Theory of Total Blame,” TDR 36.1 (1992): 124–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Dolan, Jill, “The Dynamics of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Pornography and Performance,” Theatre Journal 39.2 (1987): 156–74, at 161CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. Striff, Erin, “Bodies of Evidence: Feminist Performance Art,” Critical Survey 9.1 (1997): 1–18, at 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. The relationship to food is universal, despite being individual. As anthropologist Jon D. Holtzman writes, “[Food] has the uncanny ability to tie the minutiae of everyday experience to broader cultural patterns, hegemonic structures, and political-economic processes, structuring experience in ways that can be logical, and outside of logic, in ways that are conscious, canonized, or beyond the realm of conscious awareness.” It is that oscillation between intensely particular experience and vast structures of meaning that make food use important to analyze. Holtzman, , “Food and Memory,” Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006): 361–78, at 373CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Sally Banes and André Lepecki, The Senses in Performance (New York: Routledge, 2007), 1.

17. Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (London: Routledge, 2003), 337.

18. Porteous quoted in Emily Grady, “Sniffing and Savoring: The Aesthetics of Smells and Tastes.” In Aesthetics of Everyday Life, ed. Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 177–93, at 185.

19. Stephen Di Benedetto, The Provocation of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010), 93, 97.

20. Ibid., 98.

21. As Di Benedetto succinctly sums up, “Taste sensation can be a form of virtual time travel.” Ibid., 113.

22. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), viii, ix.

23. Ibid., viii; italics hers.

24. Ibid., xvii.

25. Ibid., 5.

26. We Keep Our Victims Ready also toured various locations around the country, including New York's Lincoln Center (she drew two thousand viewers over two nights at the “Serious Fun” festival) and Minneapolis's Walker Art Center. Harlan Jacobson, “Audiences Pay Rapt Attention as Karen Finley Brings a Startling Brand of Evangelical Feminism to New York's Lincoln Centre Stunned into Silence by a Revealing Rage,” Globe and Mail (Canada), 28 July 1990, available at www.lexisnexis.com (accessed 5 December 2014).

27. Finley, Different Kind of Intimacy, 84.

28. Karen Finley. We Keep Our Victims Ready. Performed by Karen Finley at The Kitchen in NYC (20 April 1990). New York, NY: Electronic Arts Intermix, 1990 and 2001. Videocassette (VHS), 78 min.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Finley, Different Kind of Intimacy, 90–91.

33. Ibid., 91.

34. Finley, We Keep Our Victims Ready.

35. Finley, Different Kind of Intimacy, 84.

36. Finley, We Keep Our Victims Ready.

37. See Cynthia Carr's account of Finley's early use of food in the 1980s: C. Carr, “The Karen Finley Makeover,” Village Voice, 7 November 2000, available at www.villagevoice.com/2000-11-07/news/the-karen-finley-makeover/ (accessed 17 May 2013).

38. Theodore Shank, Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 200.

39. Ibid.

40. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “The NEA's Suicide Charge,” Washington Post, 11 May 1990, A27, available at www.proquest.com (accessed 5 December 2014).

41. Ibid.

42. Finley, Different Kind of Intimacy, 80. Helms had been agitating for an amendment to the NEA's grant-evaluation procedure since the controversies in 1989 over federal support for Andres Serrano's photograph of a crucifix in urine and the allegedly homoerotic and pornographic photos of Robert Mapplethorpe.

43. Roudané, 22. Helms was also featured in an unflattering light in one of We Keep Our Victims Ready's opening monologues.

44. Finley, Different Kind of Intimacy, 102.

45. C. Carr, “Karen Finley Makeover.”

46. Finley, Different Kind of Intimacy, 80.

47. Ibid., 150.

48. Stephen Holden, “Finley Mocks Her Critics In Her Art,” New York Times, 24 July 1990, available at www.proquest.com (accessed 5 December 2014) and www.nytimes.com/1990/07/24/theater/review-theater-finley-mocks-her-critics-in-her-art.html (accessed 12 September 2015).

49. Jacobson, “Audiences Pay Rapt Attention.”

50. Luc Sante, “Blood and Chocolate: What Karen Finley Really Does,” New Republic 203.16 (15 October 1990): 34–7, at 34.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid., 37.

53. Frankel, David, “Karen Finley,” Artforum International 36.4 (1997): 113Google Scholar.

54. Beverley Skeggs and Helen Wood, Reacting to Reality Television: Performance, Audience and Value (New York: Routledge, 2012), 5.

55. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 8.

56. Ibid., 11.

57. Ibid., 91.

58. Ibid., 93–4.

59. Ben Brantley, “There's Still No Vanilla in a Finley Encounter,” New York Times, 24 June 1998, available at www.nytimes.com/1998/06/24/theater/performance-art-review-there-s-still-no-vanilla-in-a-finley-encounter.html (accessed 5 December 2014).

60. Finley, Different Kind of Intimacy, 256.

61. Ibid.

62. Brantley, “There's Still No Vanilla.”

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid.

65. Michele McPhee, “Taking a Licking: Smear Ye, Smear Ye! Karen Finley Speaks Out on a Big Supreme Court Decision,” New York Daily News, 2 July 1998, available at www.lexisnexis.com (accessed 5 December 2014).

66. Simon Beck, “Indecency Ruling Painted as Threat to Freedom Rights,” South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), 29 June 1998, available at www.lexisnexis.com (accessed 5 December 2014).

67. Christopher Rapp, “Chocoholic,” National Review, 20 July 1998, 35, available at www.lexisnexis.com (accessed 5 December 2014).

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid.

70. In an interview about her intentional transformation, she states, “I didn't want my complexes to take over and do me in.” Jack Fischer, “Performance Artist Tries to Move On,” San Jose Mercury News, 2 March 2001, available at www.lexisnexis.com (accessed 5 December 2014).

71. Finley, Different Kind of Intimacy, 266.

72. Ibid., 267. The Playboy spread was originally supposed to include an interview with Finley regarding the First Amendment. Finley states she is glad it did not: “By becoming what Helms accused me of being, the game was over… . It was ‘OK, I'm what you thought all along. Now go away.’” Journalist Jack Fischer interprets this moment somewhat differently: “Put another way, the point, really, is that a man wouldn't feel the need to justify himself, so why should Finley? In posing for Playboy she was announcing that she wasn't much concerned with what Helms or Ms. Magazine think of her—a post-feminist exit from the personal, political and artistic stalemate in which she almost found herself.” Fischer, “Performance Artist Tries to Move On.”

73. Finley had developed Shut Up and Love Me in various touring locations across the country at the end of the 1990s. “Catch This; THEATER,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 17 December 1999, available at www.lexisnexis.com (accessed 5 December 2014). She continued the run at the Westbeth Theatre Center in NYC for a month after the initial performance. Leonard Jacobs, “Shut Up and Love Me,” Back Stage, 21 September 2001, available at Academic OneFile (accessed 5 December 2014).

74. Hughes, Holly, “Karen Finley's ‘The Jackie Look,’” Storytelling, Self, Society 9.1 (2013), 135–9, at 139CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75. Ben Brantley, “A Taste Of Honey (Hold the Chocolate),” New York Times, 22 May 2001, available at www.nytimes.com/2001/05/22/theater/theater-review-a-taste-of-honey-hold-the-chocolate.html (accessed 5 December 2014).

76. Ibid.

77. Ibid.

78. Finley, Different Kind of Intimacy, 286.

79. Fischer, “Performance Artist Tries to Move On.”

80. Simi Horwitz, “Honey I'm Home,” Back Stage, 10 August 2001, available at Academic OneFile (accessed 5 December 2014) and at www.backstage.com/news/karen-finley-honey-im-home_2/ (accessed 12 September 2015).

81. Jacobs, “Shut Up and Love Me.”

82. Ibid.

83. Horwitz, “Honey I'm Home.”

84. Ibid.

85. Ibid.

86. Karen Finley, Shut Up and Love Me, performed by Karen Finley (2001), DVD. Available on the DVD Karen Finley Live (Perfect Day Films, 2004).

87. Donida, Gabriel Doucet, “Dramaturgy of Desire (Exposed): Shut Up and (Then) Love Me (Some More),” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 13.2 (2003): 69–82, at 79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88. Chris Boyd, “Sticking in There,” Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia), 19 March 2002, available at www.lexisnexis.com (accessed on 5 December 2014) and at http://tma-archive.blogspot.com/2002/03/karen-finley.html (accessed 23 September 2015).

89. It is likely that it took Finley so long to realize how to alter affect not only because it took her over a decade to learn how she could manipulate the substance in performance, but also because it took a decade for her work's sticky life of its own to subside enough that she could alter it.