This feminist performance work explores self objectification and takes influence from Iris Young’s essay Throwing Like a Girl (2005). The aim is to interrogate the concrete action and the conceptual meaning of ‘throw’ through object, subject and abject (ject meaning ‘to throw’). The work attempts to examine space, feelings of invisibility, failure and an inability or unwillingness to make oneself heard.
My aim was to call upon my body to reject my pre-conditioned tendency to self objectify and learn to throw, to ‘take up space’ and “make the whole body speak even when one keeps silent” (Suzuki).
This practice-as-research task draws on feminist theory (Young, Beauvoir) and notions of the lived body (Merleau-Ponty) and the neutral body (Copeau). It also makes reference to Heidegger’s phenomenological concept of ‘thrownness’. In different locations and with varying levels of 'success' I throw a large rocking horse, a direct reference to the horse which the suffragette Emily Davison fatally ‘threw’ herself under.