The explicit body Rebecca Schneider In her text The Explicit Body Rebecca Schneider, using Schneemans video

o performance Fuses , identifies how the viewer of the work, usually the penetrator, is dislocated from desire through a castrating process (77-78). Rather than a traditional Lacanian and Freudian analysis of castration it is suggested that castration is more about the loss of loss itself, rather than the loss of the penis (78). Its not a fear of castration, but the fear of the loss of anxiety about castration, a fear of its discovery as absurd (83). In this respect Fuses provokes anxiety because it denies the anxiety of castration (78). It exists in this critical frame because it was not accepted as porn or art (for it was to explicit in the 60s to be considered this) (79). It was not porn because porn has arisen out of a need to police the boundaries of normativity, by mimicking its bodily associations, the penis is seen as heroic which evades death from the vagina (79). Fuses then avoids emphasising the heroicism of the penis, but at the same time is not interested in defeating it this meant the penis became a changeable signifier and not a phallic object (79). Through a Lacanian landscape the female orgasm in porn has been fetishized to the point where she is no longer the phallus, she is the phallus at this moment she is suppressed by the ejaculating penis (80). This signifier is a sign of intactness, in the sense that pornography mimics the normative and views the penis as producer and the vulva as consumer. This binary fails to see reveal the female hidden phallus (the eye) and as such presents the female as inadequate (failure in revealing the hidden penis and failure in castrating the male penis) (80). Conversely, what makes Fuses not porn is that castration anxiety cannot exist as her explicit sexed body denies mystery or castrates her lovers penis (81). It seems then that castration is about the fear of loss of the power of homogeneity. When Freud spoke about castration, he noted that castration is linked to the horror of seeing the (lack of) female genitals, but Fuses takes his a step further. Castration is about the fear of whats not there or the fear of being blinded (82). In porn castration comes in the form of the fear of being rendered visible. To be visible is to be castrated, which is to be feminized (81). The explicit mark of the female, the vagina, threatens sight, but at the same time signifies the prerogative to master. (82). This is what is exciting about pornography, although the fear is located in the viewer being revealed, his detachment saves him because she cannot see him (83). In Fuses the vagina does see, but it does not castrate the penis, but rather the anxiety of being made visible. Schneeman exposes her seeing eye, we assume this in her creation and editing of the film, but at the same time positions her as seen (83). As a result of Fuses ability to castrate the anxiety of castration the male viewer is in no way able to police the normative mimicking in the pornography of the sexed heterosexual object (83).