I begin this text performatively, by inviting you to think through my re-staging of several scenes. The first occurs on a Friday night in New York City somewhere off Broadway in a good way where Spiderwoman are wreaking their special blend of painfully hilarious havoc. In this space and place, the three Native American sisters who make up the Spiderwoman performance trio - Gloria Miguel, Muriel Miguel and Lisa Mayo - are putting on Winnetou's Snake Oil Show From Wigwam City (1988).[1] This seriously playful piece makes a mockery out of the new age trend Spiderwoman call "half-breeditis," which has lead to the pathetic and seemingly mysterious rise of white folks who are suddenly starting to discover great, great grandmothers who were once a quarter Cherokee. "Don't even bother looking back to the past," Spiderwoman seem to suggest as they stage a spectacularly fake workshop where they offer to turn white people into Indians faster than a speeding bullet. For a mere $3,000 Spiderwoman promises that you too can go Native by simply swallowing their "Yataholey Indian Snake Oil." This concoction, explains Spiderwoman in the spirit and splendor of blasphemous solemnity, is made with real, authentic Indian ingredients like "porcupine piss ... yum yum from a bum ... and skunk cum" (Schneider 160).[2]

Or, it may be Saturday night in Seattle where Spiderwoman are doing Sun, Moon, Feather (1981) during which they turn the tables on themselves by re-enacting somewhat hysterical and hilarious childhood memories of re-staging the Cowboys and Indians Hollywood classic The Girl of the Golden West. As they morph into versions of their kid-like selves, they fight over who gets to be the good guy - or, in their case, the white girl. Then, Gloria recalls a time at a pow wow when they heard their uncle trying to get people inside one of the circus tents by ballyhooing, "Cheedebeecho! Chedebecho! Cheedebeecho!" (Schneider 162). Hearing such a seemingly ancient chant, she remembers that special feeling of pride that accompanies learning words from the old languages. However, she quickly goes on to remind herself that some years later she learnt that what her Uncle was really screaming was, "See the big show! See the big show! See the big show" (Schneider 162).

But, Lisa explains, just when the audience really starts laughing, "Then - POW! - we get them with the real stuff" (Burns and Hurlbutt 166). This "stuff" is often made up of stories: tales of their father's drinking, his violent tendencies and his death are accompanied by talk about their incredibly deep rage at the ways in which Native peoples have been fucked over and over and over again. Such "stuff" also involves bodies - Spiderwoman's in particular - which are revealed to be both constituted through the discursive effects of the colonial and "post" colonial imagery as well as inseparable from the affects of such effects on their bodies that are always already marked as "Other."

This paper thus seeks to highlight how as Spiderwoman engages in the playfully serious business of making Instant Indians, problematizing the romance of the authentic and hitting us with the "real stuff" right as we are cracking up. A variety of ironies circulate and silently articulate the seemingly irreconcilable contradictions inherent in their spectacles. I will suggest that such ironies are linked to an unruly bodily aesthetic featuring the figure of the carnivalesque female grotesque which also works to disrupt and reconfigure representations of both "Indian-ness" and femininity. Moreover, such strategic interruptions inevitably serve to unsettle seemingly stable concepts like identity, memory and authenticity. In sum, I show how Spiderwoman work with and through irony and the figure of the unruly female body in ways that allow them to juggle and struggle with their desire to hold on to some form of First Nations identity in the midst of a society where nostalgia for the lost "Other," the misguided belief in the myth of primitivity and commodity capitalism meet, greet, and get off on one another.

Irony as Sensibility

I find Spiderwoman's spectacles particularly politically promising as I feel that they flesh out a provisionally ironic sensibility vis-à-vis identity that is worth fleshing out and is,indeed, worthy of further feminist inquiry.[3] Irony, writes Kathy Ferguson, is a way of seeing, thinking and doing that is attuned to and attends to seemingly irreconcilable contradictions (Ferguson 56). With such a sensibility as a guide, continues Ferguson, one can productively negotiate with the tensions that arise when one is simultaneously inspired by the premise and promise of radically deconstructive approaches to categories like identity, as well as weary of the ways in which such theoretical stances often seem to banish material matters from the spheres they seeks to subvert (Ferguson 30). Or, to quote Donna Haraway: "Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically about the tensions of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humor and serious play" (Haraway 190).

Spiderwoman certainly treat their own sense of identity as this seriously playful ironic sensibility characterized by contradictions and double visions. As they humorously highlight their lack of familiarity with Native languages, as well as their childhood fascination and identification with the white girl in the western among other not-so-exotic things - their hold on an authentic First Nations identity begins to unravel in wayward ways. Yet, once again, just when the audience really starts laughing, "Pow!" - they gesture towards the affectivity inherent in the effectivity of a category like Native identity. In turn, one senses how, paradoxically - any claim to a proper and stable category like Native is always already inevitably problematic yet crucially critical. Or, in Rebecca Schneider's words:

Spiderwoman also treat memory with a solemnly giggly provisionally ironic sensibility. Throughout their shows, memories are spun and re-spun, done and undone, in ways that speak volumes about family history and yet insist on nothing concrete. For instance, in Sun, Moon, Feather they take turns recounting the same story about dad and his boat that never left the backyard - but each recalls the ending quite differently. Reverb-ber-ber-ations also gestures towards both the materiality of memory and its endless deferral. In this performance, they talk about the time that dad's been drinking and when mom was in a trance. Then they tell the tale about interrupting the white kids putting on a séance. They remember Lisa, or more specifically, they re-cite how she looked like a tourist in her polyester pants over at the Laos corn dance. Such everyday recollections are woven in and out of the extraordinarily fantastic. Thus, Muriel describes the times when their Grandmother came into her head. "She talked," says Muriel, "and my face turned soft... its grandmother inside my head... and, she talked, from behind my eyes... and my head split open and..." (Mayo, Miguel and Miguel 205). As they take turns conjuring their memories of the past, they often pause and interrupt one another in mock horror, "Just what did you tell those people?" they ask one another again and again (Mayo, Miguel and Miguel 194, 201 & 207). Indeed, sometimes it's hard to know. A critically contradictory sensibility towards the interrogation and recuperation of memory in the stories that Spiderwoman oh-so-loosely and open-endedly weave, is indeed one that vibrates with the potential link to provisional irony.

Re-citing the Observational

However, Spiderwoman's irony is not only provisional - it's also observational. According to the rules for the roles of irony laid down by the likes of ironologists such as D.C. Muecke; observational ironies are associated with unlikely, unexpected and/or paradoxical reversals of character, turns of events or states of affairs (Muecke 23). Such irony is alive and kicking when even the best intentioned white audience members go to Spiderwoman's shows expecting to learn something concrete about Native culture. The mock-workshop that can turn you too into a real live Cherokee, for instance, says more about the colonial, neo-colonial and new-age romance with nostalgia then it does about First Nations life. In other words, and in this case, the picture that one goes to get of the other is ironically a picture of white dreams and desires - and they are not pretty. Spiderwoman, writes Schneider, "explore and explode the business of being exotic. Showing the Indian Other as Show, they display as much about the white-man's Indian as about native identity until the two are seen as impossibly intertwined" (Schneider 161).

Furthermore, when Lisa and Gloria replay themselves as children playing Cowboys and Indians via a re-take of the love scene between Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy in The Girl from the Golden West - what we get is Natives in whiteface. Such an edgy display situates itself in mock deference, defiance and defilement - as well as ironic reversal - of a history of racist hiring practices and policies that enabled only white men and women to play both the Cowboys and the Indians who graced North America's silver screens for eons.[4] This twist on the love scene is striking, for in Schneider's words: "A native troupe is expected to chase after a vanishing point marked as 'loss,' the 'authentic,' rendered by colonialist nostalgia as stuck in time, dislocated, pre-contact" (Schneider 171). However, Spiderwoman treat those expectations to irony - until they do a double-take back so that, once again, the white body finds itself looking at itself at the very moment it appears to be citing the other.

Evoking the Unruly

Finally, Spiderwoman do more than incite and invite the contradictory through provisional irony as well as recite the unexpected via observational irony - they also make quite a sight. Indeed, they stage these fantastically flamboyant, insincerely sincere and seriously playful spectacles of themselves that bring Mary Russo's reformulation of Bakhtin's carnivalesque grotesque figure of the female body to life. Such figures, writes Russo, are characterized by their link to the body's basest, barest, leakiest and most excessive functions (Russo 8). Spiderwoman's bodies, which are proudly jiggly, juggly and extra-fleshy, would most certainly be at home in Russo's unruly pantheon of performers. Their costumes, which could be described as: feathers meet Mary-Janes meet purple polyester, merged with fancy beadwork multiplied by tons of garish make-up, merely serve to strengthen their spectacular, striking and oh-so-unstereotypical doings, un-doings and re-doings. Although their work speaks to the sacred and the spiritual, it is also rife with the sacrilegious, the scandalous and the blasphemous. The "porcupine piss, yum yum from a bum and skunk cum" that helps make up their Yataholey brew, for example, would no doubt make Russo smile. However, Russo does not merely applaud such figures for daring to play with that which has been deemed dirty. She believes that such unruly bodies have powerful, political potential. Indeed, as Spiderwoman put on the carnivalesque grotesque, they not only underline and undermine the norms of appropriate femininity - they also disrupt the stereotype of the sacred and exotic Native female body. Thus such sights, as Russo writes, suggest "new political aggregates - provisional, uncomfortable, even conflictual coalitions of bodies which respect the concept of situated knowledges and refuse to keep every body in its place" (Russo 16). Indeed, I believe that if anyone can do that - Spiderwoman can.

Good-bye kisses

Before I close this show, I wish to say that although I obviously have a crush on Spiderwoman in a big way, the little Jewish girl in me would never claim to be part Cherokee, nor do I truly believe that I am much of a wannabe. In fact, as I think and re-think about Spiderwoman, like Muriel - I start to hear my own grandmother in my head. However, she's saying "Nu, what are you writing about these Other people for? Haven't your own people suffered enough? What is it? We're not good enough for your paper?" Indeed, it would have been both easier and closer to home to write about performance artists like Rachel Rosenthal, Hannah Wilke or Scarlot Harlot. But there is something about Spiderwoman that I find irresistible.

In short, I am taken with the thought provoking and politically evoking manner in which irony joins the figure of the unruly carnivalesque grotesque and circulates in Spiderwoman's performances. Together, they work to allow Spiderwoman's spectacles to evade and avoid sinking into either a problematically metaphysical take on concepts like memory or identity - while simultaneously keeping the trio from dancing through such categories in a metatheoretical quest to reveal their infinite deferral. Instead, by displaying (with) irony and the grotesque Spiderwoman show how claims to authenticity and purity are often more about problematic myths of primitivity and white man-made strategies of self-creation and idealization. Yet, as Spiderwoman suggests, this need not necessarily mean that all claims to memory and identity need be erased and effaced from the body - rather they can be treated playfully, provisionally, with irony.