David Blaine, Fathers 4 Justice, and the Spectacle of Heroic Masculinity

Abstract

This chapter examines spectacles of heroic masculinity. Focusing on the endurance performances of David Blaine and the guerrilla protests of Fathers 4 Justice, the study explores how male subjectivity is publicly performed as endangered, and suggests how the spectularized, public, mediatized nature of the work contributes to the resignification and management of that trouble. Unlike with the explicit live art practices of Roy Athey and Franko B, this analysis considers how Blaine and Fathers 4 Justice operate within a seemingly innocuous register of popular performance that enables their work to appeal to many. It pays specific attention to the manner in which the body is staged in high-risk scenarios not strictly to endanger it, but in order to engage the public in questions surrounding mastery, bodily integrity, and masculine authenticity.

[H]e [Houdini] turned the perennial philosophical problem of scepticism into a performance art (indeed, street theatre, when he would hang chained, from a bank in Manhattan). And by making exaggerated claims on people’s credulity, by encouraging them to believe the unbelievable, he did something very strange. He showed them that the only cure for scepticism was high-risk.¹

Adam Phillips, Houdini’s Box: On the Arts of Escape

One can do a semblance of surplus jouissance — it draws quite a crowd.²

Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis