Query: "Annie Sprinkle"

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:29 AM -0600 9/24/00, Gerald Cohen wrote:
>         The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 20, 2000, p.A27/3-6, "What's Worse,
>Imaginary Violence or Real Sex?") contains an unclear lexical item which
>is intentionally left undefined; the words in parentheses ("don't ask") are
>present in the article:
>         (col. 5): "...Not everyone is offended by sexually explicit
>materials, but anyone might be worried that it's becoming impossible to
>draw any lines at all.  One Florida university was recently chastised by a
>judge because it stopped a coed from projecting an Annie Sprinkle (don't
>ask) video on the outside wall of a campus building for a party she was
>throwing."
>         The term "Annie Sprinkle" does not appear in _RHHDAS_.  Would
>anyone on this list perhaps know its meaning ?
>
>------Gerald Cohen
>
>
>
>gcohen at umr.edu
Jerry,

A good place to start (courtesy of google.com) is

http://www.sexuality.org/l/art/anniems.html

which includes the entirety of a Master's Thesis on Annie Sprinkle by
Shiela Marie Thomas for the U. of Colorado Theatre Department.
(There are over 10,000 other hits on Annie Sprinkle, but most of them
not as scholarly.)  The table of contents for Thomas's thesis
includes, inter alia,

Body
             I.Inside Annie Sprinkle
            II.Annie Sprinkle, The Queen of Kink
           III.Annie Sprinkle, Post Porn Modernist
           IV.Annie Sprinkle, Slut and Goddess
            V.Annie Sprinkle, Feminist Performance Artist?

another hint, from the epigraphs to the first chapter:

Chapter I: Inside Annie Sprinkle

"Life is suffering." - Gautama Buddha

"Sex heals." - Annie Sprinkle

Here's the abstract:
===============
Annie Sprinkle, a former prostitute and star of pornographic films,
has emerged as a crucial figure in contemporary women's performance
art over the past decade.
Her one-woman show, Post Porn Modernist, directed by Emilio Cubiero
and later by Willem deRidder, ran from 1989 to 1996 throughout the
United States and
Europe. In 1995 she premiered a new show, Metamorphosex, in
collaboration with Barbara Carrellas and Linda Montano at the
University of Texas, Austin.

This thesis chronicles her careers in sex work, and performance art,
as well as some of her video and photographic work, for the first
time. Her years in prostitution
are re-constructed using information from various interviews, her
best-known adult films are examined, and their radical performance
elements are analyzed.
Sprinkle's early performance art pieces are then documented,
including the group performance Deep Inside Porn Stars, and their
development into Post Porn
Modernist is investigated. Post Porn Modernist's many script changes,
and its development into Post-Post Porn Modernist under deRidder's
direction, are
documented, and critical responses to its various incarnations are
analyzed. An examination of Sprinkle's work with other performers
such as Linda Montano and
Veronica Vera is also included. Sprinkle's "Sluts and Goddesses"
workshop, and its incarnation as The Sluts and Goddesses Video
Workshop, is examined, and her
photographic and written works are considered. Finally, the premiere
performance of Metamorphosex is documented from the first-person
perspective of the author,
who participated in the piece.

Sprinkle's body of work is then considered in relationship to the
emerging tradition of feminist performance art, and the question of
whether a sexually explicit
performance can be said to have feminist content is explored.
Sprinkle is positioned as a significant figure in postmodern feminist
theatre, and her work is established
as an important aspect of contemporary feminist discourse.
================
'nuff said?

Larry