Your body must be heard.

--Hélène Cixous

A clear articulation of the feminine as positive, powerful and free is still a chimera in our postmodern, aggressively post-feminist popular culture. Even in the most empowering cases, feminists of all sexualities have had to hedge their bets when searching for mainstream cultural icons they can wholeheartedly believe in. While many in local music scenes and lesbian communities form their own subcultural icons, they have a difficult time reaching audiences beyond their locality and the confines of the internet. Another form of resistance is elevating some “feminist” aspects of a certain film, album or media star over others. This tactic is, for better or worse, probably the most common ruse, as mainstream entertainment has similarly elevated and even appropriated some positive images of femininity while dismissing others. Often, these cultural products--the film Thelma and Louise being a paradigmatic case--portray inspiring examples of female sexuality and resistance to patriarchal oppression, yet couch them in ways that are non-threatening to gender hegemony. Thus a feminist viewer has to be vigilant as s/he picks among the vast heap of signs in our increasingly mountainous popular culture.

Being relegated to a few hopeful scraps does not seem like an effective way to form feminist resistance, especially considering the egregious effects our capitalistic consumer culture has wrought upon the earth and its exploited inhabitants. Yet dismissing this very basic action of affirmation “simply because of its ties to capital is to dismiss the media through which most people gain most of their cultural literacy” (Burns xii). A feminist reappropriation and reevaluation of popular forms can create a small, yet effective space of resistance, “even if that articulation invariably involves the employment of contaminated resources and the creation of effects both oppositional and hegemonic” (Burns xii). As many people in our society do not have access to feminist literature or communities, feminist consciousness can be ignited from one small spark portrayed in popular culture, even if it is framed within contradictions.

There have been an abundance of female musicians and singers who have been both quasi-feminist and highly successful over the past decade, and even if artists like PJ Harvey, Tori Amos, Me’Shell Ndegèocello, Missy Elliot and (most famously) Madonna create work that is alternately “oppositional and hegemonic,” they have been far more than small sparks. Their albums and music videos have provided free reign for subversive interpretations, but none have been as consistent--or as cryptic--as the work of Icelandic pop singer Björk, particularly in the music videos spanning the entirety of her solo career. Containing liberal amounts of special effects, startling images and inventive storylines, Björk videos have been popular with the public, winning several MTV Music Video Awards, Brit Awards and other accolades.

Björk’s oeuvre, a collaboration between her and a number of music video directors, fashion photographers and designers from 1993 to 2003, displays a marked repetition of themes and images about feminine desire and the body. This is particularly noteworthy, as the music video is one of the most contested forms of media for feminist expression. As cultural critic Sut Jhally argued in his documentary Dreamworlds II, music videos have been since their inception a heavily sexist store of images and lyrics. In them, women have been relegated to the position of sex object, of fulfilling the desires of men in a “dreamworld” where women exist for and invite the sexual attention of males within the videos and from male viewers. Her role is, for the most part, visual ornamentation. Filmically, a woman’s beauty and desirability in music videos “becomes a function of certain practices of imaging—framing, lighting, camera movement, angle,” thus aligning her sexuality “more closely...with the surface of the image than its illusory depths” (Doane 179). Jhally asserts that even women who are the titular stars of videos are presented for full scopophilic effect, as in the promotional videos for Samantha Fox or Salt N Pepa. The female characters of music videos are, most often, the objects of desire, not its agents.

Jhally’s examples are somewhat dated, but it still holds true that a non-exploitative vision of feminine sexuality has been a rare sight in popular music videos. This only reflects the norm of hegemonic sexuality, for even still the “female body is used as the generalized object of sexual pleasure for men...and this persistent portrayal of erotic images has its influence on, and is influenced by, symbolic meanings which are culturally pervasive” (Choi 9). These persistent symbolic meanings are well known and numerous, ranging from the virgin/whore dichotomy to the supposedly inscrutable nature of female genitalia and feminine sexual pleasure. Ultimately, femininity is most often dismissed as “‘lack,’ ‘atrophy’ (of the sexual organ), and ‘penis envy,’ the penis being the only sexual organ of recognized value” (Irigaray 23).

Feminist theorists such as Luce Irigaray, in response to the overwhelmingly negative beliefs about feminine sexuality, have attempted to subvert these tenets by creating new ways of speaking about and portraying sexuality. One of the new ways is figuring feminine sexuality as “plural” (Irigaray 28), or as obtaining pleasure from many different sources inside and outside the self. Articulating such a sexuality is difficult under the constraints of language and patriarchal discourse, but as it is, female sexuality “figures simultaneously [the] demarcation and dissolution of identity, [serving] this cultural project of disrupting the political economy of the sign as it is produced in dominant discourse” (Russo 328). In other words, patriarchal discourse dismisses the feminine as paradoxical, nonsensical and even monstrous due to its refusal to be relegated to one single definition. Exploring and reifying these terms in a feminist light can be a tool in forming new feminine sexualities.

Similarly, Björk and her collaborators have created a subversive space in which one can imagine feminine sexuality in opposition to the definition offered by mainstream music videos--her videos “plumb the depths” (Doane 179) of the image. The most obvious difference is the marked absence of male characters in nearly all of her videos, and when they do appear, they are marginal at best--only one or two can be said to be her video character’s lover, and that distinction is unclear. Also apparent is a low emphasis on Björk as a sex object. She is very modestly clothed in her earliest videos from Debut, and although this evolves to her becoming fully nude in those from Vespertine, the sexual objectification of her body is distorted and disturbed with special effects.

Distortion--or a “demarcation and dissolution of identity” (Russo 328)--is one of two guiding themes in Björk’s video work. In her world of images, colors are either deeply saturated or starkly black and white; she morphs from human to animal and back again; she appears as a sexually demanding child and a babyish woman; thoughts appear on the surface of her skin; creatures are dismembered in violent orgies of affection; bloodless technology and sexual pleasure coexist in the same space; mountains open to reveal her body and vice versa. Björk’s videos run the gamut from the frightening to the sublime, and in this way they create a concept of identity, of the body, as grotesque. As exhibited in artists like Hieronymus Bosch and Aubrey Beardsley, the grotesque has long been a form of unconscious resistance to mainstream culture and society:

“[The grotesque] can only be understood...in terms of opposition between the official culture and the subculture that fought, negated, and ridiculed it. But the grotesque...was concerned less with the derision of concrete institutions and events, more with paganism as an anti-image of the Christian world--an overall animated continuum with no ruptures between plants, animals, and humans, a place of transition and transformation....[a] material, female entity, a chaos of floral, zoomorphic, and anthropomorphic creatures in eternal pursuit of each other...” (Kuryluk 316).

Björk’s store of video characters collapse and combine seemingly insoluble binaries between organic/inorganic, child/adult, human/animal, interior/exterior and self/other. In doing so, Björk’s videos can be seen as reifying perceptions of the feminine as monstrous and grotesque in an empowering way, for she is figured as sexual agent in all of her videos.

Obscuring the difference between self and other is the second prominent theme in Björk’s oeuvre, and perhaps the most instrumental in formulating a feminine sexuality that is not contingent upon the masculine. Björk accomplishes this, both subtly and overtly, through acts of autoeroticism: a sexual and emotional engagement with herself. She constantly touches her body in the idiosyncratic movements she makes while she sings, and in several of her videos, she is seen sexually interacting with a double--a sort of clone--of herself. The multiplication of Björks and their touching each other affirms the patriarchal “fear that woman is always touching herself, that she is never differentiated from herself,” and that this secretive autoeroticism has in turn constituted “the invisibility of her pleasure to phenomenal speculation and its invisibility for specular representation” (Dennis 64). Images of women gaining pleasure in any way other than the normative, heterosexual routes are thus rare, and when they do exist, they are often made for the specular pleasure of men.

Due to the juxtaposition of Björk’s autoeroticism and the grotesque, any simple visual pleasure taken from watching her touch herself is complicated. Together, they articulate an identity in a constant state of becoming, a reaching inward and outward. What is most important about these coexisting themes is that Björk and her cohorts portray them through a repetition of concrete images and movements: animals, the presence of water, multiple Björks, Björk-as-animal, bears, forests. These occur in various guises throughout all of her music videos; this is notable when one considers that Björk has worked with a multitude of different directors and artists over the past ten years. The repetitions, unconsciously or not, could be taken as an assertion of gender and sexual identity as that “instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 402). In the arena created by her work, Björk asserts a new reality of gender, sexuality and identity.

However, given that Björk still remains in the milieu of popular consumerist culture, one cannot make a wholly feminist and subversive interpretation of her music videos. Her videos take part in the mass consumption of celebrity images that are “lovingly created by stylists and lensmen...the essential currency of fame. For fans, they function fetishistically as objects of adoration, envy, fantasy, longing and lust” (Poynor 114). For all the monstrosities that run rampant in Björk’s visual world, they are still presented in a manner that is recognizable and pleasing to the mainstream eye. Also, the more dangerous aspects of her work are often downplayed by the media, who often dismiss her as otherworldly, precious, childlike and odd. These tendencies both within her oeuvre and from the mainstream media serve to deflect attention away from the grotesque and onto less demanding aspects of her work.

What follows is my interpretation of Björk’s music video oeuvre as sexually and subversively empowering, and how these images have developed over time as they emphasize autoeroticism and the grotesque. At the same time, I will chart the tension between the subversive and hegemonic contents within the videos, and how this tension is successively dealt with. I have used the track listing on the video collection Volumen 1993-2003 as my guide, for it displays each video in chronological order. I will also utilize the four albums the videos promoted as chapter markings, as each set of videos for a particular album display common themes and reactions. Ultimately, I seek to demonstrate that substantial ground for feminist empowerment can be found within Björk’s music videos despite their connection to mainstream patriarchal culture.

Debut: First Steps and First Impressions

The guiding themes of grotesquerie and autoeroticism can be found in their infant stages within the four promotional music videos for Debut. As the album title implies, the music and videos for this period signify a clear break in identity from the surrealist guitar-pop of her past and her new beginning in the form of dance-inflected techno pop. Contained within this identity are several repetitions that are continued in her later works: touching herself, surreal inversions, sexual openness and distortion, water, forests, bears. Despite their weirder overtones, the Debut videos are the tamest works in her video series, as well as some of the most popular. It is from this period that the media gleans its most common stereotype of Björk as infantile, precious and crazy; moreover, she is made to seem “ethereal” and unbalanced, “a look designed to provoke awe and tenderness rather than lust” (Reynolds 207). While this is an effective tactic to compromise “between the desire to be glamorous and an aversion to being ogled” by de-emphasizing the body, the Debut images of Björk still evoke “a more abstract, mythical femininity” (Reynolds 207) that the media chose (and currently chooses) as its focus rather than the more progressive aspects of her videos.

Björk’s forays into the erotics of her own body find their tentative start in “Big Time Sensuality” and “Venus as a Boy.” In the former, she dances and sings on the bed of a truck moving through the streets of New York City, wearing a modest tube-like dress with overly long sleeves that also appears, in similar form, in “Human Behavior” and “Violently Happy.” Throughout the video, she sings rapturously of enjoying both the “hardcore and the gentle” aspects of sensuality while she jerkily touches her breasts, face, teeth, tongue and other parts of her body. The idiosyncratic way that she moves her hands and body--jumping, grinning, pantomiming--along with how the black and white film brings out the freckles on her face, suggest a pre-genital, childlike sexual identity. The “eroticism of children is more vague and diffuse than adult sexuality” in that the “thrill experienced... cannot be reduced to sexuality alone” (Kuryluk 169). Björk has expressed an opinion of her songs as encompassing more than what is normally defined by adult sexuality, arguing that “it’s not erotic or sensual even if it may sound like that” (Record Collector Aug 2002).

Her widening of sexual definitions is also evident in “Venus as a Boy,” which, through its literary allusion to Georges Bataille’s infamously violent erotic novel Story of the Eye, contains a subtle undercurrent of the grotesque. As she sings this ode to a particular boy’s sexual talents, cunnilingus in particular, she suggestively touches her face with her fingers and with eggs before drifting off into erotic contemplation over the egg she is frying. Her fascination with eggs echoes that felt by the character Simone in Story of the Eye, who eventually leads the novel’s characters into further explorations of sex and death. Björk in many interviews has professed her love of Bataille’s novel, agreeing that there’s “no such freedom in the world, that you can pick anything you want and put it in your butt” (Details July 1994). For Bataille, such freedom is partly symbolized by the nightmarish diffusion of eggs, eyes and testicles, and the resultant sexual depravity brought on by the collapse of such boundaries between objects.

More grotesque diffusions take place in “Human Behavior” and “Violently Happy,” and it is in these two videos where interpretations of her work as feminist, empowering and disturbing are at odds with the media’s perception of Björk as a diminutive novelty. “Human Behavior” is in several ways a microcosm of all of the grotesque themes throughout Björk’s work, both in its startling, dreamlike images and as a product of collaboration between her and French director Michel Gondry, who went on to direct five more of her music videos. Here, storylines and positions are confused, sizes change like they did in Alice in Wonderland, and the hunter becomes the hunted on this naturalistic, Little Prince-like planet upon which Björk thrives.

On one hand, Björk is the little girl in a fairytale cabin, sitting hungrily alone, only to be tempted by a moth the size of her head. On the other, she is the pint-sized prey of a monstrous killer teddy bear, who crashes through the forest surrounding her cabin in hot pursuit. She runs, she flies, she swims to escape, only to be swallowed whole by the bear; simultaneously, in what may be the reality in opposition to--or the dream of--the Björk now residing within the bear’s stomach, Björk prepares to eat the huge moth on her plate, an image of the marauding bear peering from within her forehead. As the first video to be released during the Debut period, and the most visually complex, it creates an imagined world where nothing is as it seems--especially the character of Björk. This is the “shadowy domain of the grotesque” (Kuryluk 169), where there is constant vacillitation between predator and prey, dream and reality, and storybook victim and monstrous moth-eater, and there is “definitely, definitely, definitely no logic.”

Many aspects of “Violently Happy” can be read in similar ways, though it has more to say about gender and sexuality. In this video, shot as if it were from a surveillance camera in a padded cell, Björk is one of a number of subjects gripped by feverish, sexual, solitary passion. A man and a woman clothed in identical dresses ecstatically caress a doll that is also dressed like themselves and cut its hair as well as their own. Several other male characters play with dolls in increasingly violent ways; Björk dismembers and decapitates a teddy bear, eventually crowning herself with its severed head. “I’m violently happy ‘cause I love you,” Björk ominously intones, twirling the too-long sleeves of her dress, which here resemble those of a straitjacket.

“Violently Happy” presents another exploration of childlike, budding sexuality. In Freudian psychology, a doll serves as a replacement for a young girl’s nonexistent phallus, and she uses it to exercise “her sovereign authority...[and] experiences subjective affirmation and identification through the doll” (Beauvoir 282). This notion of girlhood development is turned upside-down in the video, as it is adult men who use and abuse the dolls; consequently, definitions of what is proper behavior for adults and for each gender is subverted in “Violently Happy,” as is also seen in the doubling of the red-haired woman and man wearing the same dress. As for the decapitated teddy bear, its severed head alludes to a long tradition in art history “linking severed heads to the female sex, beheading to castration as well as to defloration or menstruation” (Kuryluk 228). Thus the bear’s head symbolizes both a violent initiation into adult female sexuality and the threat of destroying that of the male--perhaps this is why the imprisoned men play with their phallic-substitute dolls. “Violently Happy” portrays a muddied area between childhood and adult sexualities, but one thing is certain: that Björk holds the power in the feminine, yet castrated symbol of the bear’s head, and in the scissors, which she strokes like her own version of a phallus.

As violent as they are, the threatening gender subversions of “Violently Happy” are framed within the safe parenthesis of a padded cell. These images are non-threatening, as they are of subjects defined as “crazy,” and thus easily dismissed. The popular media’s interpretation of Björk’s work during the Debut period follows the same tactic; instead of focusing upon the violence and diffusions present in her work, the press has infantilized her as a “tiny gamine” (Aletti 121), a “whimsical space cookie” (Chonin 104), a “visiting extraterrestrial” (Cornwell 52) and any other number of sugary epithets still used in the present day. They chose to center upon the apparent childishness Björk exhibits in the fable-like “Human Behavior” and the antics of “Big Time Sensuality,” or upon her as endearingly wacky in “Violently Happy,” ignoring the depths of violence, transformation and desire that can also be detected in the videos.

While being a “sprite-like enigma” (Reynolds 270) may be marginally better than being sexually objectified, being so still spells out “separation and novelty, rather than...status as [a] respected musical [figure]” (O’Brien 201). Such exoticizing of Björk’s person lifts her filmic messages out of context. In the videos for Post, Björk reacts against the diminution of her work by effectively “growing up” with images that more fully describe feminine sexuality and its ally, the grotesque.

Post: An Orgy of Me

While the Debut videos were fairly subdued, the videos of the Post period explode with color, variety and multiplicity. Björk here abandons the straitjacketed tube dresses for a cavalcade of costume changes and identities, sometimes in the space of one music video--the number culminates in nine separate costumed Björks in the video for “Possibly Maybe.” Indeed, these videos constantly repeat images of multiple Björks simultaneously existing in the same space, thus confronting the viewer with an image of Björk’s identity as a “simulacrum,” where “the possibility of distinguishing between reality and phantasm, between the actual and the simulated, is denied” (Krauss 23). Björk also affirms a more overt, sexual connection to the grotesque than that glimpsed within the Debut period. It would thus seem more difficult for viewers to dismiss these images as juvenile and quirky, but popular culture has managed to do so anyway by conferring mass attention to the video for “It’s Oh So Quiet” over all of the others. And, despite Björk and her collaborators’ other efforts, videos from the Post period have yet to fully abandon the codes of sexual exoticism; while she is clearly more of an adult agent, these videos still figure Björk’s body as “both studio and mannequin, a display mechanism for her perpetual readjustments of hair, make-up, body-shape, accessories, jewelry, clothing and style” (Poynor 113).

The confrontational video for “Army of Me” immediately refutes any charges of Björk as infantile. Clad in a black karate gi, Björk sings in a bored, cold voice, “I won’t sympathize anymore” as she drives a massive truck the width of a city street. She grins, revealing teeth that are sharp metal pistons. Her torso elongates into that of a snake’s as she checks under the hood of her truck; later, as she walks through a hall of mirrors in a dentist’s office, she becomes a veritable army of Björks, who will battle (as a singular Björk) a gorilla dressed as a dentist (or a dentist dressed as a gorilla?) who is after a spontaneously growing jewel found in Björk’s mouth. Later, Björk uses dynamite to blow up an art museum, freeing an Asian man who could be her lover, brother or friend--no distinction is made.

Again, with the help of director Gondry, we have entered the world of the dreamlike grotesque, where techniques “of elongation and compression, enlargement and miniaturization [are] applied” (Kuryluk 302) to Björk’s body and other objects with startling effects. “Army of Me” continues the paradoxical themes seen in “Human Behavior,” eradicating any strict definitions of Björk as exclusively human, animal or machine. Björk saw “Army of Me” as being “so much about me actually learning that I have to defend myself” (Army of Me Special 2002); consequently, the conflation of machine/human/animal in the video create a body that is strong and capable, which matches the self-assured theme of the song. Gone are the lyrics about love and sensuality, and in their place Björk demands, “self-sufficience, please!/ and get to work.” While the video’s conclusion sees Björk reuniting with a loved one, she has had to free him using her own “self-sufficience.”

The videos for “Hyperballad” and “Isobel” echo ideals of solitude, ironically employing even more multiple Björks to state their themes. The protagonist sung of in “Hyperballad” commits the secretive, masturbatory activity of throwing odds and ends off of a cliff near her and her lover’s house. In a macabre gesture, she even imagines what her own “body would sound like/ slamming against those rocks/ and will my eyes be closed or open?” Not contented solely with love, she must exorcise these violent tendencies so that she can go back home “happier to be safe up here with you.” Björk implies a dissatisfaction with love in this song and in her interpretation of it, stating that, after a period of interest in a relationship, “You have to make an effort consciously and nature's not helping you anymore. So...you sneak outside and you do something horrible and destructive” (Feedback Feb 1996).

The video itself, in Gondry’s trademark, surrealist style, portrays the protagonist’s plight by showing the Björk before, during and after her imagined fall off of the cliff, all at the same time. The post-fall, dead Björk forms part of the landscape, her nose resembling a mountain peak and her body mixing with dirt and trash; she could also be a façade, as lights flash beneath her face to uncover a sort of electronic grid. Meanwhile, the pre-fall Björk (or perhaps the ghost of the post-fall one) appears as a phosphorescent projection laid over the dead Björk, explaining her motives through song. She later transforms into a tiny Björk made of computer pixels, who tumbles off of the cliff and breaks into pieces. The multiples are disorienting; any one of them could be the “real” protagonist of “Hyperballad,” just as much as each could be a projection of her restless mind. The song questions the (traditionally heterosexual) reality of a wholly “true” love with any other much like the multiple images of Björk question the line between original and copy through simulacrum.

The video for “Isobel” takes a more strident approach towards solitude, and it marks the first appearance of Björk as her own lover--the ultimate crossing of the boundaries between self and other. As a lyrical collaboration between Björk and Icelandic poet Sigurjón Birgir Sigurdsson (aka Sjón), “Isobel” charts a storyline that began in “Human Behavior” and finds its denouement in Homogenic’s “Bachelorette.” The heroine Isobel starts as a little girl, observing the inscrutability of human behavior from her cabin in the woods. In “Isobel,” the heroine is back in the same forest, which she uses as a base to send off an army of moths as her “messengers of intuition” (Record Collector Aug 2002) to hapless people she encountered during a failed stint in the big city.

Visually, Isobel’s retreat into the forest is figured as establishing a deep, even sexual connection with herself. Two images of her--one singing, one silent--fade in and out inside of one another as she sings the first chorus of, “my name Isobel, married to myself/ my love Isobel, living by herself.” A similar image repeats during the second chorus, only this time a skein of leaves distorts the two Björks, giving the impression that she/they have a multitude of moving eyes and mouths. Most strikingly, during the lyrics “in a heart full of dust/ lives a creature called lust,” one Björk is showing kissing the naked foot of the other. Isobel’s return to the forest is also a symbol for this act of self-connection, as her image is repeatedly superimposed over the trees and rivers surrounding her; at one point, she appears to be wearing a waterfall as a wedding veil. Images symbolic of self-love and a validation of solitude are very rare in the music video world, as the majority of songs by both men and women are concerned with obtaining the love of another or bemoaning its loss. Björk, with “Isobel,” is unique in this aspect, for not only does she validate self-love, but she also valorizes feminine bodies and sexualities, as a woman

‘touches herself’ all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two-but not divisible into one(s)- that caress each other (Irigaray, 24).

Not only does her body touch itself though its double, but the rest of the world is collapsed in a continuous cycle between self and non-self. Such a radical dissolution finds its ultimate expression in perhaps the most blatantly violent, sexual and fantastic of all her music videos, “I Miss You,” directed by Ren & Stimpy creator and animator John Kricfalusi. “I Miss You” is a gravity-less world teeming with cartoon animals that alternately embrace, kill and become each other. Björk transforms into a cartoon and back; she changes bodies and genders at random with her “lover,” a vaguely male-seeming character that she dances with as well as tears limb from limb. She is happily dismembered by a fish, while she later rips a chicken in half. At the video’s end, a cartoon Björk and her animated object of desire dance ecstatically inside of what appear to be two giant, pulsating condoms, which also take the place of the real Björk’s breasts. “I Miss You” is one big teeming mass of grotesque inversions, characterized by Kuryluk’s “overall animated continuum with no ruptures between plants, animals, and humans...and anthropomorphic creatures in eternal pursuit of each other...” (316).

As a personal response to the more limited videos of Debut, Björk sets a precedent during the Post era that she matches and articulates even further in the videos later on in her career. “Army of Me” and “I Miss You” defy the airy-fairy epithets attached to her Debut videos with brutal, fantastic images, and “Hyperballad” and “Isobel” posit questions and solutions towards the normative search for a heterosexual other to love and possess. Yet Björk and her team were, yet again, then and now, thwarted by public and media opinion, this time by its championing of the video “It’s Oh So Quiet” over the others from Post.

There is nothing inherently wrong with “It’s Oh So Quiet,” a fanciful, musical-esque romp directed by the ever-inventive Spike Jonze. The song is an ebullient cover of a 1948 song originally sung by Betty Hutton, and in the video, Björk leads a crowd of ordinary American citizens into a choreographed dance as she sings joyfully of the extreme emotions felt whilst falling in love. “It’s Oh So Quiet” became Björk’s most popular video and song to date, catapulting Björk into global stardom; however, this “success had a sting in the tale,” for soon the song became so ubiquitous on radio and MTV rotation, Björk “publicly regretted covering [it] and has not played it live for many years...[and probably] never will again” (Gittins 68). Compared to the other Post videos, “It’s Oh So Quiet” is totally harmless, and thus predictably more palatable to an audience acclimated to the codes of MTV. For her next album, Homogenic, Björk thrust increasingly uncompromised images into the music video milieu as a counterreaction, this time with even higher technical artistry and thematic cohesion.

Homogenic: State of Emergence

In the Post era of images, autoerotic and grotesque motifs are split between Björk’s body and its surrounding world, respectively, with a few suggested connections between them. Homogenic bridges this gap, centering both themes upon her body, thus making it the site of monstrosities: “a blend of fascination and horror,” which leads to “fantasies and often nightmares about the ever-shifting boundaries between life and death, night and day, masculine and feminine, active and passive, and so forth” (Braidotti 66). Juxtaposed with her earlier works, Homogenic was her most uncompromised set of songs at the time; she surmised that “this album is the most me yet” (Raygun Sept 1997). This period firmly established her as an alternative pop icon, and the lavish technical production of videos like “Bachelorette” and especially “All is Full of Love” won critical and popular acclaim in the form of awards and video airplay.

The three videos “Jòga,” “Hunter” and “Alarm Call” illustrate the seamless blending of autoerotic pleasure and the monstrous grotesque. “Jòga,” the more sober and subtle of them, expresses these themes in a conflation of Björk’s body and music with the landscape of Iceland. In an opening shot, the camera moves over her sleeping form as it lays on a rocky beach, much like it flies over rivers, glaciers and mountains, shifting in time to the song. During the “volcanic” (Record Collector Aug 2002) beats of the song’s bridge, the landscape becomes alive, splitting and breaking to reveal the molten lava underneath it. The video is then framed by a closing image of Björk holding open a large hole in her chest, within which is even more mountains and a computer-generated image of Iceland. In “Jòga,” Björk is a part of the landscape--she is Iceland and Iceland is her, and the force that moves them both is that of “eros....In this setting [where] stones breathe and water [is] omnipresent” (Kuryluk 318). The workings of her body and that of the land are seen as one and the same.

The grotesque themes of “animalistic possession and mutation” (Paynor 115) find their subject in the twin-like videos “Hunter” and “Alarm Call,” where, as in “Jòga,” the boundaries of Björk’s body are questioned. Björk’s transformation into a polar bear in “Hunter” calls up prior images of bears in her Debut videos “Human Behavior” and “Violently Happy.” All of these bears are “fake”--two are teddy bears and the bear of “Hunter” is obviously the result of computer animation--but in all they symbolize an inner drive towards violent consumption. Just as the killer teddy peers from Björk’s forehead or sits upon her hair as a severed head, now the bear is attempting to emerge from somewhere within Björk’s body. She, with varying expressions of pleasure and frustration, tries to keep the bear’s presence in check, all the while singing “I’m going hunting/ I’m the hunter.” There is a definite mood of solitary self-determination within the song and video, as she later snarls, “you could smell it/ so you left me on my own/ to complete the mission.” Björk’s morphing into a bear could then symbolize a strength and capability like that seen in “Army of Me,” though it is a conflicted strength; the bear is never allowed to permanently materialize.

Such inner conflict is absent in “Alarm Call,” a work that Björk terms as a “spank on the bum” to the music video industry (MTV News Dec 1998). Floating serenely upon a raft in the middle of an Amazonian jungle, incongruously sporting a lacy designer dress, Björk sings fiercely about the power of hope and happiness while the creatures of the forest look her over. At one point, a large python crawls from the river and between Björk’s legs; she strokes it as if it were a penis while it slithers over her groin. Not only does her interaction with the snake suggest bestiality and gender-bending (the snake as Björk’s phallus), but the snake itself is a bisexual sign. As a male symbol, the snake “enters women, causing defloration, menstruation, and pregnancy” much like the snake of Eden brought on the fall, and as a female symbol, “it observes the cycle of the moon and sheds its skin in a process likened to the monthly bleeding” (Kuryluk 232). In this way, the snake is kin to that of the severed teddy bear head in “Violently Happy,” as both are symbolic of adult female sexuality and its onset.

With its various bleedings and drastic size changes, the female body and its supposedly attendant sexuality are hegemonically marked as a sign of monstrous difference to that of the normative male body. The female body is never a fixed entity, and thus it “shares with the monster the privilege of bringing out a unique blend of fascination and horror” in that it “trespasses and transgresses the barriers between recognizable norms or definitions” (Braidotti, 65). What is radical about Björk’s video for “Alarm Call” is that it shows her taking immense self-pleasure from her monstrous difference. As the video continues, she sings “It doesn’t scare me at all” as she encounters several threatening animals: a crocodile, a snake, a school of piranhas. When the fish dare to bite one of her fingers, she plunges her head into the river and scares them away by suddenly baring not a human mouth, but a vast maw full of razor-sharp fangs. Triumphant, she throws her head back and seems to glow in post-orgasmic bliss. In “Hunter” and “Alarm Call,” Björk creates a body that draws its power and pleasure from being grotesque.

All of these disparate and conjoined aspects find what is perhaps their most eloquent expression in the video for “All is Full of Love,” where Björk endorsement of the autoerotic is writ large. Grotesque blendings can be found in the concurrent presence of high technology--the precise, graceful machines, Björk’s body as cyborg--and in the organic, symbolized here by milk that pours from Björk’s robotic body and her passionate sexual union with another robot identical to herself. The joy of the song seems to echo the “luminous” character of the plural sexuality Irigaray writes of in “When Our Lips Speak Together,” when the definitions of the body are “neither one nor two...An odd sort of two. And yet not one. Especially not one” (Irigaray 207). Here, Björk sees love as something that does not spring just from a desired other or from one’s self, but from all things:

The feeling, the emotion of the song was like completely melting and loving everything and feeling like everything loved you, after a long time of not having that. The song, in essence, is actually about believing in love. Love isn't just about two persons, it's everywhere around you (Record Collector Aug 2002).

“All is Full of Love” remains one of Björk’s most memorable and critically acclaimed music videos, winning the MTV Music Video Awards for Best Breakthrough Video and Best Special Effects, among many others (Fretwell 2000). While the video may be seen as a culmination of the many themes discussed thus far, mass culture’s attraction to it may be for different reasons. One is the obvious high-budget production of the video, which attracted the attention of non-musically centered cable networks like the SciFi Channel, which aired specials on the making of the video (Exposure 1999). Patriarchal culture’s “commercial depictions of lesbians” as overtly sexual and thus available for specular consumption (Grover 357) may also have aided the success of “All is Full of Love,” though it is made clear in the video that Björk’s lover is not another woman, but herself. Regardless, Homogenic and particularly “All is Full of Love” charted Björk’s assured mainstream success without having to concede to more typically sexist and sexually exploitative trends in the music video industry. Videos that were challenging and complex gained airplay and critical acclaim alike.

Free to experiment even further, the videos for her newest album Vespertine are raw in some ways, yet subdued in others. This time, Björk abandons any pretensions towards popular TV airplay to create videos that are (for music videos) very sexually explicit. On one hand, Björk continues the merged themes of grotesque, solitary sexual pleasure seen so clearly in Homogenic, while returning to the mood heard in Debut’s psalms of sensuality and love.

Vespertine: A Secret Code Carved

The whole of the Vespertine period is marked by a significant move to more avant-garde, elitist modes of video distribution and presentation. By the late 1990s, Björk’s fanbase was large enough to ensure that most anything she chose to create would be consumed and seen despite the attitudes of mainstream cable music channels; consequently, she began to create images that were even more daring than those seen in Homogenic. Only one of the trio of videos for Vespertine, “Hidden Place,” could be shown on primetime American TV, as those for “Pagan Poetry” and “Cocoon” featured Björk in the nude, having unsettling things issuing from or being done to her body. Thus the videos were available either from her official website or as short films screened in theaters before independent films like Waking Life. Their appearance in theaters elevated the status of her videos as more “artistic” than that which was shown on TV; her tour for Vespertine confirmed this approach, as instead of playing stadiums and other popular concert venues as she had done in the past, Björk performed in high-class opera houses, accompanied by the local symphony. While these concerts were of incomparably high quality in performance and sound, they were also prohibitively expensive, which meant that a much smaller percentage of the public was able to see her progressive images.

Of course, one might assume that being able to visually consume Björk’s nude body was a major selling point for the Vespertine videos despite their relative absence from the public domain, as “sexualized representations of women as the nude are a mainstay” of hegemonic Western art and culture (Dennis, 51). However, Björk’s affiliation with the grotesque autoerotic in these videos makes any simple visual pleasure to be taken from her body rather difficult to achieve. All three of the Vespertine videos render Björk’s skin as the porous boundary between her buzzing inner world and the outside world, and that the interaction between these two causes intense, even violent pleasure and fantastic metamorphosis. Björk sees the videos as exhibiting very insular themes:

They're about sewing things in your skin, or things that were yours first, like the bodily fluids, going in and outside you. Sort of how you communicate with the world in a very intimate, personal way. Or where something outside affects you so hard that you fall in love and things grow out of you. So, yeah, I think there was a certain theme in the three videos (Japanese Press Conference Dec 2001).

The skin as a gateway is first characterized in “Hidden Place,” where Björk is seen as nude only from the breastbone and up. The camera soon leaves the rest of her body to focus exclusively upon her face at an angle that is almost too close for visual comfort. The lens moves restlessly over her smiling, twitching face, following the tracks of multicolored, mucus-like liquids that seep out in and out of her eyes, nose and mouth. Björk later opens her mouth to reveal an identical, smaller Björk residing within; one could easily imagine Björk as a series of nesting boxes, each housing another Björk inside the other. “Hidden Place” continues the grotesque motive of mixing the interior and exterior. Likewise, M/M Paris, the designers partly responsible for the direction of “Hidden Place,” saw the liquids as a metaphor for all of the “possible emotions pulsating and circulating in her very busy brain” (reservocation.com Nov 2001).

The blending of inner and outer worlds takes the form of visceral pleasure in “Pagan Poetry,” directed by fashion photographer Nick Knight. As Björk details in song “a blueprint of the pleasure in me,” various extreme close-ups of pearls being sewn into Björk’s nipples, ears and skin are shown either in microscopically clear detail or as digitally manipulated to vaguely resemble the repetitive movements of sexual intercourse. The solitary pleasure Björk experiences in modifying her body is here conflated with the pleasure of having sex with another, as Björk’s penetration of herself with needles and thread is likened to heterosexual, penetrative sex. Again, this suggests the feminine plurality of pleasures, as there is no one site on Björk’s body that is the sole source of her pleasure.

At the video’s climax, Björk’s body is shown in full, clad in a dress that is made up of all the piercings all over her body; in effect, the dress and her skin are the same entity. Somewhat contrary to the suggested self-pleasure Björk feels in the song and video, director Knight sees her piercings in “Pagan Poetry” as an elaborate Valentine to a male lover: “I wanted to strip her down. She's actually quite raw, womanly and sexy. But [the video is] not tribal or S&M--it's about a woman's love for a man” (nme.com 2001). Though the song is about the budding possibility of a relationship with a man, Björk is lyrically torn between wanting to “keep me all to myself” and “wanting to hand myself over” to him. The merging of self and other is indeed an erotically exciting experience for Björk, but one taken hesitantly.

Björk’s tentative reaching within and without for sexual connection finds its completion in the lyrics for “Cocoon,” a gentle study of post-coital bliss. In this video, a number of grub-like, hermaphroditic, nude Björks stand in frozen repose; one of them, indistinguishable from the rest, breaks from the group and moves off to be alone. This Björk then spins a cocoon for herself out of red threads issuing from her nipples as she marvels at “a beauty this immense” found in making love to a partner. In tone and subject, “Cocoon” bears a noticeable relation to “Venus as a Boy,” for both feature Björk singing somewhat explicitly about sexual acts with another while she is decidedly alone. As she envelops herself in a cocoon of her own making--to metamorphose into what, we do not know--Björk whispers in quiet rapture, “he slides inside/ half awake, half asleep...when i wake up/ the second time in his arms: gorgeousness!/ he's still inside me!” In this moment before Björk floats out of sight in her red cocoon, the arch of her videos comes full circle. Where once she began singing and performing about the joys and mishaps of love in a childlike, inquisitive manner in the videos for Debut, in “Cocoon” she ends by returning to love as an adult woman, after a decade’s exploration into the fantastic, surreal connections between her body and that of the outside world. She returns, once more, into her body, where the pleasure she feels is never completely here or there, one or two.

Conclusion

Björk’s music video oeuvre exhibits a complexity rarely seen anywhere else in the music video industry, or in the mainstream discourse of images in general, for that matter. At the same time, their insistent repetition of autoerotically and grotesquely

centered visual themes lends weight to a feminist analysis of her videos as holding feminine bodies, sexualities and desires in a positive, empowering light. Her use of the grotesque is particularly important for a feminist reading, as the grotesque has drawn “people’s attention to the hidden complexity of life itself and induced their own reasoning and imagination,” and that this could become “a vehicle for emancipation and, significantly, exploded in times of unrest and spiritual crisis” (Kuryluk 319). The continuous presence of the monstrous feminine and the childlike in Björk’s videos also hints at the strengthening powers of the grotesque, for “in our times women and children have been...snatching power away from men” (Kuryluk 319). Figuratively, the grotesque images in Björk’s videos can be read as a reclamation of the power of representation from the sexist store of images available to popular culture.

More importantly, Björk’s videos take a view of feminine sexual pleasure as deeply central and transforming, and as existing independently from the control of heterosexist men. Björk’s definition of pleasure is largely autoerotic, but its diffusion over the surface of her body through the grotesque means that the involvement of another is not an impossibility. Indeed, Björk’s validation of her own pleasure as existing in and of itself leaves room for others, for new ways of connecting with others that are not codependent and damaging. In Björk’s dreamworld, there is space enough to “invent our own phrases” (Irigaray 215).

Bibliography: Print and Video Sources

Alleti, Vince. “The Luminous Beam.” Village Voice 25 May 1998: 121.

Bataille, Georges. The Story of the Eye. Trans. Joachim Neugroschal. New York: Urizen Books, 1997.

Björk, et al. Greatest Hits: Volumen 1993-2003. London: One Little Indian Ltd., 2002.

Burns, Lori and Melisse Lafrance. Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity and Popular Music. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Choi, Precilla Y.L. and Paula Nicolson. Female Sexuality: Psychology, Biology and Social Context. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994.

Chonin, Neva. “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Rolling Stone Oct. 1997: 103- 105.

Conboy, Katie et al, ed. Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Braidotti, Rosi. “Mothers, Monsters, and Machines.”

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.”

Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade.”

Russo, Mary. “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory.”

Cornwell, Jane. “Space Cadet.” Rolling Stone July 1995: 50-55.

Dennis, Kelly. “Playing with Herself: Feminine Sexuality and Aesthetic Difference,” Solitary Pleasures. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Gittins, Ian. Björk Human Behaviour: The Stories Behind Every Song. London: Carlton Books, 2002.

Grover, Jan Zita. “Dykes in Context: Some Problems in Minority Representation,” In the Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1989.

Irigaray, Luce. The Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Jhally, Sut. Dreamworlds: Desire, Sex, and Power in Rock Videos. Amherest, MA: Foundation for Media Education, 1990.

Krauss, Rosalind. “A Note on Photography and the Simulacral,” The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1989.

Kuryluk, Ewa. Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1987.

O’Brien, Lucy. She-Bop. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.

Poynor, Rick. “Cyber Björk,” Björk. USA: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001.

Reynolds, Simon and Joy Press. The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ‘n’ Roll. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Bibliography: Web Sources

“All is Full of Love.” SciFi: Exposure. 1999. http://www.scifi.com/exposure/frameup/allisfull.html (30 Apr 2003).

“Björk Explains New Video, Blasts Retirement Reports As ‘Rubbish.’” MTV News Archive. Dec 7 1998. http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1425868/19981207/story.jhtml (30 Apr 2003).

Fretwell, Matt and Kevin Holy. “Björk: All is Full of Love.” Chris Cunningham. 2000.

http://www.director-file.com/cunningham/521.html (30 Apr 2003).

MadWebCarpenters. “Army of Me Special.” Björk Unity. 2003. http://unit.bjork.com/specials/gh/SUB-06/index.htm (29 Apr 2003).

MadWebCarpenters. “Björk: About & About.” Björk Unity. 2003. http://bjork.com/facts/about (1 May 2003).

NB: I obtained the majority of my quotes from Björk herself from this database, but it would not allow me to link to each individual quote’s entry. Thus, if you want to find the original quote within the database, I included the magazine title and publication date within the body of this paper.

MadWebCarpenters. “Hidden Place Special.” Björk Unity. 2003. http://unit.bjork.com/specials/gh/SUB-11/index.htm (30 Apr 2003).

MadWebCarpenters. “Pagan Poetry Special.” Björk Unity. 2003. http://unit.bjork.com/specials/gh/SUB-07/index.htm (30 Apr 2003).

A Blueprint of Pleasure

A Feminist Analysis of Björk Music Videos

Sara Gray

Feminist Studies Capstone

Juhl

I have not given nor received aid on this paper, nor have I seen anyone else do so.