Unbridled: Dragging Nudity in Ann Oren's Piaffe

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O' Dwyer, Killian. 2025. Unbridled: Dragging Nudity in Ann Oren's Piaffe. In: Nicola McCartney, ed. Animal Drag. Manchester: Manchester University Press. [Book Section] (Forthcoming)

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Abstract or Description

‘Nudity’, as philosopher Jacques Derrida eloquently unravels in The Animal That Therefore I Am, is an ontotheological property that has long maintained a hierarchal distinction between the so-called moral rectitude of humans and the innocent, non-conscious awareness of animals. It persists to this day as a sentiment or affect of impropriety which ironically clothes humans and nonhuman animals alike with the paradoxical double bind of naked exposure. To be nude, in a philosophical sense, is an “animal state” that calls man to consciousness, to protect his modesty from the shame that threatens to degrade his erect posture. At the same time, nudity is also a property prescribed to animals, which are often narrated as existing in nakedness prior to any originary distinction between good and evil. In this sense, ‘nudity’ surfaces throughout history as a longstanding form of Animal Drag that has ironically clothed animals as naked and disguised humans as enlightened subjects. This chapter seeks to complicate this double bind of dressing nonhuman animals in non-nudity and the dragging of humans in self-nudity, by suggesting that the condition of ‘being nude’ is in fact a phenomenon which is forever deferred in culture. Nakedness, as considered through the work of Derrida, is an indeterminate and variable threshold which highlights drag’s capacity for erotic transformation across species lines. By attending to Ann Oren’s erotic fantasy drama Piaffe, in which a fledgling Foley artist starts to sprout a horse’s tail from her backside while working on an equine-inspired commercial, this chapter aims to restage the ‘surface encounter’ shared between humans and nonhumans in order to expose the various registers of vulnerability that uphold Cartesian subjecthood. This unexpected growth of a horse’s tail in the film, seemingly brought on by the alluring pulse of underground techno, signals the arrival of a new unbridled intimacy between the two figures of nudity described by Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am, of a new species of animal or chimerical drag cultivated by the registers of sound. Focusing on the ambiguous noises of dragging, clicking, chewing, flicking and rubbing produced as Foley in Piaffe, this chapter suggests that sound, rather than sight, harbours a unique ability to luxate the imposed difference between ‘the animal’ we conceptually cloth as naked and ‘the human’ we dress as exceptional.

Item Type:

Book Section

Keywords:

chimerical drag, Derrida, Foley, nudity, piaffe

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Visual Cultures

Dates: