Tainted Blood? Thinking Blood and Bleeding with Race. In: The Phenomenology of Blood in Performance Art

This chapter critically examines the complex entanglements of race, history, and embodiment through the lens of blood in performance art. Musser interrogates how Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) artists engage with blood as a material and symbol, situating their work within broader histories of racialization, colonialism, and violence. She explores the fraught relationship between blood and racial identity, highlighting how blood has historically functioned as both a biological marker of lineage and a tool of systemic oppression, particularly within Black histories shaped by enslavement, the one-drop rule, and state violence.
Musser analyses key contemporary artists, including Doreen Garner, whose surgical reenactments on a fabricated statue of J. Marion Sims—the so-called “father of gynecology”—expose the violent medical experimentation endured by enslaved Black women. Garner’s use of blood and flesh-like materials invokes historical trauma while demanding viewers confront the legacy of scientific racism. M. Lamar, by contrast, employs BDSM imagery and performances such as Yo My Cracka to subvert racialized power dynamics, exposing the eroticization of Black suffering within white supremacist structures.
The chapter also explores works that engage blood as a site of endurance and agency, including Paola Paz Yee, Maiada Aboud, and Ana Mendieta, who use blood to highlight gendered and racialized violence, as well as artists like Xandra Ibarra, whose commodification of menstrual blood challenges capitalist and racialized economies of bodily matter. Through these analyses, Musser argues that BIPOC artists navigate blood’s historical weight while reclaiming its aesthetic, political, and affective dimensions, offering new frameworks for understanding embodiment, trauma, and resistance in performance art.