Introduction: The Story of Orlan
Orlan is a French multimedia and performance artist whose performances over the last decade have consisted of cosmetic surgery. In 1990 she took the term ‘operating theatre’ literally and embarked on a project entitled ‘The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan’, which has consisted of performing – remaining conscious throughout, photographing, filming and broadcasting – a series of operations to totally remodel her face and body, and thus her identity.

The fact that ‘Orlan’ is not the artist's ‘real’ name, but one she gave herself at the age of fifteen in 1962, is one indication of how pivotal the question of identity has been to Orlan's career. While sounding to some like a man's name (Lemoine-Luccioni 1983: 140), it fairly bubbles with polysemous and suggestive cultural connotations; ‘Orlan-do’ the sex-changing hero(ine) of Virginia Woolf's famous novel, Orlon the synthetic fibre, and the glossily advertised perfume Orlane. When just the name's initial letter ‘O’ is taken, it is perhaps even more suggestively connotative: the ‘O’ of ‘Other’, the ‘O’ of Pauline Réage's infamous erotic – or pornographic – novel Story of O/Histoire d'O, the ‘O’ that signifies and figures the opening of all orifices. Orlan's story of how she ‘found’ her name and rebaptized herself points to another of its elements, the poetic, polysemous and psychoanalytically overdetermined syllable ‘or’ (= gold):

I decided to change my name completely, to begin with because I was doing some acting and also because I was in a conservatoire when you got thrown out if you used your own name for acting purposes. It grew little by little, then I decided to have psychoanalysis. At the third session the only thing the analyst said to me was: “The next time you'll pay me in cash, not by cheque”, whereas I had been paying by cheque. Just as I was signing the last cheque he said “no, on second thoughts, carry on paying by cheque”. Since these were the only words he'd uttered in the whole session, this contradictory message was very perturbing. I tried to work out what had gone on in the session, but I couldn't. At the next session […] as I was signing the cheque, I realized that I was signing, in very clear, precise, childlike writing, with a name which wasn't mine […from the most beautifully written signatures] I had chosen the style of the one in which “dead’ [morte] was clearly readable. So, as I was deciding not to be dead any more, I used just the positive syllable from the word, the letters O R. 1

Another famous name connoted by Orlan's is of course that of France's Saint Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orléans. Orlan's Frenchness is an issue few commentators have seemed willing to venture an opinion of, and it has even been suggested that the kind of artistic work she does is atypically French (Savary 1998: 119). This remark was in fact made about a stage of Orlan's career one might be tempted to characterize as more ‘French’ than much of it, the ‘sensual, mystical and baroque’ performances and installations of the 1980s (ibid.). It was in 1971 that Orlan adopted the persona of Saint Orlan, and much of her work of the 1970s and 1980s drew extensively on biblical and Catholic personae and on other religious iconography, and was set up in churches. The attitudes to institutional religion struck in these installations and performances – from ornate pastiche to pointedly disrespectful parody – tapped and exploited a rich source, the conflict-ridden store of imagery in Catholic art history in which sexuality and religion coincide. Religious imagery has also abounded in the staging of Orlan's operations, and it is difficult to ignore the parallel between religious martyrdom and the suffering (although Orlan argues it otherwise) inflicted by surgery undergone for aesthetic reasons. As Sarah Wilson has observed, making the link between this aspect of Orlan's work and her identity as French, ‘it is in a former Catholic country that Orlan has undertaken the sacrilegious task of managing her own metamorphosis, her refiguration and her transsexualism from woman to woman: “This woman tells us that the madonna is a transvestite/female impersonator”’ (Wilson 1995: 302). But the issue of Orlan's national identity, and the French context out of which her extensive body of work has arisen, has not so far been discussed in any detail, and for this reason I would like to explore it here, as a prelude to and non-determining context for the readings of her work that follow.

Thanks to the research and scholarship of numerous feminist critics, many of them British or American rather than French, and most of them female, the context(s) of production of French women's writing since 1968 are now well documented. The May 1968 événements provided the impetus for the wide-ranging and enormously fertile wave of women's cultural production seen in France in the 1970s, a wave supported and provoked by feminist political groupings such as the MLF (Mouvement de Libération des Femmes) that were created from 1968 onwards. Although this outburst of feminist thought, writing and other cultural activity died away in France after 1981, its value and interest for women's culture and self-advancement internationally was sustained into the 1980s and well beyond by landmark publications such as Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtviron's New French Feminisms (1981) and Toril Moi's French Feminist Thought (1987). Edited anthologies like these, along with a quantity of other publications on individual authors and theorists too numerous to mention, came to constitute the discursive phenomenon known as ‘French feminism’, a phenomenon that continued to fuel feminist research all over the globe as the twentieth century drew to its close...