Fish-Slapping: Dancing Feminist Disability

Pam Patterson 

I am both a feminist academic and disability performance artist. I often find these self-defining positions animated in an absurd dance. Each prances about figuratively fish-slapping the other as in the (in)famous Monty Python skit. Standing (or more often seated) rooted in flesh and often creatively blocked, I, as academic, sashay out feminist theory as a kind of tiny-fish-slapping irritant until out comes the BIG fish—the disabled “performing” body exhausted in pain, and almost blind—that slaps the other and upends the dance. 

Fish slapping, as act, has captured the public imagination to the point that you can view online Redditt discussions as to which is the appropriate fish to use. The delight I find from this skit comes from viewing the juxtaposition of nice and nasty in what appears to be an absurd and pointless performance. But subtle humiliation lies at the skit’s core. It is not unlike my own uneasy feminist posturing. As an aside, it is of interest to note that an online story exists that recounts how the fish-slapping dance saved Michael Palin from rotting in a Venezuelan jail.^1. Might enacting “fish slapping” as a dance for feminist disability here then serve to rescue me from further awkwardness? 

Articulating a productive relation—or lack thereof—between feminism and disability is not an easy sell. In my attempts to somehow link the two, the task has frequently been odiferous. It has resulted in years of performances about my own inadequacies as a cultural producer and a recent avoidance of feminist theory.

Over the last five decades as the pain and limitations of my body have increased, I've been engaged in work, as a cultural producer and educator, moving my body—theoretically and physically—almost to the point of extinction. I now teach where student art making is often no longer accomplished by hand but rather using artificial intelligence. Bodily (re)presentation is wily, and students only appear in zoom classrooms as ubiquitous avataristic circles and in the occasional chat line texts which indicate there might be a “real” person learning out there. 

I—in my teaching, academic, and creative practices and through my presence as older white cis-gendered queer feminist theorist—feel slapped into submission in an uncomfortable and problematic space. My disabled body is likewise frequently rebuffed, and I am often seen as irrelevant in an ofttimes contemporary feminist-denying culture. This may not bode well for this discussion. 

From reading a collection of works in Feminist Disability Studies edited by Kim Hall, I was provided with a sampling of intriguing colloquies. Many more, I am sure, have come to print since. But this collection served to momentarily challenge my submissiveness and still my ineffectual prancing by urging me to attend to those smelly fish, slapping me to attention. 

My intention in this writing is to engage first in perusing a conceptual cyborgian notion of the body through a “lived experience” transfeminist mode of becoming and second in pursuing a strategy of using texts and images from my own performances to generate further momentum for valuing feminist disability culture. I do not intend to answer, but rather generate, questions, to enjoy the paradoxical unresolvedness of such work, and to reveal the value of cultural forms for perceiving and complicating.

Perusing/Pursuing a “Cyborgian” Feminist Disability Momentum 

In (Dis)Regarding Pain? Resituating a Feminist "Cyborg" Praxis (Patterson), I explored Donna Haraway’s (qtd. in Balsamo) enactment of a reading practice that took the discursively constructed material body as starting point and narrated a reconstructed fiction of identity. She wrote that the only bodies that stand a chance in postmodern culture are cyborg bodies, constructed by communication networks and other hybrid discourses.  Cyborg bodies are neither wholly technological nor completely organic. They are a matter of lived experience. The cyborg challenges feminism to search for ways to study the body as both a cultural construction and a material fact of human life. If the female body can be theoretically constructed as an arrangement of texts, silences, laws and lines of force, can it also be radically articulated among writing practices, relations of power, cultural stagings, material bodies, and socially constructed perceptions? (17–40)

Transfeminism, a panorama of knowledges and vectors of emergence, enabled me to explore discourses that valorized cyborgian sensibilities. Emergence was key. This spoke to a cyborg consciousness as a way of describing cyborgian space as unfixed—not as a hybrid place so much as a perceptual plane of becoming (Kennedy 332). This opened new possibilities for me to activate a relationship between feminist and disability.

But for what, I didn't really know. Perhaps my intention was to find a feminist cyborgian momentum—to, at the very least, be in a space of becoming—being both material and virtual, perhaps AI reformulated and pain–free, and yet rooted in flesh where a subjective ground might constructively replay my histories.

So how do I engage with this in idea and in practice? 

Considering disability shifts the traditional conceptual feminist framework by strengthening understandings of how these two systems might intertwine, redefine, and mutually constitute one another. “Indeed, the cultural function of the disabled figure is to act as a synecdoche for all forms that culture deems non normative” (Garland-Thompson 16). This imagining generates the hybridity: feminist disability. 

In the process of doing this work—in tiny-fish-slapping-like dances—I have accepted—even adopted—confusion. Feminism, as an intellectual enterprise, has often constructively accepted the paradoxes that have emerged from its challenges to the gender system, but it has not collapsed into chaos. Instead, it has developed a methodology that tolerates internal conflict and contradiction and accepts the provisional. 

These notions of provisional, paradoxical, partial, and evolving are inherent in feminist disability creative cultural practice. By their very nature, cultural forms embrace paradox, critical reflection, and creative process (Patterson, Enacting). They dance! 

Feminist Disability Cultural Production

My research creation practice generates aesthetic forms and strategies for seeing-feeling-thinking-making. I reveal—but not necessarily resolve—the potential entanglements found with/in feminist disability as I perform often capricious configurations. 

These productions have provided me with a space of /for becoming—both material and virtual, cyborgian and fleshed. Ideas around feminist disability invite me to complicate and expand my understandings of cultural practice.  

I dance the dance of the provisional, paradoxical, and partial using an affective feminist disability investigative strategy. I identify four interpenetrating domains of feminist disability practice and, while I do not see them as discrete in either concept or practice, they serve here to establish a framing device. These domains are body, representation, identity, and activism. Using my performance work as a feminist disability artist, I invite a reviewing (and revisioning) of feminist disability in all its critical and yet delightful ambiguities. 

Body: Hands on Environs 

One eye, the left eye, had completely foundered in the bubbling purulence, and the other which remained half open looked like a dark decaying hole . . . A large reddish crust starting on one of the cheeks was invading the mouth, twisting it into a terrible grin . . . It was as if the poison she had picked up in the gutters . . . had now risen to her face and rotted it. (Zola 470).

Breathe, walk, open eyes, view, turn, re-view, utter, clutch, double over, fall, puke, lie, close eyes, roll, moan, curl, but soft, touch, shutter, decay … I am not static, speaking as I view, review, choose with never a closure. Turning I review again. Inside and yet outside, of subject (self) and of other (mother). Body made and yet ready to be remade. (Patterson, Hands on)

Fig. 1 Hands on Environs

It is in this process of re-uttering, reframing myself as crippled body after feeling the mapping of her body on mine—my mother’s decay and death—my hands losing strength, purpose and ability. I am beginning to drop things now; I have difficulty writing. 

In Hands on Environs, I metaphorically bury my mother. Dying of lung cancer, she literally choked to death. Her terror was lodged in seeing other women’s dying bodies. “Will my body be like this?” Could she stand, she thought, the sight of her dying body—the shitty diapers, the drooling face? But as death neared, she was no longer conscious of these as factors. She took a breath and then did not. As I attempted, in this work, to take my own breath, I redrew my hands on rocks at the Toronto waterfront and held and then released my mother metaphorically over the lake.

Ideas and images merge and re-emerge. No longer simply text, they became active fragments defying any desire for closure. Performance resurrects them in another form. As a dancer I eat space, passionately, repopulating, disrupting, sliding, overturning, replacing absence with movement, movement with absence, uneasy with classification, in the interests of a new cyborgian body, speaking a language experienced through an activity of production.

Representation: Body as Sight/Site

Every day, she poured her questions as you pour water from one vessel into another. I will not give you a pose, she said. Draw on the floor. Draw without looking at the paper. Follow the lines. A student of hers said, I have a friend that when she was born her mother was told that her daughter could either walk or talk. But not both. Her mother had to choose. She had to choose for her. She woke just in time to see matter stumble out of its frame. She learnt what a severe form of discipline the naked body must undergo if it is to survive as art. (Patterson, Body)

Fig 2 & 3: Body as Sight/Site

Julia Kristeva writes, in Strangers to Ourselves, “Being alienated from myself, as painful as that may be, provides me with that exquisite distance within which perverse pleasure begins, as well as the possibility of my imagining and thinking, the impetus of my culture” (13–14).

No matter how we operate, our bodies and the cultural spaces we attempt to carve continue to be negated. Both the female and disabled body are perceived as defective, leaking/lacking, potentially harbouring a sinful contagion.  

In the mainstream west, we are asked to work within certain constraints, to function within limits of normalcy and to live our lives to optimum efficiency. The promise is that we will attain a sense of completeness, of knowing who we are. But that desire never seems fulfilled. We feel bodily displaced. Formed by no more than partial truths—memories, objects, dogmas, and relationships–and driven by the desire for closure, for that definable ‘place’, we continue our fruitless search. We lust for completion. But those of us marginalized by choice or through, as in my case, physical displacement who opt for the pleasures of/in partiality know that if we were to achieve totality in a unified culture, it would be at the expense of erasing difference and a form of cultural suicide. So, we make art. 

For me, as a performance artist, the body-in-strategically-framed-action is art. The body acts as a cultural site. We have this “site” mapped on us and through us, we represent it, we make it, and it makes us. It is a complex and multi-layered phenomenon. I teach interpretive aesthetics often using the nudes in the gallery. I use visual learning strategies as I question these nudes while my body, which sits clothed in its/my wheelchair, leaning on its/my stick, the lost breast evident beneath is often neglected. In Body as Sight/Site, I address my own problematic complicity in maintaining a “normalized” representational framing in my role as arts educator.

Identity: Canc(H)er

In the night a child is screaming. Cancer is in my head for life. What path am I being asked to step away from on behalf of my life? Crossing cancer’s space—it’s a different time zone a different place; a long breathing space in which the mind gathers its strength and takes stock of its courage. Listen, I have not lost my power. I have not forgotten who I am. Once my gods were intimates. Once I made gestures of pure exuberance. Now, my hands invent another body for my body. As the world reduces to a small, brilliant space where every thought and movement is vital to my salvation, let me suddenly have a center. Let me leave a silhouette on the world. Let me stand composed before a million universes. (Patterson, Canc(H)er)

The shift from being one person to being another person is what I call travel . . . Those of us who are “world” travellers have the distinct experience of being different in different “world”’ . . . The attitude that carries us through is [a] playful [one] . . . We are not worried about competence. We are not wedded to a particular way of doing things. We are there creatively . . . (Lugones 396)

Fig. 4: Canc(H)er

As I reviewed these performances, I attended to various considerations. In Hands on Environs, I questioned Zola’s theory that women, as carriers of society’s ills, were responsible for the decay, over generations, of a family by acknowledging the legitimate internalized terror that many women feel around their leaking, soiled, and decaying bodies. In Body as Sight/Site, I looked at the places in which we work and publicly shape knowledge. In Canc(H)er, I allowed myself to explore personal and fanciful transformation. I redrew my body—made another body for my body. But the making was figurative. Is the action futile?

Activism: Dancing Body-Cultures

Here each work is now set in motion, facilitating a momentum-in-relation. Each is inextricably bound in dialogue with the “other.” This then becomes a performative exhibit. It intentionally speaks to difference, de/reconstruction, and disclosure. As body-cultures, each performance represents many productive possibilities to playfully “prance and slap”. 

I invite you to see such dancing as activist—located in movement and change, informed by our ability to play in/with the social. In this, acknowledge the sites/sights as potentially political. As images and gestures, these performances exist as reminders of our most personal resources—our bodies. Are we so defined by style that our bodies become estranged from their liberatory and transgressive effects? Or can this work continue to successfully deconstruct a confining aesthetic and the normalized body in culture? I leave this as an open text —off balance, somewhat elusive and disproportionate—a double (ef)faced fish-slapping creature for your consideration.

Notes 

1. The “Fish-Slapping” dance was first performed as a skit in the British comedy television

series Monty Python’s Flying Circus with actors Michael Palin and John Cleese. Each

actor is dressed in a uniform reminiscent of one that might be worn by a lock keeper or a

Boy Scout. One man prances toward the other and slaps him in the face multiple times

with a tiny fish until the other brings out from behind his back a huge fish and slaps the

prancer full-bodied into the water. This was presumably first performed/filmed at the side

of Teddington Lock in the UK in 1971. At other times, the skit was reimagined with

other “Python” actors Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, and Eric Idle.

Michael Palin, one of the skit’s original actors and a “Python” writer, provides his own

surrealist-like review of the “event” and of the art of fish slapping. This video also

includes the 1971 skit. Retrieved on YouTube Jan. 10, 2026. This was “screened” for

online use on Feb 16, 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLdK9zaLaG8

I use this skit to elucidate the multilayered, entangled, and often ludicrous, relationship I

have with feminism and disability and with living with the realities of my

embodied experiences as a woman with disabilities in “colonial” society. The arts

serves well here in providing forms which allow for ambiguity and complexity, and

even humour! These forms can assist in holding spaces/places where a group of people with multiple positions can be inspired to take, or

assemble in/for, action.

2. For Michael Palin’s Venezuelan detention story see: EL MUNDO Updated 09/03/2025 - 04:12 ET The "absurd" detention of Monty Python's Michael Palin in Venezuela | News

Works Cited

Balsamo, Anne.  Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Duke U., 1996.

de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Lowe and Brydone. https://newuniversityinexileconsortium.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Simone-de-Beauvoir-The-Second-Sex-Jonathan-Cape-1956.pdf. 1956—first published 1953.

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” Edited by Kim Q. Hall, K.Q. (Ed) Feminist Disability Studies, pp 13-47, Indiana U.P., 2008.

Hall, Kim Q., editor. Feminist Disability Studies. Indiana U.P., 2008.

Interview: Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber with Simone de Beauvoir 1975 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aekr9sLbVhQ 

Kennedy, Barbara.  Cyberfeminisms: Introduction.  The Cybercultures Reader.  2nd ed.  Edited by David Bell and Barbara Kennedy. Routledge, pp. 331-339, 2000.

Kristeva, Julia, “Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner.” Strangers to Ourselves.  Columbia U.P., pp. 1–40, 1991.

Lugones, Maria. “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling and Loving Perception.”  Edited by Gloria Anzaldua.  Making Face, Making Soul Hacienda Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Colour, pp. 390–402. Ann Lute Foundation, 1990.

Patterson, Pam. “Rethinking a Transabled Aesthetic Paradigm for Art and Design Education.” Canadian Art Teacher 11 (1), pp. 616, 2013.

---. Enacting learning: An Arts–informed Inquiry with the Bay Area Artists for Women’s Art (BAAWA). Lambert Academic P., 2010.

---. “(Dis)Regarding Pain?  Resituating a Feminist "Cyborg" Praxis.” Canadian Woman Studies; 28, 2/3, pp. 99–104, 2010.

---. “Feminist Performance: The Body Grotesque as Transgressive Site/Sight.” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 10:3 pp. 388–401, 2008.

---. “‘Canc(H)er’, in Pacing the Cage,” an ARTIFACTS performance for Collisions 2006, University of Victoria, 20–23 September, 2006.

---. “Body as Site/Sight,” a performance for 7A11D International Performance Art Festival, A Space Gallery, Toronto, 20–31 October, 2004.

---. “Hands on Environs,” a performance for Breathworks, Waterfront Trail Artists, Toronto, 11–16 May, 2002.

Zola, Emile. Nana. Translated by George Holden. Penguin. 1972.

Pam Patterson (she/her)

Pam Patterson has, for over 50 years, focused her research, performance, visual work, curating, and teaching on disability and women’s studies and art education. Her articles and reviews have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, books, and exhibition catalogues.

She is an Associate Professor, Faculty of Art, OCAD U, where she leads Art and Design Education Lab, Creative Research Inclusive Practices (CRIP) Lab, and directs 113Research Projects Gallery.

As a queer disability performance and visual artist, Patterson has exhibited and performed across Canada and internationally solo, and in collaboration. A current collective writing project, for publication in Canadian Art Teacher and as exhibition at Tangled Arts + Disability, plays in/with the intersections between art making, art teaching and disability.