British performance artist Alice Newstead is gaining attention for her recent performance inside LUSH cosmetics in San Francisco. The performance has become part of an increasing vocal outcry over the sale of shark fin soup in California. The proposed bill, AB376, has passed the California assembly and now awaits a Senate vote.

On Wednesday August 24, Alice Newstead performed a live human suspension inside of LUSH cosmetics, where she used to work. Human suspension is an increasingly popular form of body modification where participants are carefully hung or swung from metal hooks inserted through the body. Commonly seen at tattoo conventions, fetish balls, and carnival sideshows, the practice is gaining increased visibility as the subculture becomes more popular.

Newstead is hanging herself from shark hooks in order to “shed light on the plight of sharks and how their future is literally hanging in the balance.” With her body painted an aquatic blue-grey and her legs bound in the form of a textile shark fin, she does appear somewhat like a shark hanging for slaughter.

Such a dramatic act of protest shows the import of the body in politics, and is reminiscent of self-immolation as a form of protest.  In my opinion, we can see this act as an example of  revolutionary practice becoming an embodied practice, something Marxists label “revolutionary praxis” (Hardt and Negri 2000; Fanon 2001). But how effective are such public spectacles? Does piercing yourself and swinging form meat hooks insure sensitivity to the cause? Or does it serve to marginalize the movement as quirky, radical, and fringe (for example, see longstanding criticisms of PETA)?

In my opinion, the body is the last resource of the disenfranchised, which is what makes cases of self-immolation and martyrdom so compelling in the study of social movement activity. But as far as I can tell, Newstead is attempting to gain attention to the practice, not become a martyr. There are severe differences between the Buddhist monk who commits suicide by self-immolation and a relatively privileged westerner who publicly pierces her skin to protest a cultural practice. Perhaps I am being to harsh, but it becomes increasingly difficult to politicize such behavior when we are surrounded with similar spectacles as part of our consumer landscape. Whereas activist groups regularly rely on spectacles such as these to politicize certain items and behaviors, the tourist industry has long relied on similar techniques to attract consumers, resulting in what some have called a “society of the spectacle” (Debord 1967; Gotham 2005). It is certainly too early to judge the reception of her work, but who is to say that passers-by won’t simply shrug Newstead off as another struggling performance artist? Any thoughts?