Queer Performance

Since 1960s, artistic narrative began to occur in an intermediated manner and under the scrutiny of a critical episteme. The pictorial representation has been discarded and the artwork process began to juxtapose up various media and subjects. Galleries began to refuse the specific and filled their spaces with mixtures of video and embodied installations, which lead to a language called  “performance-for-the-monitor”, mostly  recognizable in a ‘gendered’ mediated artistic iconography...

Avec HOMO INC. OPORATED, Sam Bourcier poursuit la réflexion menée dans la trilogie des Queer Zones. Mariage, procréation, travail, patrie, les bons homos ont basculé dans la sphère de la reproduction et de la production. Que reste-t-il du sujet politique LGBT lorsqu'il est défini par le droit et le management de la diversité? Pas grand chose. Raison pour laquelle les queers et les transféministes se mobilisent pour un agenda de redistribution économique et de justice sociale plus large que la simple demande d'égalité et d'intégration.  HOMO INC. OPORATED propose une critique radicale de l'homonationalisme et des politiques de l'égalité des droits. C'est aussi une boîte à outils pour lutter contre le néolibéralisme, avec une réflexion et de nouveaux moyens d'action sur les politiques du savoir à l'université, le genre comme travail, la grève du genre sans oublier le gender fucking!

Le 9 avril 1989, l'artiste états-unienne Barbara Kruger réalisait une affiche pour une marche à Washington en faveur du droit à l'avortement qui allait devenir célèbre. On y voit le visage résolu d'une femme de face que barre en plusieurs endroits le slogan « your body is a battleground ». Le visage en noir et blanc est scindé verticalement en deux. Les lettres blanches du slogan sur bandeau rouge se détachent à la manière des slogans d'Act-Up. Il est vrai que Kruger a dessiné pour Gran Fury 2 , le collectif de graphistes à l'origine de l'iden-tité visuelle du groupe fondé par Larry Kramer, participant ainsi à la « culture war » qui a marqué les années 1980-1990 aux États-Unis. Des années 1970 aux années 1990, du combat pour le droit à l'avortement à la lutte contre le VIH, la colère et les mobilisations contre les politiques de santé publiques mais aussi les médias, le nucléaire, la guerre au Vietnam passent par une occupation perfor-mative de l'espace public qui place le corps au centre. Qu'il s'agisse du corps des femmes occupé par les savoirs et le pouvoir médical, de leur exposition au crime et au viol que dénoncent en 1977 les 70 participantes de la fameuse performance de Suzanne Lacy et Leslie Labowitz In Mourning and in Rage 3 devant l'hôtel de ville de Los Angeles ou du corps des séropos, stigmatisés par Reagan, qui vont multiplier les die-in dans la rue. On sait ce qu'Act-Up New York et la santé communautaire ont emprunté aux groupes féministes de la seconde vague, à leur 1. Cet article est le premier volet d'une série consacrés à la critique du néo-libéralisme par la performance féministe queer, transféministe et le post-porn. Le second paraîtra dans la collection Théorème, Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle et sera consacré au protest porn. Voir également Homo Inc.orporated, Le triangle et la licorne qui pète, Paris, Cambourakis, 2017. 2. « Ministère non officiel de la propagande d'Act-Up » selon Douglas Crimp, Gran Fury fait son apparition en 1988 dans le sillage d'Act-Up New York. Le collectif d'artistes se réclame « du pouvoir de l'art pour en finir avec la crise du Sida ». Il mènera de nombreuses actions dans l'espace urbain en s'appropriant les codes des médias de masse avec des affiches, des cartes postales, des détournements de journaux etc. On lui doit le célèbre logo d'Act-Up qui renverse le triangle rose des homosexuels dans les camps de concentration avec le slogan « Silence = Mort ». Gran Fury se dissout en 1995, estimant que le collectif ne peut plus adresser la complexité des messages sur le sida avec ses méthodes de guerilla design. 3. Sur les tenants et les aboutissants de cette performance, voir le texte de Lacy S., « In Mourning and in Rage (with analysis aforethought) »,

Franklin Furnace: Performance & Politics documents the historical, cultural, and political legacy of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. Spanning four decades, this collection of archival records includes forty-two works selected from the Franklin Furnace Event Archives. It also features early solo performance artworks by Martha Wilson prior to her establishing Franklin Furnace in 1976. Historically, Franklin Furnace is known for presenting artists who radically engage social agendas, making them vulnerable to institutional neglect, cultural bias, and mainstream censorship.

Franklin Furnace: Performance & Politics includes artists working across various mediums to confront sociopolitical issues in the Americas. This archival body of materials centers the artworks of women, queer/trans folks, and people of color, who largely remain excluded from the historical record. These artists examine the politics of race, gender, and sexuality while forming new political imaginaries that challenge unjust social policies, violations of rights, and hegemonic power structures. This collection ensures the historical preservation of these records, allowing such to live, perform, and engage political issues relevant today.

Franklin Furnace: Performance & Politics includes works by the following contributors: Eleanor Antin, Ron Athey, Horace Brockington, Cassils, Patty Chang, Peter Cramer & Jack Waters, Billy X. Curmano, DANCENOISE, DISBAND, Zackary Drucker & Flawless Sabrina, Bob Flanagan & Sheree Rose, Sherman Fleming & Kristine Stiles, Lawrence Graham-Brown, Guerrilla Girls, Dynasty Handbag, Martha Hellion & Carla Stellweg, Essex Hemphill & Wayson Jones, Holly Hughes, M. Lamar, Ana Mendieta, Tim Miller, Estera Milman, Tracie Morris, Shirin Neshat, Rashaad Newsome, Lorraine O'Grady, Dread Scott, Pamela Sneed, Annie Sprinkle, Amber Hawk Swanson, Julie Tolentino, Diane Torr, Johanna Went, and Martha Wilson, among many others.

Using an arts-based approach, this research examines how songs written by queer and lesbian musicians can account for and archive queer lived existence while constructing a musical genealogy for listeners and artists alike. By examining my own experience of listening to and attending performances of certain queer and lesbian identified musicians, and then composing and performing my own songs in public spaces, I make a case for the corporeal mobility of songs, and a process I have termed “queer musical lineaging.” Much of the research around music to date has centred on how it impacts and influences brain activity, and how it brings together subcultures and publics. The significance of this project lies in the research around musical processes and practices (listening, composing, performing) as corporeal acts that connect bodies to one another, and build kinships. This research draws mainly upon primary sources of autoethnographic, written accounts in the form of journal entries, stories, poems and song lyrics, and conducts an interpretive analysis of six “queer” songs, five composed by the author of this thesis, and one composed in collaboration with a trans* youth. This project will contribute to research on arts-based practices as archival work, as well as the impact that songs have on people’s lives by broadening our understanding of music’s corporeal effects and genealogical role in lived experience.

"Huysuz Virjin wouldn't be so glad to meet us," says Madır Öktiş, the organizer of latest drag performance show in Istanbul, "but she is still our grand-drag-mother". Indeed, Huysuz Virjin (Seyfi Dursunoğlu) would be so surprised to see the new dimensions of this performance art if she had the chance. In one of her interviews, she says, "So many artists will come and go, but no one will achieve what I did" (Atay and Akşit 154). Today, drag surely has changed a lot in Turkey-particularly, in Istanbulian nightlife, and there are surely much more drag performers than Huysuz could imagine, but she may have a point while arguing that no one will achieve what she did. Of course, this achievement cannot be considered independent from the achievement of her childhood friend, Zeki Müren. Even though they did not like each other so much during the peak of their careers; today, Seyfi Dursunoğlu mentions in his interviews how empowering it was for them to have each other: two queers leading the entertainment sector of Turkey, one is leading the music sector, and the other one is leading comedy, pioneering a new field of performance art. Seyfi Dursunoğlu was completely aware of how a difficult task he "accomplished" (Atay and Akşit 262) while pioneering the drag performance art in Turkey, an Islamic country. After all, drag has always been a performance art that violates the social norms critically. So, in this paper, I intend to explore the evolution of drag performance in Turkey (from Grumpy Virgin to today's nightlife) to see the queer thrive within a conservative regime, the socioeconomic status of either performers or viewers, and the extent to which drag is a reconciliation of gender identity & expression. With such queer approaches to performance studies, I intend to increase the visibility of queer minorities in pro-Islam traditions and cultures.

While LGBTQ+ narratives have become an established part of national storytelling in contemporary theatre in the United States, considerably more often than not such plays and productions focus on urban queer experiences rather than the rural. Many queer theorists, including Jack Halberstam, have argued that such a lack of representation is grounded in the false notion of a “metronormativity” suggesting that queers must migrate to the city in order to survive. Through critical readings of two recent revival productions of canonical American works, Christopher Alden’s Peter Pan (2017) and Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! (2018), I demonstrate how queer rurality was presented conceptually and dramaturgically, reconfiguring ideologies of nationalism that would see the urban/rural as a polarized binary. Drawing on my own personal experience, I extend Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s foundational theory of the closet (in/out) through my original concept of, “closet ajar,” critically unpacking the imagined constructs of these productions where rural queers are alternatively presented as a part of the community at large. I argue that these productions open possibilities for future representations of queer intersectional rurality in American performance (and beyond) and scholarship across disciplines

Documenting my encounters as a white queer scholar with the sonic archive of the late Black American lesbian comic Jackie “Moms” Mabley, this paper explores the cross-racial/sexual politics of sonic historiography. Through what I term listening backward, I examine how sound procures queer sonic intimacies between critic and subject: the repetitive listening, soundwaves directly travelling from one voice to one person, and most pertinently, the historical and sociocultural contexts that make consumption of such exchange possible and/or fraught. This listening practice centres on relational and resonant modes of archiving through sound and asks: (1) How can exploring methods of sonic documentation align performance studies’ commitment to archiving the affective? (2) What might attention to not only the product of such documentation but also its performative processes offer about how the sonic can deepen modes of performance historiography and the racial/sexual politics of listening? (3) What practices of listening can centre queer intimacies and temporalities in the archive?

The essay looks at the cultural work of Eduardo Alegría--performance art, postmodern dance, electro-acoustic "post-pop" music--in the context of contemporary Puerto Rican artistic practices. In particular, the essay examines how Alegría explores some of the different identity axes that have marked Puerto Rican subjectivities since the 1990s through a queer idiosyncratic style infused with camp, parody, kitsch, melodrama, and stand-up comedy.

Grounded in the archive of 1960s performance artist Jack Smith, this chapter theorizes the possibilities of approaching a queer archive as a space of productive and radical disorientation. This is chapter four of my doctoral dissertation on LGBT and Queer archiving, defended at the University of Minnesota in October, 2014.

This essay analyzes the use of drag and gender subversion by two white South African performers, Pieter-Dirk Uys and Steven Cohen, during the long decade bisected by South Africa’s political transition (roughly 1990 to 2001). While satirist Uys invented his drag alter ego Evita Bezuidenhout to critique the hypocrisy of the apartheid regime, his post-apartheid performances modeled a rehabilitated, self-critical whiteness. Breaking the fourth wall, Uys (as Evita) interviewed Nelson Mandela on live television and educated South Africa’s still racially divided communities on voting laws. Rather than embracing the narrative of the rainbow nation central to the new democratic dispensation, performance artist Cohen used his queer body to enact what he calls “monster drag,” highlighting whiteness’s simultaneous alienation and privilege in relation to the black majority state. While vastly different in objective and aesthetic, these performances allowed for what the essay calls a “prismatic” deconstruction of white identity within the context of political transformation. Through a process of categorical ambiguity and affective displacement, each performer used drag to open up a space for the whites who had formerly been classified as “European” to claim a queer form of Africanness. As time has advanced and the dream of the rainbow nation has faded, however, nonwhite drag performers have increasingly taken center stage to challenge the boundaries of both queerness and whiteness. The essay ends with an analysis of black queer South African performance artist Athi-Patra Ruga’s ongoing series The Future White Women of Azania as an example of new directions in South African queer performance.

The Danish performance and activist collective dunst has over the last decade made their mark on Copenhagen with their outrageous genderfuck performances that trash all forms of respectability and political correctness. This article anal/yses dunst practice of taking the anal stage to the stage, asking whether it is possible to tease out a queer sexual politic in dunst’s incoherent attacks on the “normalcy dictatorship”.

More about the DTJ issue: http://www.thisisperformancematters.co.uk/news.post110.html

While LGBTQ+ narratives have become an established part of national storytelling in contemporary theatre in the United States, considerably more often than not such plays and productions focus on urban queer experiences rather than the rural. Many queer theorists, including Jack Halberstam, have argued that such a lack of representation is grounded in the false notion of a “metronormativity” suggesting that queers must migrate to the city in order to survive. Through critical readings of two recent revival productions of canonical American works, Christopher Alden’s Peter Pan (2017) and Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! (2018), I demonstrate how queer rurality was presented conceptually and dramaturgically, reconfiguring ideologies of nationalism that would see the urban/rural as a polarized binary. Drawing on my own personal experience, I extend Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s foundational theory of the closet (in/out) through my original concept of, “closet ajar,” critically unpacking the imagined ...

Queer teori ya da queer kavramı doksanlı yıllardan günümüze kadar neredeyse her alan- da tartışılır hale gelmiştir. Bu çalışma queer teori bağlamında performans sanatının içerisinde queer olan eylemleri, söylemleri, durumları incelemek amacı taşır. Sanat tarihi ve performans sanatı tarihi içerisinde de üzerinde durulan ama halen bazı noktaları söylemekten çekinilen cinsiyet, kimlik vb. kavramları derinleştirmeyi amaçlayan bu çalışma performans sanatına farklı bir açıdan yaklaşır.

Queer theory or queer notion has come to be discussed in almost every field from the nineties to the present day. This study is intended to examine actions, discourse and situations that are queer in the performance art, within the context of the queer theory. Although the concepts like gender, identity, etc. are discussed in the fields of art history and performance art, some points are still avoided. This study approaches the performance art from a different perspective and aims to deepen these concepts.

Temporal drag, erotohistoriography, chronomornativity, horniness under capitalism, rhythm, dancing, and crip time. These are some of the topics addressed in this interview with Elizabeth Freeman—queer theorist and author of the books Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010) and Beside You In Time: Sense Methods & Queer Sociabilities in the American 19th Century (2017)—conducted by Amelia Groom—co-editor of the “No Linear Fucking Time” focus on Prospections. Freeman and Groom also discuss recent video installations by the artist duo Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, including (No) Time (2020), which is part of the No Linear Fucking Time exhibition at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht.

This Special Issue of the Somatechnics Journal (9.1) is interdisciplinary, embracing autoethnographic, autobiographic, ethnographic, cinematic and performance art perspectives on twenty first century trans narratives. Transgender studies is an internationally growing field, situated in multi–disciplinary discourses and theoretical frameworks, interconnected to central somatechnical concerns. The articles within this Special Issue were all presented at The 10th International Somatechnics Conference in Byron Bay, Australia (2016) and present a range of theoretical bases for discussion of the ways in which trans embodiment is understood and the discourses (theoretical, textual) that frame, represent and at times, misrepresent trans lives. The necessity for ongoing scholarly reflection and discussion of trans narratives will continue to gain in significance as concepts are circulated within culture and the academy, as new technologies frame gender–diverse lives and as younger scholars gain opportunities to articulate their points of view, beside established scholarship. A feature of the Special Issue is that it will present a cross–section of scholars, foregrounding a selection of recent Australian scholarship. Publication of the Conference papers in this Special Issue, will extend the temporality of papers beyond the duration of the Conference, enabling the circulation of ideas to connect readers and thinkers internationally. It is intended that this Special Issue will contribute to the ongoing somatechnical work of inscribing trans narratives intertexually, from flesh to word, a central point to be raised.

A critical review of Ruben Esparza's Queer Biennial, in which this is the third iteration.  This was published in Artillery art magazine and on artillery.com -- but highly edited by the editor.  Here is the unedited version: Art Review: Queer Biennial: What if Utopia?

Introduction: Cabaret's social disorganisation

In The Scene of Harlem Cabaret, Shane Vogel argues that, 'the Cabaret school of the Harlem Renaissance took the collectivities of sexual, racial, gender and economic  heterogeneity  of  the underworld  not  as a spectacle to define or discipline but as a location of social and sub­ jective  expansion'  (2009:  13).  He notes that much of  the regulation  of cabaret  spaces and, by extension,  cabaret cultures during the time of the Harlem Renaissance had  to do with  a moral  panic  about  the Jim Crow-era 'social disorganization' (2009: 13), characterised not only by race and class mixing, but especially by the excesses of the night, which cabaret (and this mixing) seemed to cultivate. Similarly, Laura Gutierrez (2010), in her work on feminist and queer caberetas politi­ cos in Mexico, identifies both the flexible structure and what she calls the performance of delirio - an apparently nonsensical and frenzied stage behaviour - as constituting the politics, aesthetics and pleasures of cabaret performance. Here I shall argue that contemporary activist or politico (political, grassroots) feminist and queer cabaret is a translocal phenomenon that retains a dynamic, ludic capacity for 'social and sub­ jective expansion' and 'social disorganization' (Vogel 2009: 13).1 That is, across locales, cabaret is a site for the performance of local specificities that gesture to, but are not reducible  to,  the  nation;  indeed,  cabaret  itself is a border-crossing activist  performance  method. My theorisation of a broad translocal cabaret methodology is  anchored  by  a  discus­ sion of Mexico City-based Cesar Enriquez's Disertaciones de la Chingada and Toronto-base.ct Alexandra Tigchelaar's Les Demimondes. Across bor­ ders,  Enriquez  and  Tigchelaar  share  a  particular  cabaret  method  that  I have observed and I elaborate here, one characterised  by a produc­  tive frenzy achieved through a proliferating dialectics of trans-temporal mythological  embodiments,  which I articulate here as embodification.

For pdf please contact me: cowant AT newschool DOT edu

'Ev'ry step you take, Evr'y move you make, that’s right, you know how it goes . . . ' Dark and Bold, cold and present, Bride-Cake Bride-Bones is a sweeping whirlwind of a tale. Under the constant leer of the Poleeesze a recluse wonders whether she will ever find her son and a stale love affair returns to haunt its owners. Love, loss and jealousy haunt its bejewelled quarters. This is the place where drama, technology, lemons and a reincarnated Iguana collide.

Cuando comenzamos en 2010 con las actividades de tango queer en Madrid nuestros objetivos eran: desestabilizar el código de género de la milonga; abrir los espacios de tango a personas no heterosexuales y transformar el código de género del baile mediante la transformación de la técnica del tango. El objetivo principal del presente artículo es evaluar cómo se han desarrollado los dos primeros objetivos en los tres años siguientes. Encontraremos que para evaluarlo deberemos reflexionar sobre qué entendemos como tango queer, y más específicamente qué entendemos como " queer " y como "sexualidad en el tango ".

Sarah Kane: Queer Desires and Feminist Continuums contextualises the playwright's work in an explicitly feminist and queer theatre arena and extends it to an interdisciplinary arts context exploring dramaturgy and recent productions and also how her plays link to performance art, film and manga. Due 2025. Routledge Publishers.

"Pedro Almodóvar‘s High Heels (the original Spanish title, Tacones
Lejanos, literally means ―distant heels‖) is a 1991 postmodern film that
celebrates performance, fluidity, and fragmentation as ways of being in and
understanding the world. In a generic combination of melodrama, comedy,
musical, and film noir, High Heels tells the story of a turbulent motherdaughter relationship, and a judge‘s criminal investigation following the murder of the daughter‘s husband (who also happens to be the mother‘s former lover). In recent years, Almodóvar‘s film has received the attention of Orit Kamir, a law-and-film feminist scholar who opens up a refreshing line of inquiry. Kamir uses the film as a powerful site and as a means to explore alternative feminist images of law, judgment, and justice.In this Article, I provide new insights into Kamir‘s feminist jurisprudential reading of the film by placing it within the framework of postmodern jurisprudence, performativity, and queer aesthetics. My aim is to reconceptualize law through an ethics of alterity, and to further theoretical developments in postmodern accounts of judgment, ethics, and justice."

The Scene of Foreplay: Theatre, Labor and Leisure in 1960s New York suggests foreplay as a theoretical framework for understanding a particular mode of performance production. That mode exists outside of predetermined structures of recognition in terms of professionalism, artistic achievement, and a logic of eventfulness.

Foreplay denotes a peculiar way of working and inhabiting time in performance. It is recognized as emblematic of a constellation of artists in the 1960s New York scene, including Ellen Stewart, John Vaccaro, Ruby Lynn Reyner, Jackie Curtis, Andy Warhol, Tom Eyen, Jack Smith, and Penny Arcade.

Matching an original approach to historical materials and theoretical reflection, Palladini addresses the peculiar forms of production, reproduction, and consumption developed in the 1960s scene as labors of love, creating for artists a condition of “preliminarity” toward professional work and also functioning as a counterforce within productive economy, as a prelude where value is not yet assigned to labor.

The Scene of Foreplay proposes that such labors of love can be considered both as paradigmatic for contemporary forms of precarious labor and also resonating with echoes from marginal histories of performing arts, in a nonlinear genealogy of queer resistance to ideas of capitalist productivity and professionalism. The book offers much for those interested in performance theory as well as the history of theater and performance arts in the 1960s.

Para Lévinas, la relación con el Otro no hace referencia a una ontología previa, sino que rompe el "englobamiento" totalizante y totalitario de la mirada formal e ingenua, la cual intenta apresar categorías teóricas que predicen «imprecisamente» su morar en el mundo; es la mudanza originaria que se funda en la experiencia y en el tiempo interior que le permiten al otro ser absolutamente Otro. La relación con el Otro se abre a modo de responsabilidad hacia una persona inenglobable, vaciada a lo infinito, en una exterioridad que va más allá de la objetividad. En "Totalidad e Infinito", Lévinas plantea la posibilidad de romper el encantamiento que se genera cuando se intenta poseer al otro, totalidad donde la subjetividad y la infinitud quedan encalladas, siendo el sujeto cautivo de sí mismo.