In Between Subjects

A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance

Amelia Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000208030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

This volume is a study of the connected ideas of "queer" and "gender performance" or "performativity" over the past several decades, providing an ambitious history and crucial examination of these concepts while questioning their very bases.

Addressing cultural forms from 1960s–70s sociology, performance art, and drag queen balls to more recent queer voguing performances by Pasifika and M?ori people from New Zealand and pop culture television shows such as RuPaul's Drag Race, the book traces how and why "queer" and "performativity" seem to belong together in so many discussions around identity, popular modes of gender display, and performance art. Drawing on art history and performance studies but also on feminist, queer, and sexuality studies, and postcolonial, indigenous, and critical race theoretical frameworks, it seeks to denaturalize these assumptions by questioning the US-centrism and white-dominance of discourses around queer performance or performativity. The book's narrative is deliberately recursive, itself articulated in order performatively to demonstrate the specific valence and social context of each concept as it emerged, but also the overlap and interrelation among the terms as they have come to co-constitute one another in popular culture and in performance and visual arts theory, history, and practice.

Written from a hybrid art historical and performance studies point of view, this will be essential reading for all those interested in art, performance, and gender, as well as in queer and feminist theory.

1
INTRODUCTION

Performing (queer) art and theory, relationally

In Between Subjects demonstrates that the concepts of gender performance and queer performativity did not in any way “begin” with c. 1990 queer theory, as many tend to assume. This trajectory, rather, has a long and complex history, and I will point to the ways in which it is articulated through practices as well as intellectual discussion. Gender is a performance. Queer (or genderqueer) is performative. Performance has genderqueer implications, putting (sexed) subjectivity and selfhood in motion. Art’s performativity attaches itself to genderqueer subjects in a relational way. Queer artists tend towards performative methods. Queer performance marks the apotheosis of a radical critique of liberal bourgeois values. Performativity queers art(making). Queer performativity deconstructs gender (or, as Judith Butler famously put it, “the deconstruction of identity [in gender performance] is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated”).¹

These and other related formulations have come to seem commonplace in visual art and performance studies discourses, especially in the US, permeating into the fields of popular culture. They have come to be embedded in and informative of not only academic theories of gender/sexuality, contemporary art in general, and performance art; they have also become talking points in mainstream culture, on reality television, social media, popular magazines and blogs, and beyond.² What do I mean by “gender/sexuality,” and why do I write the terms this way? Debates about how to understand the relationship between gender and sexuality, and how to theorize their meaning, value, and structure, have been extensive since the mid-twentieth century. I will tend to use gender/sexuality or sex/gender together, as does queer/feminist/trans theorist Viviane K. Namaste, in order to insist upon their coextensive role in articulating subjectivity and the impossibility of fully separating them—albeit politically it can be advantageous to tease them apart.³

Suffice it to say that both gender and sex identifications are involved in the burgeoning of popularized versions of queer. And the relationship among terms and identifications such as genderfluid, gender non-binary, or queer and performance or a performative mode of self-presentation or display is now seen to be self-evident to the point where a fair percentage of selfie posts on Instagram and Facebook seem to pivot around an idea of gender performance in images as necessarily “radical” (as either, paradoxically, a radical assertion of “authentic” self, or a radical unhinging of gender norms).

Seeking to denaturalize these assumptions, this book traces an intellectual and art/performance history of discourses and practices circulating around the concept of gender as performance, especially those associated with experience or subjectivity relating to LGBTQ-identified people, including terms such as performativity, relationality, theatricality, queer, and trans. The focus is not on performance studies, nor on theater, but on ideas about performance and gender/sex as these have circulated in the visual arts and art world since at least 1960. I also point persistently to the narrowness of these discourses in their hegemonic forms as US-based, most often normatively white, cosmopolitan and urban, often male, and clearly linked to late capitalist and postcolonial formations in European-dominant cultures. The critical part of the genealogy thus signals my goal of denaturalizing the seemingly obvious and true claims of queer theory and performance theory as these have unfolded and intersected from their prehistory (I date this to around 1950) to their fully developed dominant forms (since the late 1980s).

I am originally trained in art history, and have made an investment in learning and thinking from feminist and queer theory as well as performance studies. My specific interdisciplinary allegiances will be obvious in the ways in which I see these discursive histories, and in my choices of exemplary performance and visual arts practices. This genealogy is thus assertively partial. As Édouard Glissant notes parenthetically of such genealogical attempts: “We are recapitulating what we know of these movements, in an attempt to consider how they have come into our view. And frequently we make mistakes. What is important is that we start retracing the path for ourselves.”⁴ I hope that this particular version of the genealogies of queer and performance will spark many others.

One way of denaturalizing the claims made about queer performance today and of foregrounding my own particular participation in historicizing them is through literal disruptions in the text written as highly performative and often personal ruminations on particular performance or performative practices: this is the point I am making by beginning the book with a brief prologue dominated by textual ruptures which serve as “field notes” amplifying on the more academic genealogy, and which take shape through a more personal, less explicitly scholarly mode of writing that openly expresses my highly biased interpretive accounts of performance works. The ruptures are not always about performances I view as queer. They range from descriptions of my encounters with bodies that changed my understandings of sex/gender embodiment to vignettes situating my specific personal relationship to the material at hand—in both cases foregrounding my partiality and (no doubt) my blindnesses, as well as vulnerabilities.

Another way to put pressure on these claims, written into both the genealogy and the breaks from academic argument, is to foreground practices that were ignored or marginalized at the time of their expression and in these genealogies of queer and performance discourses because of their subcultural, assertively non-normatively raced and classed, and/or extreme nature. Both of these methods are recursive, folding the arguments of the book back on themselves again and again, to enact the looping and repetitive nature of historical narrative and assignments of meaning as these are applied to cultural moments we consider queer and/or performative. These narratives are also written so as to highlight the relationality of determinations of signification and value, a relationality that (as we will see) itself might be said to be central to the development of concepts of “queer” and “performance” or “performativity,” and to how they work together.

This relationality itself has a history (as will be foregrounded in Chapter 3). Glissant, a key theorist of the Black Caribbean experience, of post-coloniality as well as decolonial theory, for example, makes use of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s poststructuralist concept of the rhizome, to argue:

The notion of the rhizome maintains … the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root. Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other. ⁵

It is precisely this immediately post-WWII development of relationality which Glissant unfurls explicitly in relation to the self/other dynamic of postcolonial relations and theories that were at their height (as with queer theories of gender performance) around 1990. This concept of relationality underlies my arguments throughout this book.

I examine relationality, as thus linked to postcolonial and rights-based political movements since WWII, intensively in Chapter 3, focusing there on social sciences theories of “interactive” or “interpersonal” selfhood along with artistic strategies of relationally activating spectators as participants in the artwork which burgeoned from the late 1950s through the 1970s. These developments provide a genealogical subtext to the 1990s articulation of “relational aesthetics,” as well as of queer performativity. As was clear in my prologue, relationality is also a concept I see activated by the works I examine, and a structure I willingly tap into through my own openly relational interpretations—I seek to perform my relation to and investments in the works I describe. To this end, I mark and even assert my own generational development as a political being raised under the explosive agitations of the US rights movements and identity politics in the 1960s and 1970s, and as an intellectual coming of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s, inspired and guided by feminism and by anti-racist and queer theory and activism, as well as the poetics of poststructuralist philosophy. Because of these contexts, I have also fortuitously been able to live in and with queer creative communities, bathing in the glow of what Glissant calls a poetics of relation (or relationality), where the oppositional logic of Western modernism (where “exclusion is the rule in binary practice”) is replaced by a “poetics,” which “aims for the space of difference—not exclusion but, rather, where difference is realized in going beyond.”⁶ This context of my immersion in the discourses and practices calling for an end to the violence of this system of exclusion and “binary practice” is the very same I examine historically here, implicating myself in the genealogy I am both immersed in and seek to trace.

This book explores precisely the way in which performances such as those sketched in the ruptures in the prologue bring to mind the discourses that label such works with the language of queer performance while, at the same time, the discourses overdetermine how we engage the works and the bodies. We are caught in a recursive (relational) loop of interpretive engagement, one that I will trace back through some of its forms to earlier moments wherein non-normative sexed/gendered embodiment has been linked to modes of performative saying as doing in Euro-American culture.

Genealogizing

Tracing a genealogy of discourses surrounding concepts of queer or gender fluidity and of performativity or performance is a way of understanding how these concepts came to be attached. To this end, this book relies on Michel Foucault’s 1971 concept of genealogy borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche, which (in Foucault’s words) “requires patience and a knowledge of details and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material … it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies”; this genealogy “opposes itself to the search for origins.” ⁷ As Foucault further elaborated this approach in 1976, it is an “attempt to desubjugate historical knowledges … to enable them to oppose and struggle against the coercion of a unitary, formal, and scientific theoretical discourse … to reactivate local knowledges … against the scientific hierarchicalization of knowledge and its intrinsic power-effects.” He continues to note that the key strategy for performing a genealogy is archaeology—the “method specific to the analysis of local discursivities,” whereby we dig deep into discourses of the time to identify patterns of thought and action. ⁸ Seeking to explore and trace the hidden histories of interrelated discourses of queer and performativity, then, I attend to local formations of knowledge, some articulated through actual performance, others in writing or argumentation, in order to historicize the co-development of a range of terms intimately related to these beliefs since around 1950 (especially in the USA, but also in the UK, and other white-dominant Anglophone contexts), including: gender, sexuality, performance, performativity, queer, theatricality, camp, relationality, otherness, transsexuality, and transgender.

I look for repeated patterns pointing to modes of belief forming the bases of queer and/or performative cultures. As Foucault might put it, my critical genealogy looks at a “coupling together of scholarly erudition and local memories,” or more specifically in this case excavates an archaeology of art practices and performances (often but not always personally experienced by me in their live form), archives, and texts—as well as chats, emails, and relationships I have (or have had) with the artists in the more recent periods I examine. ⁹ I do this in order to explore the patterns of feeling, including apparent anxieties, which motivate their articulation of what we can recursively int...