Abstract
In his book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, José Esteban Muñoz emphasizes the role of the solo performer in radical queer performance. For Muñoz, this figure is in a unique position to articulate ‘the reality of being queer at this particular moment’.3 Following the initial outbreak of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, which devastated gay communities, Muñoz sees in the solo performer an ability to press queer concerns into razor-sharp relief with great immediacy: ‘More than two decades into a devastating pandemic, with hate crimes and legislation aimed at queers and people of color institutionalized as protocols, the act of performing and theatricalizing queerness in public takes on ever multiplying significance.’4
In its emergence as a protest against marginalization or subordination, politicized identity thus becomes attached to its own exclusion […] In locating a site of blame for its powerlessness over its past — a past of injury, a past as a hurt will — and locating a ‘reason’ for the ‘unendurable pain’ of social powerlessness in the present, it converts this reasoning into an ethicizing politics, a politics of recrimination that seeks to avenge the hurt even while it reaffirms it, discursively codifies it.1
Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity
Thus even when the body artists have tried to expose the relations between theatre, violence, and law, they have sometimes ended up accomplishing the opposite of what they set out to do.2
Anthony Kubiak, Stages of Terror
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 73–4.
Anthony Kubiak, Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1991), 145.
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 1.
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (London and New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1.
Deirdre Heddon, Autobiography and Performance (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmilllan, 2008), 2.
Mary Richards, ‘Ron Athey, A.I.D.S. and the Politics of Pain’, in Body, Space and Technology, e-journal (Internet Publication: Brunel University, Dept. of Performing Arts, 2003). Read at http://www.brunel.ac.uk/departments/pfa/bstjournal/3no2/Papers/mary%20richards.htm
See, for example Athey quoted in Lois Keidan, ed., Exposures (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2001), 6.
Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation, (1975), (London: Vintage, 2007), 306.
Fredrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (1887) trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22.
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 101.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Moses and Monotheism’ (1939), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XXIII, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 84.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 102.
Elizabeth Grosz, commenting upon Kristeva’s semiotic, suggests that women, and in particular mothers, risk being associatively tied to the pre-Symbolic register, to which they are aligned via childbearing. See Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan, A Feminist Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 163.
For an elaboration of Artaud’s position, see Jacques Derrida, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 232–50.
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 84.
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, in Écrits: A Selection (1977), trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 319.
Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 54–5.
The precise setting is not obvious in performance, although in writing, Athey identifies it as a surgery hut. See Ron Athey, ‘Voices from the Front’, in Acting on AIDS: Sex, Drugs and Politics, eds. Joshua Oppenheimer and Helena Reckitt (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), 430–44.
Amelia Jones, ‘Holy Body: Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper’s Judas Cradle’, The Drama Review, vol. 50, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 159–69.
Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 184.
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, ‘The Lost Object — Me: Notes on Endocryptic Identification’ (1975), in The Shell and the Kernel, Vol. 1 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 141.
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, foreword by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 25.
Timothy Murray, Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Ann Arbor: the University of Michigan press, 1997), 15.
Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ (1991), in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 307–20; 314.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’ (1914), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIX, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 150.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (dementia paranoids)’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XII, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 1–82; 71.
André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’ in On Private Madness (London: Hogarth Press and the Institution of Psycho-analysis, 1986), 142–73, 152
Joachim F. Danckwardt and Peter Wegner, ‘Performance as Annihilation or Integration’. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 88, part 5, October 2007, 1117–33; 1119.
Franko B in interview with Robert Ayers, ‘Listening to Franko B: Blood Bravery and Beauty’, in Body Probe: Torture Garden 2: Mutant Flesh and Cyber Primitive (London: Creation Press, 1999), 69.
Although less forthcoming than Athey about his personal background, Franko admits to certain details that are crucial to understanding the relationship between certain figures and authority systems referenced in his work. Franko spent much of his childhood in a climate of religious fervour at a Catholic orphanage in Brescis in Northern Italy. While he returned to live with his mother at the age of seven, he was soon sent away to the Red Cross, close to Lake Mergozzo. See Sarah Wilson, ‘Franko B: Haute Surveillance, Haute Couture’, in Franko B, Manuel Vason, Gray Watson and Sarah Wilson, Franko B: Oh Lover Boy (London: Black Dog, 2001), Unpaginated.
Words spoken in interview with Patrick Campbell and Helen Spackman in ‘With/out An-aesthetic: The Terrible Beauty of Franko B’, The Drama Review, vol. 42, no. 4, (1998): 56–74; 64.
Franko B, Shelf Life (London: Two10 Gallery/The Wellcome Trust, 2000), 6–7.
Antonin Artaud, ‘Saint Francis of Assisi’, in Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 5. I acknowledge that Sarah Wilson makes this comparison with Artaud in her essay in Oh Lover Boy, unpaginated.
Stephen Di Benedetto, ‘The Body as Fluid Dramaturgy: Live Art, Corporeality and Perception’, in Journal of Dramatic Criticism, vol. XIV, no. 2 (2002): 4–15; 4.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 85.
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 91.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 167. For Deleuze and Guattari, the Body Without Organs is an open, potentialized intensity, ‘full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance’ (p. 167).
Theodor Reik, Masochism in Sex and Society, trans. M. H. Beigel and G. M. Kurth (London: Grove Press, 1962), 44–91.
Elisabeth Bronfen, ‘The Body and its Discontents’, in Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality, eds. Avril Horner and Angela Keana (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 109–23.
Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (London and Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003), 103.
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: John’s Hopkins University Press, 1995), 8. I also acknowledge here Dawn Perlmutter’s elucidation of Girard’s theorization of sacrificial crisis in ‘The Sacrificial Aesthetic: Blood Rituals from Art to Murder’, in Anthropoetics, vol. 5, no. 2 (Fall 1999–Winter 2000). Read at http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0502/ blood.htm
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 82.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Economimesis’, in Diacritics, vol. 11, no. 2, trans. R. Klein (1981): 3–25; 9.
Amelia Jones, ‘Dis/playing the Phallus: Male Artists Perform their Masculinities’, in Art History, vol. 17, no. 4 (1994): 546–84; 557.
Maurizia Boscagli, Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century (Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), 5.
Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 24.
See Johannes Birringer, Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 203.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2010 Fintan Walsh
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Walsh, F. (2010). Wounded Attachments in the Live Art of Ron Athey and Franko B. In: Male Trouble. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281752_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281752_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-36824-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-28175-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)