Reorienting Queer Performativity

Amelia Jones's In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance begins by observing that the formulation “queer performativity” has, since at least the late twentieth century, become a fixture in performance and visual art discourses, humanities scholarship, and even some larger “fields of popular culture” (1). Jones aims to “denaturalize” (xvi) this union of terms, while parsing what critical capacities they afford. Her book maps out the cultural and conceptual developments that have positioned the linguistic category of the performative—an utterance that does what it says—as a lodestar for studies of gender and sexuality: an association cemented (though not, as Jones demonstrates, inaugurated) by the blockbuster scholarship of Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick in the 1980s and 1990s.For this thorough-going assessment alone, Jones's study proves significant and valuable. She examines cardinal debates too numerous to name comprehensively here. Jones revisits Butler's foundational contributions and underlines Jacques Derrida's insistence that the performative utterance exceeds its context through availability to citation. She shows particular investment in Sedgwick's version of queer performativity, which foregrounds shame's relationality, the contingencies mortality lays bare, and the author's own vulnerable self-implication. Reaching beyond such canonized interlocutors, Jones's genealogy dilates both the timelines and disciplinary bounds that usually attend her key terms. For example, she finds antecedents for 1990s theories of gender in mid-twentieth-century social sciences, especially Erving Goffman's writing on the “socially enacted” (97) self. Jones also convincingly asserts the role of midcentury political watersheds like the American civil rights movement in constituting concepts of identity open to the performative. By “enunciating identity in public places in conjunction with other like-minded and/or identified comrades,” such mobilizations exhibited a “performative” (38) sensibility in action, just as this term was coming into the parlance of academic linguistics.Jones's emphasis on activism's conceptual impact demonstrates her attention to praxis. This also comes to the fore in what she calls a pattern of “interpretive ruptures,” which recount visceral experiences with performance and aim to highlight “the partiality of [the author's] genealogy” (xv). In one such section, Jones narrates finding photos of the radical Chicano/a art collective Asco's “no movies” while conducting research for her teaching in the 1990s. These images register enactments of “queer feminist theory long before it was written down” (166), and foreground the ethnic and racial identifications through which gender and sexuality are always constituted. Some of Jones's most compelling “field notes” (xv) orbit Ron Athey: she narrates a long arc of engagement with his oeuvre, from initial aloofness to deep investment. It is unsurprising that Jones's reflections on Athey's performances are so insightful; as she notes, she was curating a retrospective of his work while writing. The exhibitional genre of the artist retrospective, like the genealogy, is a kind of history making, and its most inventive versions understand the subject's relationality, as Jones does here.In her interludes, Jones displays the performativity she ascribes to Sedgwick's writing, making “frequent intimate contact with stories about bodies” (61). Jones leans further into embodied and emplaced experience when she arrives at her chapter titled “Other,” a turning point in the book. While the chapters “Performativity,” “Relationality,” “Theatricality,” and “Queer” focalize the US context in which queer theory found its most fulsome early expressions, In Between Subjects establishes a new center when addressing the concepts “other” and “trans.” Anchored by a research period spent in Aotearoa, as New Zealand is called in the Māori language Te Reo, these sections agitate Jones's scholarly authority even more fundamentally than do her regular textual ruptures, while extending her attempt to trouble queer theory's “dominant assumptions of whiteness” (190). Jones's concluding chapters are suffused with “disorientation” (258). Amplifying a gesture found throughout, they make critical use of the author's “shame and sense of ‘unbelonging’ ” (252), a venture that provokes open questions about how we assemble meaning from experiences of social dissonance amid asymmetries of power. Shame, per Sedgwick, can initiate “structural changes in one's relational and interpretive strategies.” It is one source, Jones wagers, of the “binding power of queer performance communities” (25). She delves into this performative affect by taking up the Māori concept of whakapapa, another historical methodology among the text's array, which, according to Carol Brown and Moana Nepia, offers a “genealogical paradigm of thought” (2016: 208) deeply invested in traced connections. Jones detours through a complicated accounting of her family lineages that intervenes in colonial habits of forgetting (a notion I come to via Jill Carter's teaching). This maneuver enacts Jones's understanding of relationality as “the key structure through which we take responsibility for our beliefs, statements, interpretations (of bodies, of texts, of political situations)” (29).Among the Pasifika and Māori artists she addresses, Jones dedicates significant attention to the Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) collective FAFSWAG, whose performances intermix voguing with Indigenous gesturality, and whose members variously employ queer and trans alignments, as well as Indigenous identifications like the Sāmoan fa'afafine or the Māori takatāpui. Voguing and ballroom cultures have been frequent fixations for US queer theory: the discipline's abstractions and allegorizations can violently obscure trans lives, as Jones notes via Vivian K. Namaste's theorizing (1996: 188). Jones finds a way out of this intellectual cul-de-sac by moving beyond the question of what a figure like Venus Xtravaganza can teach us about gender performativity and instead pursuing the motile performance practices that vogue communities have developed as they transform, and are transformed by, disparate sites of cultural expression.Jones bores into the misalignments she experiences with FAFSWAG. She contrasts her own movement workshop failures with collective member Akashi Fisi'inaua's “virtuosic” (338) performances: exhausting efforts that make “the call to perform and re-perform femininity iteratively” (337) into an empowering endeavor. (In this assessment, Jones gets close to identifying what Eva Pensis [2023: 22] calls “feeling cunt,” a “transformative performance pedagogy among femme queens” [Eva Pensis, email message to the author, April 10, 2023] and expression of erotic autonomy.)Early on, Jones comments on the communitarian impulses and minoritarian investments that drive Joshua Chambers-Letson's performance scholarship, asking: “Could this be the renewed, pulsating variant of today's performative” (74)? Her extensive critical reflections on FAFSWAG seem to answer in the affirmative. FAFSWAG's praxis is “fundamentally communal,” and they are “not interested in power sharing unless it's with the underclasses” (303). This is the kind of undercommons collectivity Chambers-Letson's (2018: xxi) work conjures: a “communism of incommensurability,” after José Esteban Muñoz. And while Jones's book examines a series of key concepts in their canonical formation, it also tracks a crosscurrent through “the raucous, sexy, sharply political” activities of artists that appear throughout, from “Asco in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s to, at this moment, the FAFSWAG collective in Auckland.” Carefully juxtaposing works from disparate “temporalities, energies, sites, and historical frameworks” (332), Jones invites the reader to inhabit the productive “discomfort of finding ourselves in between” (339).This insurgent thread, however, remains bundled with Jones's larger genealogy, which is in turns limiting and bursting with “anarchic energies” (188). Jones observes that, while meant “to dislocate US theories of queer performance from their unquestioned dominance,” her engagement with FAFSWAG may be “doomed because [she] inevitably write[s] from inside of these theories” (325). And yet, if we take the performativity of text seriously, the context and intention of the author, so exhaustively set forth here, do not secure the final word. Jones's thoughtful analyses of queer, trans, and other performances need not stay within the genealogies from which she inevitably writes; they are open to citation and reinterpretation beyond their provenance, as any performative utterance or act is

Aesthetics · Art · Performativity · Queer · Queer theory · Sociology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies

• After the Party

  Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, Joshua Chambers-Letson•After the Party•2020

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