Performing Cultures of Equality 0367755017, 9780367755010

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Figures
Contributors
Acknowledgements or Credits List
1. Performing Cultures of Equality: Embodiments, Visualities, Inscriptions
PART I: Embodying (In)Equalities
2. Honey Pot Performance’s Black Feminist Praxis: Embodiments of Collaboration and Collectivity
3. The Performance of Black Youth Masculinity in Bola Agbaje’s and Mojisola Adebayo’s Council-Estate Plays
4. Art’s Political Potential and the Violence That the Art Does: On the Performative Operations of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Guests (2016)
PART II: Visualizing (In)Equalities
5. Tinted Visions: Performing Equalities through Festive Decorations in LGBT-Themed Events in Hull (UK City of Culture 2017)
6. Social Media Reverberations of Feminist Assemblies: Reflections after Non una di meno’s Verona transfemminista Rally
7. Gender-Based Violence and the Performance of Masculinity: A Comparative Analysis of the Documentary Films Ma l’amore c’entra and Serás hombre
PART III: Inscribing (In)Equalities
8. Strangers, Persisters, and Killjoys: Confronting Gender Inequality through Performance Poetry
9. Imperialism’s Performative Technologies: Race, Gender, and Wearable Devices in Aliette De Bodard’s ‘Immersion’
10. Figures of a Gender Now upon Us: The Transfeminine in Contemporary Queer Fiction from the Philippines
Index

Citation preview

Performing Cultures of Equality

This book examines the enactment of gendered in/equalities across diverse cultural forms, turning to the insights produced through the specific modes of onto-epistemological enquiry of embodied performance. It builds on work from the GRACE (Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe) project and offers both theoretical and methodological analyses of an array of activities and artworks. The performative manifestations discussed include theatre, installations, social movements, mega-events, documentaries, and literary texts from multiple geopolitical locales. Engaging with the key concepts of re-enactment and relationality, the contributions explore the ways in which in/equalities are relationally re-produced in and through individual and collective bodies. This multi- and trans-disciplinary collection of essays creates fruitful dialogues within and beyond Performance Studies, sitting at the crossroads of ethnography, event studies, social movements, visual studies, critical discourse analysis, and contemporary approaches to textualities emerging from post-colonial and feminist studies. Emilia María Durán-Almarza is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, French and German Studies at the University of Oviedo. Carla Rodríguez González is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, French and German Studies at the University of Oviedo. Suzanne Clisby is Professor of Gender Studies in the Centre for Global Learning (GLEA) at Coventry University, Co-Director of the UKRI GCRF Global Gender and Cultures of Equality (GlobalGRACE) Project (2017– 2021), and Co-Editor of the Journal of Gender Studies.

GRACE (Gender and Cultures of Equality) Project

Theorising Cultures of Equality Edited by Suzanne Clisby, Mark Johnson and Jimmy Turner Investigating Cultures of Equality Edited by Dorota Golańska, Aleksandra M. Różalska and Suzanne Clisby Performing Cultures of Equality Edited by Emilia María Durán-Almarza, Carla Rodríguez González and Suzanne Clisby For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/GRACE-Project/book-series/GRACE

Performing Cultures of Equality

Edited by Emilia María Durán-Almarza, Carla Rodríguez González, and Suzanne Clisby

First published 2022 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Emilia María Durán-Almarza, Carla Rodríguez González and Suzanne Clisby; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Emilia María Durán-Almarza, Carla Rodríguez González and Suzanne Clisby to be identified as the author[/s] of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. With the exception of Chapter 7, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Chapter 7 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge. com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-75501-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-75509-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-16275-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003162759 Typeset in Sabon by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

The Open Access version of chapter 7 was funded by Universidad de Granada.

Contents

List of Figuresvii Contributorsviii Acknowledgements or Credits Listix 1 Performing Cultures of Equality: Embodiments, Visualities, Inscriptions

1

EMILIA MARÍA DURÁN-ALMARZA, CARLA RODRÍGUEZ GONZÁLEZ, AND SUZANNE CLISBY

PART I

Embodying (In)Equalities

11

2 Honey Pot Performance’s Black Feminist Praxis: Embodiments of Collaboration and Collectivity

13

MEIDA TERESA MCNEAL

3 The Performance of Black Youth Masculinity in Bola Agbaje’s and Mojisola Adebayo’s Council-Estate Plays

30

PAOLA PRIETO LÓPEZ

4 Art’s Political Potential and the Violence That the Art Does: On the Performative Operations of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Guests (2016) DOROTA GOLAŃSKA AND ALEKSANDRA M. RÓŻALSKA

44

vi  Contents PART II

Visualizing (In)Equalities

63

5 Tinted Visions: Performing Equalities through Festive Decorations in LGBT-Themed Events in Hull (UK City of Culture 2017)

65

BARBARA GRABHER

6 Social Media Reverberations of Feminist Assemblies: Reflections after Non una di meno’s Verona transfemminista Rally

82

TOMMASO TRILLÒ

7 Gender-Based Violence and the Performance of Masculinity: A Comparative Analysis of the Documentary Films Ma l’amore c’entra? and Serás hombre

100

ORIANNA CALDERÓN SANDOVAL AND ADELINA SÁNCHEZ ESPINOSA

PART III

Inscribing (In)Equalities

117

8 Strangers, Persisters, and Killjoys: Confronting Gender Inequality through Performance Poetry

119

ESTHER ÁLVAREZ LÓPEZ

9 Imperialism’s Performative Technologies: Race, Gender, and Wearable Devices in Aliette De Bodard’s ‘Immersion’

137

ELEANOR DRAGE

10 Figures of a Gender Now upon Us: The Transfeminine in Contemporary Queer Fiction from the Philippines

156

JAYA JACOBO

Index

174

Figures

6.1 ‘I can’t believe I am still protesting this shit!’.93 6.2 Protest banner resting against a brick wall.94 6.3 ‘La Lega out of our panties!’.95

Contributors

Esther Álvarez López is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Oviedo, Spain. Orianna Calderón Sandoval is Postdoctoral Researcher at Örebro University, Sweden, and is also affiliated to the Women’s and Gender Studies Research Institute at the University of Granada, Spain. Eleanor Drage is a Christina Gaw Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), UK. Dorota Golańska is Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Research and Affiliate Researcher at Women’s Studies Centre, University of Lodz, Poland. Barbara Grabher currently works as Postdoctoral Researcher in the research group Urban HEAP in the Institute of Geography and Regional Sciences at University of Graz, Austria. Jaya Jacobo is Assistant Professor at the Research Centre for Global Learning (GLEA) in Coventry University, UK. Meida Teresa McNeal is Artistic/Managing Director of Honey Pot Performance, an independent artist and scholar, and part-time faculty in Art & Art History at Columbia College Chicago, USA. Paola Prieto López is an Adjunct Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Oviedo, Spain. Aleksandra M. Różalska is Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Research and Head of the Women Studies Centre, University of Łódź, Poland. Adelina Sánchez Espinosa is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Granada, Spain and European Consortium Coordinator for GEMMA Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies. Tommaso Trillò is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Communication and Journalism of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Acknowledgements or Credits List

This volume is one of the outcomes of the Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe (GRACE) Project, a European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie (Grant Agreement No. 675378). Dr. Esther Álvarez-López’s, Dr. Emilia María Durán-Almarza, Dr. Carla Rodríguez-González, and Dr. Paola Prieto-López also wish to acknowledge that the research carried out for the development of their chapters received financial support by the Spanish National R&D Programme, project RTI2018-097186-B-I00 ‘Strangers and Cosmopolitans: Alternative Worlds in Contemporary Literatures’, financed by MCIU/AEI/FEDER, EU, and by the R&D Programme of the Principality of Asturias, through the Research Group Intersections (GRUPIN IDI/2018/000167). Dr. Barbara Ghabher wishes to express her gratitude to all the research participants, who continue to support the investigation as they challenge, reflect on, and discuss the developments in and of their city with her. Dr. Jaya Jacobo would like to thank the GlobalGRACE Project, with funding from the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) programme Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) under grant reference AH/P014232/1, for supporting the research that I have done as its postdoctoral fellow (2018–2020) of its Philippine work package on LGBTQ youth cultures; students and colleagues at the YMCA San Pablo, Ateneo de Manila University, Far Eastern University, University of Sydney, Ontario College of Art and Design University and the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, where I presented various parts of the chapter; comrades at Camp Queer, the Young Feminists Collective and the Society of Transsexual Women of the Philippines (STRAP); and colleagues at the Modern of Museum of Art in New York City who have generously engaged my initial thoughts on the transfeminine; and Professor Suzanne Clisby, for giving me the time, space, and encouragement to finish the piece. And, finally, the editors want to give special thanks to all the people who have made putting together this volume possible, especially, Ángela RodríguezSuárez, who helped with copy editing; Ronnie Lendrum, our style editor; Dr. Domitila Oliveri and Dr. Isabel Carrera-Suárez for sharing good advice and insightful feedback at different stages of the writing and editing process.

1

PERFORMING CULTURES OF EQUALITY EMBODIMENTS, VISUALITIES, INSCRIPTIONS Emilia María Durán-Almarza, Carla Rodríguez González and Suzanne Clisby

Performing with GRACE March 8, 2019 was a markedly performative day in the shared herstory of the community of researchers in Women’s and Gender Studies we affectionately called ‘the GRACE gang’. After four years of intense creative and scholarly labour, the EU-funded project ‘GRACE: Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe’ was coming to an end, and it was time to showcase the work of affiliated researchers, artists, filmmakers, and practitioners. More than 140 delegates convened over the course of three days for the 2019 GRACE Conference, entitled ‘Gender and Cultures of In/Equality in Europe: Visions, Poetics, Strategies’ that took place on March 7–9. Centred around International Women’s Day, GRACE’s final public event provided participants with the opportunity to explore the themes of this research network through a range of activities, including a series of public talks; the launch of the GRACE feminist Quotidian smartphone app; the opening of the GRACE exhibition Footnotes on Equality; a guest screening of Isabel de Ocampo’s You Will Be a Man, with the participation of the filmmaker—which is analysed in Chapter 7 of this volume—and the performance I’ve Lost You Only to Discover That I Have Gone Missing by Beatrice Allegranti’s Dance Theatre.1 Although not explicitly disclosed in the title of the conference, the performative engagement with the concept of ‘cultures of equalities’ becomes evident in the line-up of creative formats and interdisciplinary ventures included in the programme. Through dance, film discussions, curated installations, technological devices and discussion panels, cultures of intersectional gender equality and inequality in and beyond Europe were debated, exposed, and experienced verbally, visually, and somatically. If performative approaches to the enactment of cultures of gender equality were central to the project from its inception, as exemplified by its marked emphasis on advancing the research into the ‘production of cultures of equality that underpin, enable and constrain. . . changing policy and legislative frameworks’ (Clisby and Johnson 2020, 2), the GRACE closing event firmly grounded performance methods and methodologies as key DOI: 10.4324/9781003162759-1

2  E.M. Durán-Almarza et al. tools for addressing in/equalities in the cultural and social spheres. It did so by, on the one hand, giving prominence to performing and visual artworks as relevant modes of inquiry into the configurations of culture-specific in/ equalities; on the other, by showcasing a wide variety of case studies, PhD projects and scholarly interventions that, through the transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary lenses of Gender, Queer and Feminist Studies, debated and experienced the agentive dimensions of cultural practices and artefacts. During these three days of intense a(e)ffective work, GRACE researchers and their guests performed small gestures of gender equalities across academic, creative, and activist worlds. This volume, Performing Cultures of Equality: Embodiments, Visualities, Inscriptions, is a collective response to the embodied dis/comforts and engaged discussions around in/equalities that materialised in and through the performance of intellectual exchange. In it, GRACE researchers and their extended scholarly network reflect on the agential, performative potential of participatory art (Jacobo, Chapter 10; McNeal, Chapter 2), audio-visual artefacts (Calderón Sandoval and Sánchez Espinosa, Chapter 7; Golańska and Różalska, Chapter 4), activist events (Grabher, Chapter 5; Trillò, Chapter 6), literary texts (Álvarez-López, Chapter 8; Drage, Chapter 9; Jacobo, Chapter 10), and theatrical performance (McNeal, Chapter 2; Prieto López, Chapter 3) for the enactment of gender equalities.

Why Perform(ing)?: Enacting Cultural In/Equalities In her introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (2008), Tracy C. Davis identifies three main paradigm shifts in the Social Sciences and the Humanities since the 1970s. If the ‘linguistic turn’ has worked to emphasise ‘language’s role in constructing perception’, the ‘cultural turn’ has sparked an interest in ‘tracking the everyday meanings of culture, and culture’s formative effect on identities’ (1). The subsequent ‘performative turn’ which, in her view, emerged at the turn of the 21st century, has given rise to scholarly endeavours that acknowledge ‘how individual behaviour derives from collective, even unconscious, influences and is manifest as observable behaviour, both overt and quotidian, individual and collective’ (1). This move has forced scholars to refine ‘the rationales for connecting performance to culture’ (2). A renewed understanding of culture as performative (i.e., as producing rather than just reproducing specific social values and belief systems) has opened new avenues for engaging with sociocultural practices. If cultural forms and artworks are not just objects to be enjoyed from a passive outside position but are instead regarded as artefacts co-created in the very act of interacting with them, viewers, spectators, and readers become key agents in the process of artistic and cultural production. Reflecting on the changes that the ‘performative turn’ has brought about in the field of Performance Studies itself, Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera have argued that,

Performing Cultures of Equality 3 performance has evolved into ways of comprehending how human beings fundamentally make culture, affect power, and reinvent their ways of being in the world. The insistence on performance as a way of creation and being as opposed to the long-held notion of performance as entertainment has brought forth a movement to seek and articulate the phenomenon of performance in its multiple manifestations and imaginings. (2006, xii; emphasis in original) The performative turn thus emerged from a moment when the notion of culture itself was being reconceptualised and the focus of analysis switched from an exclusive emphasis on artworks as finished products to a broader processual conception of cultural forms. In this context, the definition of what counts as performance expanded to include areas that had hitherto being studied separately. In his now classic conceptualisation, Dwight Conquergood laid the basis that contributed to developing this renewed conception of performance along three criss-crossing lines: ‘(1) as a work of imagination, as an object of study; (2) as a pragmatics of inquiry (both as model and method), as an optic and operator of research; (3) as a tactics of intervention, an alternative space of struggle’ (2002, 152; emphasis in original). His ‘three c’s of performance studies: creativity, critique, citizenship (civic struggles for social justice)’ (152) firmly established Performance Studies as a radically multi- and interdisciplinary field, allowing for the emergence of scholarship in the Social Sciences and Humanities that pushes the boundaries of more traditional approaches to the study of history, literature, education, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, and political science, to name a few. In these two decades of the 21st century, performance has become a central element of social and cultural life, encompassing a broad range of expressive behaviours (Schechner and Lucie 2020). Under this framework, culture comes to be broadly conceived as ‘as the process through which people create and contest the social worlds that they inhabit’ (Clisby and Johnson 2020, 2) and thus becomes a key site for the critique, activist intervention, and imaginative production of material in/equalities. Drawing from a consideration of culture as ‘corporeal knowhow of practice, as the organizing ethos of practice, and as the experienced import of practice’ (Biernacki in Davis 2008, 3), Performance Studies methods and methodologies become key tools for the critical exploration of how gender in/equalities are performatively produced and reproduced in and through cultural practices. By turning to the insights originating through the specific modes of onto-epistemological enquiry of embodied performance, the chapters in this book seek to examine the enactment of gendered in/equalities across cultural forms. Drawing on the conceptualisation of in/equality developed by Suzanne Clisby, Mark Johnson, and Jimmy Turner in Theorising Cultures of Equality (2020), our contributors performatively inquire into the production of cultures of in/equality through two main concepts: those

4  E.M. Durán-Almarza et al. of ‘re-enactment’ and ‘relationality’, which we ground on current feminist and material readings of culture, gender, and equality. First, gender equalities and inequalities are conceived as always already culturally performed, in the sense that they are specifically (re)produced in the particular context in which the norms that make them possible regulate power relations. Equalities and inequalities are enacted and experienced differently by different people from diverse sociocultural backgrounds, and the ways in which these are done and undone are also culturally specific. The performance of equalities and inequalities are thus interpreted as iterative enactments of the cultural that allow for the emergence of alternative arrangements of gendered equalities. Judith Butler’s notion of performativity— discussed in more depth by Eleanor Drage, Orianna Calderón Sandoval and Adelina Sánchez Espinosa, Barbara Grabher, Paola Prieto López, and Tomasso Trillò in their respective chapters—is of pivotal relevance here, as it bridges some of the insights specifically produced in the field of Feminist and Gender Studies with those in Performance Studies. In Butler’s wellknown conceptualisation, performativity refers to the ‘stylized repetition of acts’ (1988, 519) that, performed through the body, sustains the fiction of gender. The intersectional and comparative study of the re-enactment of gender identities, experiences, and relations thus provides a vantage point through which to examine the myriad ways in which gender in/equalities are materialised in and through cultural performance. The second dimension to be considered is that of the relational production of in/equality. If as, Suzanne Clisby and Mark Johnson have argued, ‘studying the production of cultures of equality can be best described as the critical investigation and creative co-production of equalities events and artefacts’ (2020, 5), in this volume, contributors examine the specific ways in which ‘co-production’ occurs in and through performative artworks and events. In line with Richard Schechner’s view, performance is interpreted as occurring in various situations which are not always discriminated from each other, and that include, among others, everyday life events, the arts, sports, technology, and rituals (Schechner and Lucie 2020, 31). We argue that the post- and trans-disciplinary methodologies and epistemological groundings embraced by Performance Studies are therefore particularly suitable to the analysis of gender equalities and inequalities, as they allow for nuanced examinations of how these in/equalities are created, sustained, and undone in and through performance practices, values, ideas, tastes, and aesthetics. By doing so, the different chapters critically engage the ‘political potential’ of gender/ed performances (Kunst 2017), as embodied practices occurring in artistic, activist, and/or everyday life sociocultural environments, thus establishing fruitful dialogues within and beyond Performance Studies. To this end, some of the central questions this volume tackles include: How does the (re)enactment of equalities feature in and through such performative manifestations as theatre, installations, social movements, mega-events, documentaries, and literary texts?

Performing Cultures of Equality 5 What does it mean to perform (in)equalities? For whom or by whom are these performed? How does a transcultural analysis of the enactment of in/equalities in performance across geographical lines allow for nuanced understandings of the materialisation of cultures of in/equality? How are gendered in/equalities relationally produced in the inter- and intra-action of the bodies of the performers, audiences, and/or participants in the selected events? Addressing each of these key questions in different ways, contributors offer both theoretical and methodological insights into a wide array of practices, events, and artworks from the first two decades of the 21st century with (trans)cultural links to multiple geopolitical locales (France, Italy, the Philippines, Poland, Spain, the USA, the UK, and Vietnam).

Chapter Contents The different chapters present a broad range of case studies of gender in/ equalities in and through cultural performance which, in line with Dwight Conquergood’s conceptualisation, is understood here as encompassing three interrelated dimensions: 1 Accomplishment—the making of art and remaking of culture; creativity; embodiment; artistic process and form; knowledge that comes from doing, participatory understanding, practical consciousness, performing as a way of knowing; 2 Analysis—the interpretation of art and culture; critical reflection; thinking about, through, and with performance; performance as a lens that illuminates the constructed creative, contingent, collaborative dimensions of human communication; knowledge that comes from contemplation and comparison; concentrated attention and contextualisation as a way of knowing; [and] 3 Articulation—activism, outreach, connection to community; applications and interventions; action research; projects that reach outside the academy and are rooted in an ethic of reciprocity and exchange; knowledge that is tested by practice within a community; social commitment, collaboration, and contribution/intervention as a way of knowing: praxis. (2002, 152) Foregrounding gendered and feminist understandings of cultural performance, the volume is divided into three sections, each covering a different aspect of performed in/equalities. The first, ‘Embodying (In)Equalities’, comprises three chapters that situate the gendered and racialised body and its effects at the centre of the debate. It opens with Meida Teresa McNeal’s contribution, Chapter 2, ‘Honey Pot Performance’s Black Feminist Praxis: Embodiments of Collaboration and Collectivity’, where she elucidates the work of this Afro-feminist collective (Honey Pot Performance, HPP) she directs and their potential to create spaces of gender and ethnic equality in

6  E.M. Durán-Almarza et al. the context of transcultural and Black communities in the USA. McNeal situates their engaged work at the intersection of critical performance and public humanities and assesses the value of their actions to redress power asymmetries through the collective weaving and interrogation of individual embodied experiences of marginalisation. Their collaborative, participatory theatre practice aims to engage the community in creative processes of knowledge production, as exemplified by the four recent multi-modal artistic projects McNeal brings to the fore. The first one, If/Then, gathered five Black and Brown performers who explored the spiritual and intuitive side of their artistic practices, focusing on the Africanist notion of divination/divining. Their enactment of fluid relationships with spirituality contributed to creating an embodied sense of collectivity which facilitated the reflection on possible strategies for the redistribution of power. The second action, Chicago Black Social Culture Map, McNeal explains, is a performative and archival project which delves into the impact of Black culture on urban environments by bringing into conversation house culture with its main influences: blues, jazz, gospel, punk, new wave, and disco. The combination of spatial representation—the maps of the city— with the conversational side of the project—people’s emotional engagement with the materiality of the places where these instances of Black music had gained an infrastructural dimension—creates a matrix of Black oral history from the 20th century Great Black Migration through the present day that culminated in the homonymous digital humanities dataset (https://www.honeypotperformance.org/chgpblksocialculturemap). The third action detailed by McNeal is We Will Chicago, an urban planning initiative in which HPP will collaborate with community organisers to reimagine and reconfigure neighbourhoods as people-centred spaces, in the framework of the focus on mutual aid and collective responsibility triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The last instance is The Ladies Ring Shout 2022, a revisited production of this cornerstone project to commemorate the company’s 20th anniversary. It originated as a response to the devastating consequences of the economic crash of 2008–2009, aiming to offer Black women a creative space to articulate their concerns and shared experiences of oppression. As McNeal explains, 20 years later, this new production aims to assess the changes—improvements but also new vulnerabilities—in Black women’s lives, continuing with the company’s commitment to producing multidisciplinary, engaged performances which can serve ‘to model the kind of communities we want to be part of’ (McNeal, this volume). Chapter 3, Paola Prieto López’s ‘The Performance of Black Youth Masculinity in Bola Agbaje’s and Mojisola Adebayo’s Council-Estate Plays’, focuses on the staging of alternative Black masculinities in the UK, exploring the challenges they pose to the patriarchal legacies of colonialism. Here Prieto López locates the emergence of urban plays dealing with violence, crime, and other social issues affecting the lives of Black Britons during this first decade of the 21st century as a response to the rising number of

Performing Cultures of Equality 7 incidents following the violent murder of Stephen Lawrence in London in 1993 and the increasing recognition of the impact that racism still has on British society. She argues that, in spite of the extensive criticism received by these plays for contributing to fixing stereotyped images of Black male youth, they have the potential to interrogate these prejudices and offer progressive representations of Black urban experiences. As such, in her analysis of Agbaje’s Gone Too Far (2007) and Off the Endz (2010), and Adebayo’s Desert Boy (2011), Prieto López identifies the distinctive features that allow these authors’ works to escape the limited scope of representation characteristic of other council state plays, which tended to focus on the performance of hegemonic—violent—masculinities as empowering strategies of survival. Dorota Golańska and Aleksandra Różalska’s Chapter 4, ‘Art’s Political Potential and the Violence That the Art Does: On The Performative Operations of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Guests (2016)’, closes this first section. Their Deleuzian ‘art-as-sensation’ approach to Wodiczko’s installation (Venice 2009 and Liverpool 2016) is also grounded on their own bodily experiences as visitors to the exhibition, which is described in detail to introduce their analysis. By focusing on the material-semiotic workings of this particular installation, the authors investigate the potential of art to raise awareness of the vulnerability and inequality experienced by refugees within the boundaries of ‘Fortress Europe’, as well as of the consequences of the strategies of borderisation promoted by EU governments. From their new materialist perspective, they relate Wodiczko’s installation to the (in)securitisation of the refugee population living in the ‘Calais Jungle’ to argue that politically engaged performance art, given its capacity to appeal to its audience by activating intellectual and bodily flows of energies, is an optimal platform to promote connectivity and response-ability in the creation of more egalitarian societies. In the next section, we turn to ‘Visualizing (In)Equalities’, through three contributions that deal with different visual artefacts—decorations, social media posts, and documentary films—addressing the ways in which audiences or participants interact with them in order to foster the production of cultures of equality. In the first contribution, Chapter 5, ‘Tinted Visions: Performing Equalities through Festive Decorations in LGBT-Themed Events in Hull (UK City of Culture 2017)’, Barbara Grabher analyses the material culture of mega-events by focusing on the visual spectrum of event spaces, especially their decorations, to elucidate whether they can promote gender equality. In her case study, she problematises the LGTB rainbow symbol in festive decorations for the week-long commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales that took place in the framework of the ‘365 Days of Transformative Culture’ (Hull 2017 Ltd 2015, 14) celebrated in Hull as UK City of Culture in 2017. The LGBT50 events comprised the first ever UK Pride Parade and Party, as well as a series of activities whose decorative design focused primarily on the rainbow, as a symbol of equality and tolerance. Through a combination

8  E.M. Durán-Almarza et al. of ethnographic and visual methods, Grabher explores how some of the artists associated with Summer Tea Party, an action curated by the queer arts collective Duckie, negotiated the processes of meaning-making promoted by these events by arguing for a more open interpretation of equality than the one branded under the rainbow flag. Grabher analyses how these counter-visualities represent a necessary reflection on the diverse forms that equality may adopt. Chapter 6, Tomasso Trillò’s ‘Social Media Reverberations of Feminist Assemblies: Reflections after Non una di meno’s Verona transfemminista Rally’, provides an analysis of the social media practices connected to the collective actions of the Italian feminist network Non una di meno. One of the most successful initiatives carried out by this movement—whose inception coincided with the beginning of a global cycle of protest comprising, among others, Ni una menos across Latin America, the 8M protests in Spain and the #MeToo movement—were the actions that took place in the Italian city of Verona on March 30, 2019 to protest against the ultra-conservative XIII World Congress of Families. These actions—the rally itself, but also conferences, performances, shows, and workshops—were accompanied and complemented by visual material on Instagram (#VeronaTransfemminista). Trillò focuses on these images from an interdisciplinary perspective that includes discourse analysis, media and movement studies as well as affect theory to study the responses of Non una di meno to the ideas promoted at the Congress of Families over the same symbols: the family and womanhood. The author pays particular attention to the collective actions that enabled the choreography of assembly of Verona transfemminista and to a corpus of user-generated memes posted on the rally, in reference to the movement’s communiqué. Trillò explores the politics of signification and the production of meaning involved in a process in which choreographic leaders created collective frames for individual interpretations of the movement’s demands. In Chapter 7, ‘Gender-Based Violence and the Performance of Masculinity: A Comparative Analysis of the Documentary Films Ma l’amore c’entra? and Serás hombre’, Orianna Calderón Sandoval and Adelina Sánchez Espinosa look at the affective and performative dimensions of documentary cinema to explore the ‘moments of affection or becoming’ that Italian filmmaker Elisabetta Lodoli and Spanish director Isabel de Ocampo create in these works as potential catalysts of social change. Through a close-reading of the films, combined with an analysis of interviews with the filmmakers, as well as through the reactions of their audiences, Calderón Sandoval and Sánchez Espinosa delve into the prevalent role of hate and anger in contexts of gender-based violence, which they see as connected to failed expectations about an idea of happiness rooted on the reproduction and performance of traditional gender roles. The third and final section of the book, ‘Inscribing (In)Equalities’, explores the performative force of literary texts. In Chapter 8, ‘Strangers, Persisters, and Killjoys: Confronting Gender Inequality through Performance Poetry’,

Performing Cultures of Equality 9 Esther Álvarez López focuses on the work of women spoken wordsters from the USA and the UK—on and beyond the stage—from the theoretical axes of willfulness, strange(r)ness, and the figure of the feminist killjoy provided by Sara Ahmed’s affective approach. Álvarez López argues that the poems and performances she analyses contribute to destabilising ethnic and heteronormative structures of power through the reorientation of intersubjective affection with the audience, which allows them to create new social imaginaries through their artivism. Chapter 9, Eleanor Drage’s ‘Imperialism’s Performative Technologies: Race, Gender, and Wearable Devices in Aliette de Bodard’s “Immersion”’, provides a critical reading of this science fiction short story, addressing performativity from a gender and a philosophy of technology perspective. Drawing from Judith Butler’s studies on gender performativity, as well as from Bernard Stiegler’s and Federica Frabetti’s explorations of the performative and overreaching dimension of technē in contemporary cultures, Drage studies the representation of the performance of gender and ethnicity through human-technological bodies to argue that this story, which constitutes a critique of Franco-Vietnamese post-coloniality, exemplifies how technology has become an essential intermediator of social relations. Drage contends that race and gender are (re)produced and policed through integrated human-technological systems complicit in ideological governance and the shaping of the social subject and argues for the investment on commercially viable alternatives that can imaginatively remodel hegemonic systems of race and gender. The book closes with Jaya Jacobo’s chapter ‘Figures of a Gender Now upon Us: The Transfeminine in Contemporary Queer Fiction from the Philippines’. In it, the author explores the emergence of the transfeminine in Filipinx discourses on gender by focusing on the figure of the binabayi from an interdisciplinary perspective that studies Filipinx subjectivity in combination with lexicographical and close reading techniques. Jacobo initiates the analysis by identifying a phenomenology of vernacular consciousness through the concept of loób (‘outside’), which is followed by a study of the choreography of performance through the concept of palabás (‘orientation outwards’) and a trans critique of both orientations. Next, Jacobo carries out a decolonial reading of the lexicon of Spanish colonial gender hierarchies. The final part of this chapter offers a trans reading of a series of contemporary works of fiction produced in the participatory writers workshops organised by Jacobo as part of the UK Research Innovation-funded research project Global Gender and Cultures of Equality (GlobalGRACE). These include Vincent Empimano’s ‘Utoy’ (‘Little Boy’) (2019), Joe Henry B. Teñido’s ‘Taya’ (‘It’) (2018), Andrew Estacio’s ‘Dibuhong Martir’ (‘Portrait Martyr’) (2020), and Carlo Paulo Pacolor’s ‘Ang Natatanging Lamyos ng mga Bakla’ (‘The Incredible Tenderness of Faggots’) (2020). Jacobo reads these narratives as representative of the performative potential of literature to configure modes of existence for the transfeminine.

10  E.M. Durán-Almarza et al.

Note 1. The book of abstracts and full conference programme can be downloaded from here: http://graceproject.eu/conference2019/

Works Cited Adebayo, Mojisola. 2011. Desert Boy. In Mojisola Adebayo: Plays One, edited by Mojisola Adebayo, 159–243. London: Oberon Books. Agbaje, Bola. 2007. Gone Too Far! London: Methuen. . 2010. Off the Endz. London: Methuen. Butler, Judith. 1988. ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’. Theatre Journal 40, no. 4: 519–31. Clisby, Suzanne and Mark Johnson. 2020. ‘Theorising Gender and Cultures of Equality’. In Theorising Cultures of Equality, edited by Suzanne Clisby, Mark Johnson and Jimmy Turner, 1–24. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledgehttps://doi. org/10.4324/9780203702963-1 Conquergood, Dwight. 2002. ‘Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research’. TDR 46, no. 2: 145–56. https://doi.org/10.1162/105420402320980550 Davis, Tracy C., ed. 2008. The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521874014 Empimano, Vincent. 2019. ‘Utoy’. Periferias 3. https://revistaperiferias.org/en/ materia/the-bakla-the-agi-our-genders-which-are-not-one/#_ftn3 Estacio, Andrew. 2020. ‘Dibuhong Martir’. Project GRACE-UP National LGBTQ+ Writers Workshop. https://www.pinoylgbtq.com/fictionist-andrew-estacio Hull 2017 Ltd. 2015. Hull UK City of Culture 2017: Strategic Business Plan 2015– 2018. Hull: Hull 2017 Ltd. ‘LGBT50’. https://www.hull2017.co.uk/whatson/ events/lgbt-50/ Kunst, Bojana. 2017. ‘The Troubles with Temporality: Micropolitics of Performance’. In Points of Convergence: Alternative Views on Performance, edited by Marta Dziewan ́ska and André Lepecki, 85–98. Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art. Lodoli, Elisabetta, dir. 2017. Ma l’amore c’entra? Italy: MaxMan Coop. Madison, D. Soyini, and Judith Hamera. 2006. ‘Performance Studies at the Intersections’. The SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, pp. xi–xxv. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412976145 Pacolor, Carlo Paulo. 2020. ‘Ang Natatanging Lamyos ng mga Bakla’. Project GRACE-UP National LGBTQ+ Writers Workshop. https://www.pinoylgbtq. com/fictionist-carlo-pacolor Schechner, Richard, and Sarah Lucie. 2020. Performance Studies: An Intro­ duction. 4th ed. London and New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9781315269399 Teñido, Joe Henry B. 2018. ‘Taya’ (unpublished manuscript).

PART I

Embodying (In)Equalities

2

HONEY POT PERFORMANCE’S BLACK FEMINIST PRAXIS EMBODIMENTS OF COLLABORATION AND COLLECTIVITY Meida Teresa McNeal

Introduction This [gathering of supporters] is really inspirational and will propel us forward with intention and purpose. In such a challenging year, it’s strange that we had the kind of growth we had. We want to move into 2021 acknowledging that blessing. We want to commit to our work, clarifying our vision and focus, finding the right balance of inspiration, aspiration, and capacity to continue forward. It’s okay if it takes us a little longer. It took us twenty years to get here and it’s good and it feels right and it’s authentic. My heart is full from what everyone brings to this circle and what was contributed today. Meida McNeal (Honey Pot Performance Virtual Retreat, 2021) In late January 2021, Honey Pot Performance (HPP) held its annual strategic visioning retreat, marking our second year as a formal institution. We called together 25 collaborators, advisors, and supporters to reflect on the prior year’s accomplishments, challenges, and growth. In a year so tragically defined by the COVID-19 global pandemic, we had experienced exponential progress. Our organisational budget grew by 400%. We expanded our network to offer creative collaboration and resources to other Black and Brown artists. Our Chicago Black Social Culture Map project completed a year of virtual programs, shifted digital archiving platforms, and cemented our structure to ensure greater longevity. We paid more artists and administrators to help us build our vision. We could feel ourselves growing into our next shape with stronger infrastructure, more confidence in our vision, and a better understanding of the ways we wanted to continue to share leadership and decision-making. While conditions have forced us into extreme isolation in many ways, the social unrest responding to continued police brutality, anti-blackness, and the rise of mutual aid networks to support those made economically vulnerable by the pandemic are crystallising cultural organising and collective knowledge building at a quickened pace. On top of that, the abolitionist movement has grown stronger in its demands to defund police DOI: 10.4324/9781003162759-3

14  M.T. McNeal and redistribute resources to communities, while, across the US, calls for racist monuments to be removed have spawned commissions to reimagine how we tell and mark our history.1 As these evolutions continue our human journey towards justice and equity, HPP has been bolstered by the energy of this moment recognising our alignment. We do not have to build towards the era we are entering; we are already here and have been doing our part of the work. For the past 20 years, HPP has steadily built intimate, community-centred, collective forms of creative practice and consensus building. It has been an organic evolution driven by iteration and slow shifts over time. Our relationships and the pace of our lives have guided us, making space for this creative work to grow alongside moves across the country, parents passing, children growing, rifts and healing in interpersonal dynamics, and challenges in holding work, artmaking, and life in balance. We take inspiration from the Black women creative collectives that historically precede us: Combahee River Collective, The Sisterhood, Sistren Theatre Collective, and Sapphire and Crystals, among others. As the Black women of the Combahee River Collective stated plainly in their collectively authored statement: ‘The only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us’ (Taylor 2017, 18). This attention to Black women’s collective quality of life and community care reflects the ways HPP has activated over the years, centring the voices and lives of Black women and Black community through critical performance. Our rehearsals and meetings have always held time for reconnecting with each other through conversation and laughter. Our children have grown up in the studio, running amidst us while we create and making pallets on the floor as the work waxed on. We have accommodated leaves of absence for family issues and mental health. We have always operated as a kind of community hub, holding folks when they need to take a step back and putting all hands in to divide up labour to try to keep loads from getting too heavy for any one person. With all of our projects, we are thinking about how we not only use a Black feminist frame as the root of our creative process, but also how we model the kinds of communities we want to be part of— communities that acknowledge the stories of folks who are often marginalised, take creative risks and experiment together, and are interested in building collective forms of action that redress power inequities and oppressions by being the change we want to see take root and flourish. Looking at several of our creative projects and processes, all featuring extensive public engagement, this chapter explores HPP’s bricolage methods of inquiry based on choreographic craft, poetry and prose, intuitive responses through improvisation, performance, and Black feminist discourses. HPP’s work stands at the intersection of critical performance and public humanities, as a means to create deeper human connections. Our public research process invites people to help co-create the worlds that form our works through workshops, dialogues, and social events. Performances are

Honey Pot Performance’s Black Feminist Praxis 15 created at intimate scale through designed community engagements that privilege personal and community narratives, imagination, vulnerability, and consensus building. Continuing the circle of knowledge creation beyond the design and creation phases, we look for tangible ways of sharing the work through printed and digital publications. We build multiyear creative engagements and multi-platform projects around issues relevant to Black women, Black communities, BIPOC communities, and everyone else. Our primary focus is on saving ourselves and our communities using creative forms of expression to name the challenges that we face in our everyday lives and the larger systems of power that we operate within. We imagine and uplift systems that encourage our thriving beyond mere survival. Black feminist theory and praxis are the root of our creative and engagement processes. We have grown up with the Combahee River Collective’s defining ideas of multiple and interlocking forms of oppression as an experience creating new categories of inequality and suffering, understanding that it is the merging of those identities compounded that has historically created Black women’s oppression across race, gender, class, and sexuality. As they cogently state: ‘the synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives’ (Taylor 2017, 15). Like our forebears, we are invested in dialogue, theorising, and forms of expressivity as a path towards mutual understanding and as a way to name the political, economic, and social inequalities that keep us from liberation. HPP believes the seeds of our collective freedom lie in recognising multiple forms of knowledge production, in the practice of shared vulnerability, and in the practice of gathering and creative making in ways that model the future we want to manifest by imagining how power can be redistributed and restructured. We have moved slowly to get here. All of what we know and value about HPP has come from the learnings, the missteps, and the growth of two decades of making together organically. HPP does not force projects to come into being. We allow them to evolve at their own pace. We encourage them through continual practice. We build relationships and trust to grow a strong network of vested individuals committed to the greater cause of documenting and preserving Black cultural heritage and community knowledge. We stack this knowledge, drawing on the talents and skills of those making in the room with us. We are not afraid of shared leadership; we embrace the creative ideas and solutions our circle brings to the table. We grow stronger by acknowledging these gifts. The creative work in all of its spiderweb applications and emergence is the fruit of this long-term labour to learn how to make decisions together and to imagine worlds in which we are free to create ourselves and our communities as the most powerful and present images we can conjure. We lean into the creative as a tool for actualising our greater potential, interrogating and celebrating history, while constructing new possibilities for what we might become in a more equitable and just world.

16  M.T. McNeal

If/Then Movement 1 Intentional Out in the open Woman as. . . Movement 2 If two or more gather in the name of, that’s church. . . Far Eyes Movement 3 How do our ancestors remain with us? Out in the open Self-referencing 2 What divine instruments guide and shape our work? How do we tune in to higher plane energies? And how do we build from the power and magic of collective creative decision-making, using trust and intuition in concert with structured methods? If/Then brought HPP into conversation with five Black and Brown artists to investigate the ways spirit and intuition guide our practice. We explored aesthetics through hands-on engagement, building upon the use of binary systems and divination/divining as a central metaphor in our process. We engaged in fluid combinations of play and ritual—a series of incantations and spells, casting of shells, deconstructing lists of directions and tasks, sculpting a recipe book of invitation, love, and cooperative joy—to encourage collective magic. Phase One was an invitation to experiment, improvise, and play. From March to May, we spent one month with each of the featured artists keeping a weekly practice, switching them up monthly, and culminating in a public performance to play our divined scores for a witnessing audience. Visual artist Gloria Talamantes experimented with documenting these sessions as illustrations, which eventually became scenic and costume design elements. In Phase Two, HPP commissioned each of the artists to create new work inspired by the improvisational seeds generated in Phase One. Finally, Phase Three was a new works festival featuring all the artists in an interwoven performance recorded at Green Line Performing Arts Centre and stitching each of our sections together to make an original performance ritual based on our year-long creative gatherings. Early on in the process of If/Then, we solidified an opening ritual that always began with the words: ‘Mark Intention. Get Familiar. Listen. Build

Honey Pot Performance’s Black Feminist Praxis 17 relationships. Come together. Create the ritual. Perform the service. Make the offering’. Spoken individually and collectively, these words were the ensemble’s call to action, to tune in, and to pay reverence to this time, space, and creative connection we were about to share together. Our weekly practice in improvisational sound, movement, and image making became a soul edifying experience in the first months of the global pandemic. It kept us in our bodies. It kept us creating. It kept us connecting. The continuum of freedom and structure we gave ourselves through the process allowed us to experiment with locating connectivity in virtual space, while giving us clear parameters to work from. We chose a three-movement structure made of nine prompts (and divided into threes for each movement) to play a performance score of between 45 minutes to one hour each week. It was a test of endurance through Zoom’s virtual boxes: could we keep ourselves animated and attentive? We began to explore every aspect of our homes, inside and out, dancing under lamplight on an armchair in the corner of the room, exploring the back porch stairs, or running to a nearby park to take up more space. Our nine prompts kept us linked thematically and our three-movement structure gave us an opportunity to shift and extend the improvisational experiment. At the core of this process was the Africanist concept and practice of divining, spiritually guided choices that support one’s life pathway through the casting of ritual objects built on the binary of ‘yes’ and ‘no’, like a cowry or coconut shell. Binary systems are an integral part of African-descended divination practices, defined as both a way of coding information as well as two-part structures. These systems anchor planetary, temporal, material, and somato-emotional processes and interactions. Translated into HPP’s work, binary systems—as tools of divining—generate a body of choices guided by energetic connections, chance operations, and consistent practice. Simultaneously as we began this process, HPP had the serendipitous opportunity to be invited to be in conversation with Cuban artist Belkis Ayón’s work as part of Nkame, a solo retrospective exhibition of her work at the Chicago Cultural Centre. Through her large-scale printmaking, Ayón interrogated the male-dominated secret society of the Afro-Cuban religious group Abakuá. Investigating their founding myths, she created her own visual iconography, which both documented and interrogated the group’s narratives. In particular, she explored the ways women were (mis)represented through the figure of Princess Sikán—‘the woman who was put to death by men’, Ayón (2017) notes, ‘to recover the sacred voice’. In exploring Ayón’s work we found a kinship with her transgressive questioning of a male-dominated religion oppressive to women and her subsequent revisions of their icons and symbols to (re)create voice and presence for Princess Sikán.3 The If/Then project met two goals for HPP. First, the project explicitly articulated a relationship with ‘spirit’, an element of our performance lexicon that we wanted to explore and decode more fully. Over the years,

18  M.T. McNeal our core circle of collaborators has sought ways to centre performance as therapeutic space, as a modality to clarify our individual and collective sense of being, while also tapping an energetic reservoir that often feels heightened in the act of moving and creating together. Each of us has remarked that this way of manifesting energy feels like church, like an outof-body experience, and like catharsis, a cleansing of spirit that becomes necessary and supports us in our lives outside of studio and performance environments. HPP’s primary performance vocabulary often focuses on the healing power of touch, the trance-like qualities of repetition, lush and low weighted movement deep in the hips and torso, polyrhythmic chants, songs, and other soundmaking and poetic verse to build towards amplified connections and heightened presence. Second, it gave us space to act on an aspect of our updated mission: supporting and developing the work of other artists of colour. We reached out to five artists: Allegra Dolores, the musical storytelling sister duo of Asia Dee and Kimeco Roberson; Sojourner Zenobia, a performance and healing artist; Norman W Long, an experimental sound and jazz musician; and Gloria Talamantes, a visual artist. Each of these artists had similar elements of spirit and cultural heritage as part of their body of artistic work. We wanted to be in conversation with them through an experimental creative process where we could discuss and embody how spirit showed up in our work and why ancestors were important to acknowledge through performance as a portal of connection. For years, HPP’s core ensemble has discussed the ways spirit finds its way into our creative works. This presence is palpable in the direct experience of performing together. There is a life-affirming energy that gets turned on when we tap into the deepest parts of connecting in our creative processes and in the act of live performance. Many within our core creative circle are also engaged in African-based religions, particularly around practices of ancestral connection through altar keeping, divination, and by listening for messages and communication through the shifting energy of our exchanges in performance.4 Over the years, traces of these beliefs have made their way into the core of our performance practice. We often integrate rituals of acknowledgement for our ancestors within our works, whether it be a gesture to actual family lines or to larger diasporic Black familial heritage. In The Ladies Ring Shout (2021), we danced in and out of a large circular symbol patterned on the floor using cornmeal, sand, rocks, and other natural materials. This geometrical design was an allusion to the practice of making veves in Haitian Vodou, as a way to honour and connect to ancestors and spirits through the act of physically creating these symbols. In Juke Cry Hand Clap (2014), ancestral recognition showed up in a more secular manner as personal and collective narratives where we traced our introductions into house music culture through family and community connections. This might be a sibling taking someone to experience their first party, sneaking into the basement to watch older folks find release and

Honey Pot Performance’s Black Feminist Praxis 19 joy in music and dancing, or sharing urban myths about spaces dear to the local Black community. In ritualising our individual and collective history of Black heritage through our embodied experiences, we impress the importance of everyday actions and stories as critical components of Black knowledge production systems. These oral, aural, and performed talismans bring us protection and fortitude. As Black woman performance artist Phylicia Ghee notes, ritual performance is ‘about ritualizing the mundane—the things that seem very simple, but also are very complex. Ritual can be the simple things that we do but the ramifications are so deep for what we experience. Our [ritual] deconstructs or reconstructs [us] internally’ (quoted in Carroll, n.d.). This idea of elevating vernacular and lived experience is a core value and driving concept in HPP’s critical performance and public humanities works. We work to liberate our voices and create opportunities for others, in particular communities of colour, to do the same. We work to recognise the ways Black people, and Black women, make meaning in the world as valuable and as contributing to larger discourses of what it means to be human, even as these stories speak to the specificity of Black cultural experiences.

Chicago Black Social Culture Map Welcome to a love letter Welcome to this living archive Tonight we let loose an homage We renew our ancestral connection This is a pipeline to spirit power Here, we reside in sweat and sound and seduction And soul and soothsaying and the sweetest bittersweet Here in this city, Black Metropolis, Chi City We are the recipients of pullman porter gypsies And headstrong ‘fight to keep yo spirit alive’ workers We have been gifted the fortitude of grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts who refused to be defined only by the labors provided for other folks’ benefit Be vulnerable Let those rhythms cleanse you. Free your spirit. Transcend.

20  M.T. McNeal We are more than this work alone In social clubs and lounges and ballrooms We come alive Realized in all our pain and pleasure Embrace dissonance. Find harmony in chaos. Dance it all out. Give good hugs. Get High. Cry if you must. We build our own palaces Sacred spaces where we can be our full human selves We are the children of disco Transplanted Blackness along railroad routes and dark roads.5 After making several works exploring Chicago house music and dance in the 2000s, HPP began to identify this local urban folk tradition as a seminal influence in our approach to performance-making. The embrace of the vernacular, the intersection of the sacred and profane, the understanding of the body as an archive of cultural heritage, and the focus on the collective community’s health as inseparable from the individual’s own wellness were all aspects of a critical philosophy found in the social infrastructure of Chicago house music culture and community. These were also core elements of HPP’s own philosophy of making. After creating works that broached our personal histories with house—Househedz (2006)—and the role of women in house—Sweet Goddess (2011)—we wanted to explore house’s connections to the Black social culture histories that preceded it. Often, we would discuss that the parties and music we were listening and dancing to felt older than our moment, echoing rent parties, skate jams, jook joints, or neighbourhood lounges. With Juke Cry Hand Clap, we traced this shifting narrative of Black sociality alongside the Great Migration—the movement of Black folks from the South to the North of the US from the 1910s to the 1970s in search of better opportunities and freedom from the domestic terrorism of white racism under Jim Crow laws and policies. We wanted to embody the sense of freedom and remaking found in creating new Black social spaces in Northern US cities like Chicago, New York, and Detroit, catalysed by this historic migration. This period birthed a myriad of cabarets, ballrooms, and clubs for Black people to socialise and feel safe in as they practiced leisure and a sense of reclaimed dignity. In the city of Chicago, areas like The Stroll, covering 15 blocks on State Street between 26th and 39th Streets, represented a wave of early jazz innovation in the 1910s and 1920s. Later waves of Black social life emerged in the Bronzeville neighbourhood around 35th and State Street, and 47th Street and South Parkway: ‘at those intersections, people came to see and be seen,

Honey Pot Performance’s Black Feminist Praxis 21 shop, conduct business, dine and dance, and experience this bustling Black metropolis. The crowds reflected the diverse mix of people living in the Black Belt: young and old, poor and prosperous, professionals and laborers’ (WTTW, n.d.). Marking the tension of the migration journey in the search for better opportunities and affirmation of their own humanity, we also wanted to capture Black communities’ continued struggles as they moved North. As Isabel Wilkerson noted in The Warmth of Other Suns, ‘What bind[ed] these stories together was the back against the wall, reluctant yet hopeful search for something better, any place but where they were. They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left’ (2010). As people settled in spaces like Chicago’s Black Belt on the Southside, they were met with the realities of racism and social inequity in a new format. Often, they were crammed together under shoddy housing conditions, with a lack of access to proper heating and electricity in overcrowded and poorly maintained units causing public health hazards.6 Many white neighbourhood associations enacted restrictive covenants barring Black people from renting or owning their neighbourhoods. Later, after this practice was declared unconstitutional, it would morph into the practice of contract selling, where Black people bought homes on ‘contracts’ on instalments with high interest rates and without equity, since in most Black neighbourhoods mortgages were hard to access (Moore 2019). But, even in the face of these continued challenges, Black social culture would root itself throughout Chicago’s South and Westsides, emerging as jazz, blues, R&B, funk, disco, and house music, among others. With Juke Cry Hand Clap, HPP aimed to represent that evolution through historical archival research and personal stories. Our community-designed engagement featured a series of mapping exercises over six months of social parties meant to bring house into conversation with earlier musical styles or genres that influenced it, including blues, jazz, gospel, punk, new wave, and disco. Attendees entered a large open space with softly designated areas. Large maps with sections of the city were hung on the walls. People were given post-it notes and pens and asked to write down all the spaces that were part of their personal or community memory. As these spaces accumulated, folks would dialogue and debate about particular events that happened in them or when a space was replaced by another space, or even argue about where spaces actually were in the city. These conversations were supported by a DJ booth spinning an evening long set around a particular musical genre, sonically performing the ways house had been influenced by it. Finally, a set of tables were set up with individual maps for participants to complete and then share on the wall. The map survey included both personal memory and social context questions asking people to share their favourite DJs, house anthems, and dances to remembering fashion trends and brands, popular spots and intimate memories of clubbing, and notes on what was happening in the world when folks were at the height of their nightlife experiences. Across this

22  M.T. McNeal matrix of memory work, we were attempting to dive deep into the textures of Black oral history as both an individual and collective experience. The volume of the stories contributed became qualitative data to help inspire Juke Cry Hand Clap’s narrative and embodied structure, as well as the basis of HPP’s digital mapping work. That formative dataset is now the backbone of a living public and digital humanities initiative called the Chicago Black Social Culture Map (CBSCM). The online archive documents the lived experiences of Black Chicagoans from the Great Migration through the rise of house music, giving this chronically under-documented constituency an opportunity to see their stories and histories represented as written record and archive. The act of creating and sharing the CBSCM archive not only serves to insert this important segment of American history into the official canon, but also engages those whom the archive represents, inviting them to actively help to build and shape this historical record, and increase their agency from passive audience into participant and history-maker. The CBSCM features live programming, including DJ sets, artist performances, panels, conversations, as well as community archiving, and story mapping to continue growing the online map. Since 2014, through open sessions, targeted interviews, and multifaceted research, an enormous amount of data has been compiled on over 350 venues in the Chicagoland area. Materials in the collection include digitally recorded oral histories, digitised audio from cassette tapes, two-dimensional paper flyers, posters, small hand-held ‘pluggers’, and printed photographs, as well as fashion representing house music culture. Programs primarily take place in important cultural and social justice spaces on Chicago’s South and West Sides, following the history of our city’s Black social and cultural production. The 2019 programming featured six public events in neighbourhoods, including South Shore, Lawndale, Garfield Park, Hyde Park, and Humboldt Park, with over 900 online reservations. Host partnerships were developed with Westside Justice Centre, Centre on Halsted, DuSable Museum, Silver Room, Reunion Chicago, and Stony Island Arts Bank. Additional supporting partnerships included the Blackivists, Modern Dance Research & Archiving Foundation, Smithsonian Museum, and the Illinois Humanities’ Sojourner Scholars program. In that same year, we paid over 65 artists, speakers, moderators, and support staff to produce this range of programs. With the global pandemic in 2020, HPP migrated to virtual programs keeping pace with the previous year to produce six dates of online panels, discussions, and DJ sets. What began as a performance project has evolved into an emergent arm of HPP’s Black feminist praxis, privileging the stories of the Black and Brown, often queer and youth centred, community experts who created the culture and contribute to its next iterations as cultural history and social politics across dance music aesthetics, nightlife infrastructure, and theories of pleasure and leisure. This particular project demonstrated to us the potential power of performance and cultural work to organically grow

Honey Pot Performance’s Black Feminist Praxis 23 from an aesthetic container for social and cultural knowledge to an ongoing producing knowledge generator, using archiving, fieldwork, and cultural organising strategies to show the depth and breadth of Black cultural influence and knowledge making through forms of embodiment. It has led HPP to ask questions about the efficacy of our approach and methods for other civically engaged and educational platforms, inciting us to explore other opportunities to apply our Black feminist performance framework.

We Will Chicago During the early days of the global pandemic, I began a walking practice in my Albany Park neighbourhood. My favourite podcasts to listen to were all about exploring Black change agents and cultural stories. GirlTrek, a Black woman’s health program, encouraged women of colour to walk for more healthy lives while listening to curated historical stories about lesser-known Black women, communities, and social justice movements. Co-hosted by adrienne maree brown and Toshi Reagon, Octavia’s Parables offered a close reading of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), making prescient allusions between our current political struggles, climate change crisis, economic instability, increasing social unrest, and this speculative fiction tale. Developing a habit of daily walking and listening prompted me to revisit practices that were the cornerstones of what I first found so powerful about Black feminist praxis when I was introduced to this body of discourse in my high school and early college years. Issues of power, agency, and structural inequity were not abstract; they were personal and made real through acts of dialogue, storytelling, reflection, shared voice, loving critique, and learning together. Everything we need to know is already in our grasp. I was reminded to go back to basics. These lessons in walking and listening created space for my mind to meander, giving me time to consider HPP’s body of work, our slow organic approach to growing the collective, and what trajectory we might be on as we step towards the future. Shifting from a collective to nonprofit structure, we have begun to have lots of philosophical conversations about the kind of organisation we want to build and what kind of legacy we want to leave behind. We have also initiated processes to look closely not just at what we make creatively but how we make it. Can our creative community design processes be broken down into a curricular model? Is there a scope and sequence of exercises to be built around the ways we combine narrative, storytelling, movement, sound, and image to build theatrical and performed worlds? How do we honour our knowledge as a collective that understands how to convene groups to get them to do things together and to build consensus by creating? Finally, how do we recognise these two decades of evolving work as labour worthy of adequate compensation in a world that tends to not recognise facilitation, teaching, or relational work as such?

24  M.T. McNeal We received two opportunities to begin to tease these questions out through practice. One grant allowed us to build a curricular model by revisiting our works since 2010 and piloting a sequence of workshops to get further feedback as we fine tune what communities to approach and share our work with. We were also selected as lead public engagement artists for We Will Chicago (2020), a multiyear citywide master planning initiative that gives us an opportunity to apply our creative community design and facilitation knowledge to a municipal urban planning effort. HPP will work with a core group of artists and community organisers to guide the work. Artist and organiser teams will be selected, aligned with the seven core pillar issues affecting residents’ quality of life: housing, economic development, infrastructure and transportation, arts and culture, health, environment, energy and climate, and lifelong learning. Each artist and organiser team will focus on one pillar in a community anchor hub (e.g., storefront, church, garden) activating that site with vibrant programming opportunities to engage around that issue through workshops, conversations, design exercises, knowledge, and skill shares, among others, to illuminate ideas and concepts that are most important to the community’s interests. A mobile team will also be implemented covering the rest of the city with its own set of workshops and activities to engage communities in all of the core pillars while making residents aware of the unique hub activations. Following a period of learning, experimenting, making, and dialogue, each hub will generate an action plan and some form of creative output based on the core ideas, solutions, and recommendations that emerge from their time together. Communities will work with the artist and organiser teams to realise these outputs as creative work, series, or other public-facing actions. The framework of HPP’s approach to this project draws on our body of work while also being inspired by the Fifth City model, a radical community experiment from the 1960s to the 1980s in Chicago’s Garfield Park. Fifth City’s work was about scale, consensus-building strategies, and focusing on community as leaders, experts, and problem solvers. So is ours. We look at the lessons we can apply in our current moment moving towards more equitable neighbourhood-based planning. The artist engagement facilitated by HPP attempts to reach both the depth and breadth of the city. By designing a community-centred process focused on creative dialogue, interactive participation, and consensus building, our process will emphasise strategic thinking, patience, and agile imagination in city visioning, planning, and implementation. As we embark on this work, we are reaching out to a cross section of emerging and established cultural workers and community organisers with rooted relationships in neighbourhoods. As we co-create our model, our guiding questions include the following: • •

What do we want to keep? What do we want to change? What is urgent right now?

Honey Pot Performance’s Black Feminist Praxis 25 • •

Communities are fatigued with planning exercises. Why another asset gathering and planning exercise? What are the incentives to participate? What do residents get back? What does reciprocity look like? How do we position artists, organisers, residents, and other local stakeholders as experts, knowledgeable contributors, and problem solvers?

HPP will harness this process not only to support the creation of a people-centred citywide plan, but also to uplift Chicago’s neighbourhood cornerstones, who are foundational to change across the city. We believe change has to happen at the neighbourhood level to be sustained. The current pandemic’s focus on mutual aid and collective care also resonates as neighbourhoods organise food pantries, rent drives, and other forms of support to provide resources for the most vulnerable. We believe people and communities can create solutions if they can access the right resources to implement them. We will work to reimagine how communities can engage with city departments and civic institutions—from planning, transportation, and public health to arts and culture, parks, libraries, and schools—to foster a different kind of exchange and support. We will imagine together what this new city could be like. This work in curriculum and model building represents HPP’s most ambitious leap into knowledge production yet. This work stretches the limits of our collective imagination and capacity. We have to trust each other and the weight of our history together to construct nuanced platforms that will address learning at all levels—from youth to adults and from individuals to communities—while also addressing the intersectional complexities of our unique experiences and simultaneously continuing to centre Black woman queer identities as the compass that orients all of our endeavours. The work also continues to demonstrate the importance of rooting in the simple building blocks of listening and learning together. Standing in kinship with late politician and activist John Lewis, who spoke about his civil and human rights work as an ‘intricate art’ of practicing ‘love in action’, HPP imagines our work as a practice of liberation from the hyper-capitalist systems that force us to compete and invest in destructive energies. In an interview with Krista Tippett, Lewis (2020) laid out the practices civil rights activists used to commit to their work and (nonviolent) approach during the volatile 1960s. The combination of learning, doing, and listening strategies Lewis outlined aligns with HPP’s work. He defined these tools as: research and study to understand the core principles of why the work is necessary; role play and practice to be ready when challenging moments of action arise; investment in love, vulnerability, and trust as values that keep us human; co-creation and co-presence to keep us collectively invested and activated in our goals; defining sacred spaces to allow for moments of ritual, listening, and intimate connection; and defining public space to help us better understand how to gather with intention. This body of life-affirming practices ultimately contributes to our collective health

26  M.T. McNeal and wellness and our future potential towards thriving as we evolve and transform towards more just versions of selves.

The Ladies Ring Shout 2022 As part of our celebration of 20 years of our own longevity and persistence, HPP is revisiting one of our seminal productions, The Ladies Ring Shout. This project represents a shift in our ways of making. We began to evolve our approach from being based solely in autobiographical or autoethnographic stories to illuminate cultural and social issues. The Ladies Ring Shout demonstrates HPP’s turn towards designing creative community experiences that generate the stories and data that serve as the source material for our performances. Initiated as a women’s weekly creative workshop in response to the economic crash of 2008–2009, we gathered to have a space for Black women to express our anxieties and to work towards articulating our needs in the moment. What emerged were powerful stories and vulnerabilities touching all spheres of our lives that we then decided to shape into The Ladies Ring Shout, a Black women’s quality of life performance. Revisiting The Ladies Ring Shout allows HPP to do a community audit of what has gotten better, stayed the same, or in some cases, worsened around issues concerning Black women’s quality of life conditions since we created that work a decade ago. Like the workshop curriculum project, this project allows HPP to revisit the longevity of our practice together through a work that was pivotal to what has now become our established community engagement process. The Ladies Ring Shout 2022 uses the everyday tools we draw from in our smaller circles of woman-centred support— sharing words and laughter, divulging secrets, engaging images, text, rhythm, movement, and other forms of expression—in order to cope, to function, to heal, and to thrive. The work seeks to widen the scope of representational possibilities for Black women. We will deconstruct the original work with a company of up to 15 Black women, representing an age range of 16–80. As a large company, we will convene the whole group to experience the original workshop sequence that inspired the making of the first production. We will then break the work into scenes where section leaders will use creative facilitation to revise and recreate those scenes for this contemporary moment. While the performance will build a cohesive experience out of the workshop themes and exercises, the actual workshop will concentrate on articulating the unique voices and perspectives of workshop members. Phase one of the workshop introduces participants to each other and establishes a rhythm for the workshop process. Phase two focuses on themes critical to Black women’s lives depicted in the work such as representation, love and relationships, scars/trauma, work-life balance, quality of life, nurturing and parenting, spirituality, healing, and defining our communities of care. Creative writing and embodied exercises will be supplemented with experiments in other artistic mediums including

Honey Pot Performance’s Black Feminist Praxis 27 collective play with still image, video, audio and reading excerpts from the work of relevant Black women writers and poets. Finally, as part of HPP’s practice, we will translate the new version of the work into some form of tangible format of knowledge production as a final gesture of the creation process. This could be a book, a website, a curriculum, or a set of tarot cards. With The Ladies Ring Shout 2022, we imagine working with the whole ensemble to decide what our lasting gesture will be for this work. Like the other works explored in this essay, The Ladies Ring Shout 2022 is evidence of HPP’s long and historical commitment to devising multidisciplinary performance from a Black feminist perspective. We feel compelled to do this work, this labour in both the private space of a workshop and the public testimonial space of performance, revitalising the call to action articulated by our Black & Brown feminist foremothers—Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Barbara Christian, Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, M. Jacqui Alexander, Patricia Hill Collins, and Ntozake Shange. We echo the lessons Sherri L. Barnes (2020) eloquently summarises in the introduction to her online Black feminist bibliography: ‘As Black women have become cognizant of the multiple systemic forces of oppression, they have pursued collective actions for social change, transforming society and themselves through their own agency and self-determination’. I end with the closing words of our initial summary of the women’s workshop. Written ten years ago, they are still incredibly relevant today: We will save ourselves. And by saving ourselves, we will then extend a hand to other Black girls and women who are in need of space and support. By beginning with the empowerment of the individual, we gradually evolve to empower the group. We build together as an invested community of mutual care. (Original Ladies Ring Shout Workshop Guide, 2010)

Notes 1. Note the recent initiatives considering the racist origins of many historical monuments. See the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project and Chicago Monuments Commission at https://mellon.org/initiatives/monuments/ and https://chicagomonuments.org/, respectively. 2. 9 prompt/3 movement structure for If/Then divining structured improvisation process from April 2020. 3. For further information on Ayón’s Nkame, visit https://www.chicago.gov/ city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/nkame.html. 4. According to UNESCO’s (n.d.) Intangible Cultural Heritage List, ‘Ifa divination does not rely on a person having oracular powers but rather on a system of signs that are interpreted by a diviner, the Ifa priest or babalawo, literally “the priest’s father”. The Ifa divination system is applied whenever an important individual or collective decision has to be made’. 5. Excerpt from Juke Cry Hand Clap (2014), ‘Welcome/Opening’. 6. https://www.chipublib.org/housing/ (site discontinued).

28  M.T. McNeal

Works Cited Ayón, Belkis. 2017. ‘Interview by Ines Anselmi, Zurich’. The Von Christierson Collection. https://www.withoutmasks.org/es/video/14-interview-with-belkisaayon-manso-by-ines-anselmi/ Barnes, Sherri L. 2020. ‘Introduction’. Black American Feminisms: A Multi­ disciplinary Bibliography, June 22. http://blackfeminism.library.ucsb.edu/ introduction.html brown, adrienne maree, and Toshi Reagon. 2021. Octavia’s Parables, produced by Kat Aaron, podcast. https://www.readingoctavia.com/#about-home Butler, Octavia E. 1993. Parable of the Sower. New York, NY: Warner Books. Carroll, Angela N. n.d. ‘Decolonizing Performance Art: Phylicia Ghee Uses Ritual Performance to Heal the Generational Trauma of Black Women’. Black Art in America, accessed May 12, 2021. https://www.blackartinamerica.com/ index.php/2019/10/23/decolonizing-performance-art-phylicia-ghee-uses-ritualperformance-to-heal-the-generational-trauma-of-black-women/ Chicago Black Social Culture Map, 2018, produced by Honey Pot Performance, the Modern Dance Music Research and Archiving Foundation, the Blackivists, and a team of local cultural historians and cultural producers, mapping arts project, accessed July 1, 2021. https://www.honeypotperformance.org/about-the-cbscm Honey Pot Performance, dir. Meida McNeal, creative Afro-diasporic feminist collaborative, accessed May 12, 2021. https://www.honeypotperformance.org/ Househedz, 2006, produced by Honey Pot Performance, performance work. http:// househedz.wetpaint.com/ (site discontinued). If/Then 2021, produced by Honey Pot Performance, performance work, accessed July 1, 2021. https://www.honeypotperformance.org/if-then Juke Cry Hand Clap, 2014, produced by Honey Pot Performance, performance work. https://www.honeypotperformance.org/juke-cry-hand-clap Lewis, John. 2020. ‘Remembering John Lewis’. Interview by Krista Tippett, July 23. https://podtail.com/en/podcast/on-being/remembering-john-lewis/ Moore, Natalie. 2019. ‘Contract Buying Robbed Black Families in Chicago of Billions’. NPR, May 30. https://www.npr.org/local/309/2019/05/30/728122642/ contract-buying-robbed-black-families-in-chicago-of-billions Original Ladies Ring Shout Workshop Guide. 2010. Unpublished. Sweet Goddess, dir. Meida McNeal, chor. Meida McNeal in collaboration with Abra Johnson, Boogie McClarin, and Ni’Ja Whitson. 2011. Produced by Honey Pot Performance, multimedia dance theater work. https://www.honeypotperformance.org/sweet-goddess Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. 2017. ‘The Combahee River Collective Statement’. In How We Got Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, 15–17. Chicago: Haymarket Books. The Ladies Ring Shout. 2021, produced by Honey Pot Performance, performance work, 90 mins, accessed May 11, 2021. https://www.honeypotperformance.org/ the-ladies-ring-shout UNESCO. n.d. ‘Ifa Divination System’. Intangible Cultural Heritage, accessed May 11, 2021. https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/ifa-divination-system-00146 We Will Chicago, 2020, Citywide Planning Initiative, accessed July 1, 2021. https:// www.honeypotperformance.org/we-will-chicago

Honey Pot Performance’s Black Feminist Praxis 29 Wilkerson, Isabel. 2010. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Random House. WTTW. n.d. ‘Bronzeville: The Black Metropolis’. DuSable to Obama: Chicago’s Black Metropolis, accessed May 12, 2021. https://interactive.wttw.com/ dusable-to-obama/bronzeville

3

THE PERFORMANCE OF BLACK YOUTH MASCULINITY IN BOLA AGBAJE’S AND MOJISOLA ADEBAYO’S COUNCIL-ESTATE PLAYS Paola Prieto López

Council-Estate Plays In 1993 Black British teenager Stephen Lawrence was fatally stabbed by a group of white teenagers in a racially motivated attack. A public enquiry into the case led to the publication of the Macpherson Report six years later, which concluded that the police investigation was ‘marred by a combination of professional incompetence, institutional racism and a failure of leadership’ (Quinn 2019). The public inquiry and the release of the report resulted in the increasing recognition of the impact that racism still has in contemporary Britain. The emergence of urban plays dealing with violence, crime, and social issues affecting the lives of Black Britons during the first decade of the twenty-first century responds to the rising number of racist incidents following the death of Stephen Lawrence. As Lynette Goddard points out, ‘the Stephen Lawrence case has a directly measurable impact on arts policy and it also arguably seems to have affected the topics of Black playwrighting in the new millennium, in particular heralding the prevalence of urban plays about vulnerable and disenfranchised Black teenage boys and young men’ (2015, 10). In 2003, Kwame Kwei-Armah premiered Elmira’s Kitchen, the first play written by a Black British playwright to open in the West End. This was followed by plays such as Roy Williams’ Fallout, which also premiered in 2003, debbie tucker green’s random (2008), and more recent ones such as Rachel De-lahay’s The Westbridge (2011) and Arinze Kene’s God’s Property (2013), all of them addressing the issue of inner-city life, knife-crime, and violence. Elmira’s Kitchen certainly marked the beginning of a decade in which a remarkable presence of Black British playwrights could be seen on the London mainstream stages, which made Kwei-Armah himself refer to this period as indicative of a cultural renaissance in Black British drama (Davis 2006, 246). However, council-estate plays have often been received with mixed-reactions. On the one hand, they have been subject to extensive criticism for perpetuating stereotypical views of the Black urban experience, which have been interpreted as responding to the programming interest of a white-male DOI: 10.4324/9781003162759-4

The Performance of Black Youth Masculinity 31 dominated industry in producing ‘ghetto plays’ (Goddard 2015, 13). As a result, the increased visibility of Black British drama at the beginning of the new millennium has taken place at the expense of narrowing the opportunities for Black British playwrights to explore other themes. From the now famous statement made by Patricia Cumper, former director of Talawa Theatre company, ‘I will not put another dead young man on the stage’ (2012, 419), to critic Lyndsay Johns’ assertion that ‘Black theatre is blighted by its ghetto mentality’ (2010), plays set in council estates have often been underrated for reinforcing an essentialist vision of Black communities. In a more positive tone, however, D. Keith Peacock points out that, while it is true that some playwrights address the programming interests set by mainstream theatre, it is also the case that some of ‘these themes are promoted not only by directorial demands, current theatrical stereotypes or by the requirements of diversity funding, but by personal experience of negotiating a place within a multiracial society’ (2015, 155). The council estate, as well as its dramatic representation, has been discussed as an ambivalent space in contemporary British drama, which serves to both contest and reinforce the fixed depictions of Black innercity life that are prevalent in national discourses (Bell and Beswick 2014, 120; Beswick 2019). In her monograph on social housing in performance, Katie Beswick (2019) coins the term ‘council-estateness’ precisely to refer to this set of negative representations associated with people dwelling in these spaces. Bell and Beswick (2014) also contend that these narratives often centre around the authenticity of these performances by framing them in terms of the real-life experiences of their playwrights, thus problematising the separation between the real and the represented.1 Much of this criticism stems from the limitations of the realist conventions employed in most of the contemporary performances of the council estate. However, scholars such as Mireia Aragay and Eric Monforte have challenged the view that it is only through formal experimentation, as opposed to the social realism employed by playwrights such as Bola Agbaje, that the perception of audience members can be challenged in theatre (2013, 96). In Lynette Goddard’s view, these plays may still ‘encourage critical reflection on the predominant issues of crime, violence, and aggression that are particularly associated with young working-class masculinity in London’ (2015, 158). As is argued here, by putting the spotlight on the circumstances that motivate young men to make poor choices associated with deviant behaviour and criminality, audience members are asked to reflect on the reasons that force these subjects to choose a particular lifestyle. Bola Agbaje is a critically acclaimed playwright born in London of Nigerian parents. Her first play, Gone Too Far!, premiered at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs in 2007 and, like Off the Endz, performed also at the Royal Court in 2010, deals with the representation and performance of Black urban experience in the city’s inner spaces, where she grew up. 2

32  P. Prieto López Although her plays have been examined in terms of the identity politics they portray and, specifically, the combination of West-African and Caribbean influences (Ekumah 2015; Goddard 2015; Pearce 2017), reviewers have often overlooked their potential in defying more traditional council-estate plays by portraying characters in a more positive light in the final scenes. Gone Too Far! (2007) deals with two brothers of African descent negotiating their identities in multicultural London. Ikudayisi was born in Nigeria, speaks Yoruba, and has recently arrived in London, whereas Yemi, born in England, actively rejects his roots by aligning himself with dominant notions of Black male youth and street culture. Set in a run-down council estate, marked by the graffiti on the walls, the play focuses on the conflicts encountered by the two brothers as they are asked to go to the shop around the corner to get some milk for their mother. What at the beginning seems a fairly simple errand complicates as the siblings encounter a Pakistani shop owner, who refuses to allow Yemi into the shop because he is wearing a hoodie; an old white woman who mistakenly thinks Ikudayisi is trying to rob her when he tries to help with her bags; and two police officers who accuse Yemi of being under the influence of drugs and try to arrest him. These scenes underline dominant perceptions of Black men as hustlers and muggers, pointing to ‘the perceived threat of the Black Other—the “alien”, the “stranger”’ (Alexander 1996, 5). Things further complicate as they come across a gang of Black teenagers on their way back home and get into a fight with them, which ends up with the accidental stabbing of Ikudayisi. The play finishes with Ikudayisi at home recovering, and Yemi rejecting the world of the streets and proudly embracing his African identity. In Off the Endz, Agbaje depicts a working-class Black couple living on a council estate, but in search of social mobility. The couple’s plans to move off the estate and get a better life are frustrated when David, a friend who has recently been released from prison, arrives at their place and pushes Kojo, the protagonist, into the business of drug dealing. As with Ikuyadisi in Gone Too Far!, Kojo gets shot by a gang of teenagers, but he recovers and chooses another path in the end. Mojisola Adebayo is a British actor, director, playwright, and theatre maker from Nigerian and Danish descent. Moj of the Antarctic, which premiered in 2005 at the Lyric Hammersmith, marked the beginning of her career as a playwright, and was followed by plays such as Muhammed Ali and Me, performed at the Oval House in London in 2008, and Matt Henson, North Star at the Lyric Hammersmith in 2012, each of them having a clear political and social agenda which reflects her own interest in using the potential of performance as a tool for social change (Goddard 2011, 12). Her work is illustrative of her diasporic subjectivity, which is reflected not only in the themes that she chooses to address in her plays, but also in their characteristic Afro-diasporic aesthetics (12). Her first commission, Desert Boy, dedicated to Stephen Lawrence, is also her first knife-crime play. It was produced by NITRO and the Albany and first

The Performance of Black Youth Masculinity 33 performed at the Albany Theatre in South London in 2010, before going on a national tour. Although she recognises that she is not interested in portraying conventional stereotypical views of Black-on-Black violence, she acknowledges the potential of ‘looking at the subject of crime and positioning a young Black man, particularly in Britain today, through a different kind of lens’ to make the audience question and challenge their prejudices and stereotypes (Adebayo 2017). Desert Boy differs considerably from the other two plays examined in this chapter, not only in terms of its form, which distances itself from the social realism employed by Agbaje through the incorporation of music, a capella singing, dance, and movement (Goddard 2011, 15), but also with respect to its structure and the themes addressed. The opening of the play takes us to Deptford Beach in London, as we observe Soldier Boy, a young Black male from South London, with a knife stuck in his abdomen bleeding to death. Desert Man, a mysterious character from another time who emerges from the sand of the beach, draws on the historical figure of John Caesar, a slave who lived in Deptford in the 1780s and later became a convict who was sent to Australia, denoting Adebayo’s taste for historical characters. From this point onwards, the play takes us on a journey through the history of colonialism and slavery as Soldier Boy and Desert Man travel back in time. This is powerfully achieved through a series of flashback scenes in which, guided by the character of Desert Man, we travel to Timbuktu, Desert Man’s native city, then through the Middle Passage to the US, where he is sold as a slave and fights for the British, and finally back to the UK, where he is arrested for theft and sent to Botany Bay, in Australia. Through this series of flashbacks, combined with Soldier Boy’s memories of the events which led him to Deptford Beach after a dispute with other members of the gang he belongs to, Adebayo establishes a connection between the past and the present, specifically highlighting the legacies of colonialism in contemporary constructions of Black male youth identity (Goddard 2011, 15–16). By doing so, she reflects on peer-pressure, the effect of slavery on family structures, and the impact of the absence of Black male role models for criminalised youth. The three plays under consideration here, all set in deprived areas of the city of London and sharing similar plot lines, explore in depth issues of disenfranchisement and criminality, hypermasculinity, and Black-on-Black violence. However, although their argument seems to point to traditional knife-crime plays dealing with urban violence and aggressive Black masculinities on council estates, I argue that they in fact significantly differ from them by offering alternatives, which I explore by contrasting the performance of hegemonic masculinity with depictions of progressive masculinities. This can be seen particularly in the final scenes of these plays, where the main characters reject and contest the system by transcending their circumstances and moving away from toxic conceptions of Black masculinity.

34  P. Prieto López

Young Black Masculinities in the UK Claire Alexander’s monograph The Art of Being Black continues to be one of the most important studies on Black masculinities in the UK. Alexander contends that research on Black masculinities tends to perceive the Black peer group as ‘a form of status inversion’ (1996, 136) by means of which Black youth create ‘an alternative value system’ which produces the ‘illusion of status and power’ (133) that they are unable to achieve in society. This Black subculture upon which a Black youth identity is formed is often developed in parallel with the performance of a form of hegemonic masculinity that emphasises hypermasculinity and ‘toughness’ (Mac an Ghaill 1994, 187), reflected in the youths’ speech, body language, clothing style, and social relationships, often influenced by Jamaican and American sources (Gunter 2008, 352). The performance of this form of hegemonic masculinity has often been explored in its historical dimension in connection with the legacy of colonialism (Mercer 1994; hooks 2004; Monrose 2020). In her book We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, bell hooks underlines how ‘in patriarchal culture, all males learn a role that restricts and confines. When race and class enter the picture, along with patriarchy, then Black males endure the worst impositions of gendered masculine patriarchal identity’ (2004, x). For hooks, contemporary Black masculinities were shaped in plantation cultures during slavery, when Black males learnt to safeguard their masculinity through the violent domination of others. Along this same line, Kobena Mercer also asserts that ‘Black male gender identities have been historically and culturally constructed’ and, as a result, ‘Black men have adopted certain patriarchal values such as physical strength, sexual prowess and being in control as a means of survival against the repressive and violent system of subordination to which they were subjected’ (1994, 137). In contrast to this form of hegemonic masculinity, Athena Mutua’s groundbreaking book Progressive Black Masculinities focuses on an alternative model, which she terms ‘progressive’ and defines as ‘innovative performances of the masculine self that eschew dominance and are engaged in the struggle to transform social structures of domination’ (2006, xxii). For her, this conception of progressive masculinities should be in direct opposition to both patriarchy and white supremacy, the two pillars upon which hegemonic masculinities are constructed. Judith Butler’s theory of performativity is a useful tool through which we can examine how Black male youth identity is performed by the main characters in the plays. According to Butler (1988, 1990), gender is conceived as a social construction which is enacted through repetition. As a result, a hegemonic model of masculinity is portrayed by the main characters in the plays through their speech, attitude, style, and behaviour towards others. While Butler problematises the issue of agency in her study, Alexander’s research on Black youth masculinities in Britain focuses on how these

The Performance of Black Youth Masculinity 35 identities are not fixed but rather ‘created and re-created as part of an ongoing and dynamic process’. In this she departs from the idea of Black cultural identity being ‘externally defined and structurally constrained’ and her perspective is based instead on ‘a collection of individual lives, choices and experiences’ (1996, 18). It is precisely by considering the notion of choices and agency that I will focus my analysis on how the main characters in the three plays move from a model of hegemonic masculinity towards more progressive identities.

Staging Hegemonic Black Masculinities The impact that the legacies of colonialism have on contemporary constructions of Black male identity can be examined in a number of ways in the plays under analysis. On the one hand, all of them explore the performance of hegemonic masculinity by foregrounding the main characters’ obsession with emasculation, weakness, or the need to control and dominate others, a preoccupation which is strongly marked by the environment in which they have to perform this identity: the council estate. Crucially, instances of patriarchal masculinity in Gone Too Far! and Off the Endz can also be considered in association with the idea of the characters ‘actively owning the space they occupy’ (Ekumah 2015, 189) and deploying a strong sense of territorial control (Mac an Ghaill 1994; Archer and Yamashita 2003). Both Yemi and the other gang members in Gone Too Far!, and David in Off the Endz, seem to assert their masculinity through their efforts to gain control of the estate as a physical space, to the point that they embody it, as illustrated by David’s assertion: ‘Bruv, I am the endz’ (Agbaje 2010, 59). Gaining respect in the council estate is often achieved through violence and confrontation with other gang members who dispute the leader’s authority. As Yemi contends in Off the Endz: ‘In this country you ain’t got to look for trouble before it finds you. Can you not see dat? If you don’t go for what is yours, they will always think you’re a dickhead. If you don’t stand your ground’ (Agbaje 2007, 72). The construction of the characters’ identity, grounded in a dominant model of masculinity, can also be observed in the characters’ clothing and way of walking, as well as in their style of speech. The use of the hoodie, as a defining indicator of this street identity, is explained by Charlotte Bell both as a marker of difference and criminality, but also as a strategy of resistance: The word ‘hoodie’ (a vernacular term for a hooded sweatshirt—a key piece of urban street fashion) has racial connotations and has become a derogatory signifier for urban youth crime, often leveraged to support increased surveillance and policing. In the UK, the ‘hoodie’ has dominated understandings of the need for increased surveillance and policing city centres, as well as emerging as a symbol of resistance to these practices, most notably during and after the 2011 riots. (2013, 38)

36  P. Prieto López Stereotypical associations between Black male violence and the hoodie are present in Gone Too Far!, when the Bangladeshi shop keeper denies Yemi entrance to his shop for wearing one. Similarly, Soldier Boy in Desert Boy also wears a hoodie and walks limping in a street-like style (2011, 181). Majors and Billson explain how this style associated with Black masculinity is another strategy Black young men deploy to achieve presence and display their power (1992, 73). At another level, their use of language works as a boundary making mechanism, ‘signaling both membership to the group and difference from the others’ among male peer groups (Alexander 1996, 56), as is illustrated by the characteristic ‘z’ in Off the Endz, as well as in the differential use of street slang by the main characters. In this respect, hooks asserts that: young males embrace a notion of cool that is about getting pussy and getting ready to kill (or at least to make somebody think you can kill) because as an identity this one is easier to come by than the quest to know the self and to create a life of meaning. (2004, 146) This is reflected in the street names adopted by the gang members in both Gone Too Far! and Desert Boy: Razer, Flamer, and Blazer in the former, and General, Sergeant, Corporeal, Savage, and Soldier Boy in the latter, all of which are associated with defending their space. The performance of hypermasculinity and aggressive behavior is considered a way of fitting in by the characters and a strategy for survival in these spaces that, according to hooks, responds to the images portrayed in the media: A biased imperialist white-supremacist patriarchal mass media teaches young Black males that the street will be their only home. And it lets mainstream Black males know that they are just an arrest away from being on the street. This media teaches young Black males that the patriarchal man is a predator, that only the strong and the violent survive. (26) In this regard, Black masculinity often echoes the ‘white hegemonic master model, in which the acquisition of a masculine identity always appears to depend on the “othering” of someone else’s’ (Mercer 1994, 167). In Gone Too Far!, Yemi, the youngest of the two siblings, embodies this model of patriarchal masculinity by reinforcing stereotypes of migrants and intimidating the owner of the shop who has refused him entry: ‘That’s what I can’t stand bout you Indians! Smelling of curry, coming over here, taking up all the corner shops, and man can’t buy nothing’ (Agbaje 2007, 12). Issues of the domination of others as a way of asserting one’s identity are also linked to inter-group conflicts and the competition between the Caribbean and African youth in Gone Too Far, where characters identify the Caribbean style and accent with holding power and running the estate,

The Performance of Black Youth Masculinity 37 whereas they see Africa as backward. This can be seen in the way Yemi mocks his own brother: I don’t know what you are complaining bout. Don’t you have to walk miles in Nigeria to get water? And now you’re in England you going on like you can’t even walk. We haven’t even gone far. That’s the problem with you people straight from the bush, you get to this country and want bare luxuries. (15) The exception to this is Blazer, who has managed to become the gang leader, despite proudly accepting his Nigerian identity and having a respectful attitude towards others. Like Yemi in Gone Too Far!, Soldier Boy in Adebayo’s play directs his racist attacks at Desert Man claiming, ‘That’s why dis areas mashed. Too many Somalis’ (164), after he misunderstands Desert Man’s origins are in Somalia and not in Mali, or his repeating of racist stereotypes when Desert Man tries to treat him after the attack: ‘Salt? What, you gonna season me, put me in a pot and eat me, you African foo’ (165). These comments highlight how, as Patricia Hill Collins contends, ‘Black men are harmed and constrained by these images [dominant representations of Black men as weak or violent] and the underlying vision of masculinity as dominance. To the extent that they internalize this thesis, their own strategies to combat their oppression will be misguided’ (2006, 75). At another level, the representation of patriarchal masculinity in relation to the pressures imposed by the capitalist system to acquire material goods is best observed in Agbaje’s 2010 play. Sharon and Kojo want to buy a new house and get off the council estate or ‘off the endz’, as the title of the play suggests, and so Kojo feels trapped between what hooks refers to as ‘an old version of patriarchy’—that is, of being the provider, and a new version which is ‘overtly informed by the reality of advanced capitalism’, in which ‘man as worker is a slave or cheap laborer’ (2004, 16). The tension between these two versions of masculinity is prompted by the arrival of David, the epitome of hypermasculinity, who forces Kojo into making various bad choices and sacrificing his values of hard work and integrity in favour of taking the path he thinks will ensure the prevalence of his authentic masculinity—that is, into drug dealing and easy money. David refers throughout the play to the idea of hypermasculinity and his urge to assert his identity, ridiculing Kojo for his metaphorical emasculation. In many cases, this hypermasculinity is related to the need to dominate women. This can be observed not only in David’s misogynist comments to Keisha, the secretary who works at Kojo’s office, but also the multiple times when he urges his friend to get his wife under control: ‘Rah. Look at how you two operate, Sharon has you on lock’ (Agbaje 2010, 27); or ‘you’re the man of the house, you need to be talking to your gal. Tell her to shut her mouth when she starts talking bout rules. . . Shut it for her if

38  P. Prieto López you need to!’ (34). From David’s arrival, slight changes in Kojo’s attitude become apparent as he starts imitating David’s behaviour and, in turn, becomes more violent with Sharon. Throughout the play, David constantly alludes to Kojo’s inability to perform like a real man, repeatedly telling his friend: ‘it’s time for you to be a man’ (6). Kojo ends up assimilating David’s speech towards the end of the play when he emphatically asserts to his wife: ‘I’M THE MAN OF THIS HOUSE’ (66). His identity, in this sense, is constituted throughout the play through this reiteration, or as Butler states, ‘an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’ (1988, 519). When Kojo gets fired from his job, he sees his masculinity threatened for not being able to be the provider of the house, which makes him put all their savings into David’s drug dealing business so as to be able to pay the bills and ensure they are able to get the mortgage for the house that would allow them to finally move out of the estate. Kojo’s loss of power in the public sphere is countered by his reassertion of his male control in private at home with Sharon. His change of behaviour can be interpreted, following Mairtin Mac an Ghaill’s theorisation, as a strategy ‘to challenge current white institutional practices that - [Black men] see as attempting to “emasculate them”’ (1994, 188). By turning to an illegal activity, he thus tries to avoid his emasculation: ‘I don’t wanna be that guy, the one that can’t provide for his family’ (Agbaje 2010, 50). At the same time, we are made aware of his disillusionment with the system, which fails him, and which in the end he uses to justify his poor choices: ‘I worked my ass off at work. Came in early, left late and they never noticed. Not once. When the stock market crashed and all the banks were losing money—how many Black faces did you see on TV? How many of our stories did they show?’ (66). The powerlessness derived from his inability to successfully perform the role of the man of the house as breadwinner and being fired from his job thus justifies, he feels, his decision to resort to illicit activities as a means to regain control. At the same time, Agbaje directs the audience’s attention to how the system keeps failing Black people. Another recurrent theme in studies of Black masculinities is that of absent fathers or the lack of Black male role models. According to Alexander, ‘images of teenage single motherhood, illegitimacy, matriarchal households, absent fathers, identity crises, gender and intergenerational conflict have all been combined to construct the Black family as mutilated and dysfunctional’ (1996, 65). As a result, the Black family has often been depicted as the source of Black male youth criminality (Alexander 1996; hooks 2004; Monrose 2020). Although Yemi and Ikudayisi in Gone Too Far! are raised in a female single-parent home, the issue of male role models is more clearly addressed in Desert Boy, where Adebayo resorts to humour and word play when Soldier Boy reflects on the relationship between his real surname, Watson, and his father’s abandonment: ‘Watson. What son? Said Dad. Walked out the door and never came back. Mum named me Junior after some one hit wonder. But it’s supposed to be “something” Junior innit?

The Performance of Black Youth Masculinity 39 Martin Luther King Junior, George Bush Junior. . . Just call me Soldier Boy’ (Adebayo 2011, 169). Interestingly, the play on words focuses attention on the implications of Black male youth ascribing themselves a street identity and a gang family in the absence of positive Black male role models. Yet, through the character of Desert Man, who also abandons his pregnant wife-to-be when he escapes from slavery, Soldier Boy learns about the importance of making the right life choices by choosing an alternative path.

A Turn to Progressive Masculinities The performance of patriarchal masculinities in the three plays contrasts with the final scenes, in which we are offered an alternative represented by the main characters—Yemi, Kojo, and Soldier Boy—who learn from their poor choices and are able to transcend their circumstances. In Gone Too Far!, Ikudayisi is accidentally stabbed when he tries to separate Yemi from another gang member, and in Off the Endz Kojo gets shot by an estate gang member who was aiming at David. These violent acts mark a turning point for the main characters, Yemi and Kojo, who, from this point on in their respective stories, adopt more progressive masculinities. To this end, in Gone Too Far!, Yemi ends up asking for forgiveness, begins to proudly embrace his Nigerian identity, and his relationship with his brother becomes more positive. For his part, in Off the Endz, Kojo decisively sends David away from the estate, rejecting the easy money and the world of drug dealing, and even capitalism and consumerism as well, as we see Sharon destroying their credit cards. After recovering from his wound, Kojo also rejects the performance of patriarchal masculinity embodied by David, to whom he emphasises the performative dimension of his behavior: ‘You have played this game wrong all your life and I’m here. . . still here tryna make you see that I got you. . . But you got to make the right choices. We can all do this together’ (Agbaje 2010, 76; emphasis added). This idea is also recurrent in Adebayo’s Desert Boy. When Desert Man appears in the first scene and sees Soldier Boy bleeding, his questioning of the incident responds to stereotypical portrayals in the media of Black-on-Black violence in urban settings: ‘Now it’s time to show, confess exactly what you did to deserve this’ (Adebayo 2011, 161). Desert Man’s assumption is explained in the final scenes by Soldier Boy who, instead of sticking to the image of criminalised Black male youth, decides to stab himself: You think cos I’m Black yout’ and I wear a hoodie, I got two phones and I live on a estate with a single mum, I am a criminal. When you see a Black boy bleeding to death you think that he must done something wrong. Cos I wind up on Deptford beach with knife in my belly you say it’s my destiny! Well it’s a case of mistaken identity. It’s YOU that’s believed the lies! Not me! I weren’t in a fight. I wasn’t armed for a deal, a murder, a robbery. I put the knife in my belly. ME! (241)

40  P. Prieto López In contrast to the character of Desert Man, who, according to Marissia Fragkou, is ‘stuck in childhood’ and unable to achieve his ‘real manhood’, as he was captured as a slave in Mali and prevented from completing his rite of passage or dama (2019, 69), Soldier Boy refuses to perform a dominant and stereotypical model of masculinity and explains the reasons for stabbing himself in the stomach as a way of setting himself free: I was scared. Everyday I walk on road I’m scared, people are scared of me, I saw a reflection of myself and I scared him too. Then I said, they’re not gonna get me. Not my crew, a dog or next gang, not the police or a bunch of racists. I’ll do it myself. Soldier Boy ain’t real. He’s just a role I play—it’s a game. I’m Junior Watson. I ain’t got no middle name. I’m 16. And for a minute, when that blade came down inside me, I felt free. (Adebayo 2011, 241–242; emphasis added) By the end, we see how he is capable of transcending this reality as the curtain falls with Soldier Boy on the stage, having recovered and performing his own rite of passage, leading him to his manhood: ‘He is dressed in indigo robes, university mortar board on his head and holds a degree certificate’ (243). By having Soldier Boy get an education in the final scene of the play, Adebayo also makes allusions to Stephen Lawrence, who was hoping to become an architect when he was murdered: ‘Build something, like Stephen would have done, a bridge maybe. Forgeron, 21st century. Change my mind. Study. Work it out with Mummy. Take her on holiday’ (243). As a result, the idea of absent fathers and dysfunctional families as leading to problematic masculinities is also contested in the plays. Indeed, Soldier Boy challenges this erroneous notion making use once again of the word ‘play’ to highlight the performative nature of this aspect: ‘Everyone is going on about role models, well “a role” is just that. Something you play at’ (203; emphasis added). While the issue of parenting is not fully explored in Off the Endz, Michael Pearce explains how the fact that Kojo survives gives him a chance to parent the son he is expecting with Sharon (2017, 148). The three plays contradict the idea of dysfunctionality associated with the absence of role models by presenting characters starting anew and sticking to their families and values. Working, getting an education, or simply rejecting the world of the streets and asking for forgiveness contribute to depicting these protagonists as agents capable of making transcendental decisions.

Conclusions Although council-estate plays have been strongly criticised for promoting, rather than contesting, dominant views of Black communities, and while we must certainly problematise the fact that only plays dealing with

The Performance of Black Youth Masculinity 41 Black-on-Black violence seem to reach mainstream theatres in the UK, the three plays analysed in this chapter address the performance of Black youth masculinities from an innovative perspective on criminality and inner-city life in London. The plays prompt a critical reflection on the structures that alienate Black male youth, addressing the impact of the legacies of colonialism on their codes of behaviour and emphasising how the adoption of such behaviour is a survival and resistance strategy in response to the racist and capitalist system which keeps failing Black men, relegating them to the margins of society. The performance of hegemonic masculinities becomes, hence, an empowering strategy which reproduces violent and hierarchical models of relationship with others. Certain stereotypes are left unchallenged in the plays, especially the almost exclusive focus on Black male characters which seems to imply that Black women are not involved in or are victims of inner-city violence or the problematic association of Caribbean identity with violent behaviour. However, the last scenes of the plays studied here suggest how the main characters look for alternative paths and decide to break with cycles of (gendered) violence by choosing to continue with their studies, by rejecting the world of the streets or by embodying the role of a caring and respectful father. The three plays look at the pressures faced by these characters that force them to reproduce colonial and patriarchal forms of domination in order to assert their identity, pointing at the close of the plays at new visions of masculinity that are grounded in more respectful relations.

Notes 1. In fact, the Royal Court Theatre, where most of these productions have been performed, has gained a reputation for producing social realism plays by playwrights who are encouraged to write from authentic experiences. This is especially the case of Bola Agbaje, who says she writes from her experience as a social housing officer. 2. Bola Agbaje was awarded the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre and nominated for the Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright of the year in 2008 for her first play Gone Too Far! The play was adapted for the big screen in 2013.

Works Cited Adebayo, Mojisola. 2011. Desert Boy. In Mojisola Adebayo: Plays One, edited by Mojisola Adebayo, 159–243. London: Oberon Books. . 2017. Interview by Paola Prieto López, August 25, London. Unpublished interview. Agbaje, Bola. 2007. Gone Too Far!. London: Methuen. . 2010. Off the Endz. London: Methuen. Alexander, Claire E. 1996. The Art of Being Black: The Creation of Black British Youth Identities. Oxford: Oxford UP. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1999.26.3.775 Aragay, Mireia, and Enric Monforte. 2013. ‘Racial Violence, Witnessing and Emancipated Spectatorship in The Color of Justice, Fallout and Random’. In

42  P. Prieto López Contemporary British Theatre: Breaking New Ground, edited by Vicky Angelaki, 96–120. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010131 Archer, Louise, and Hiromi Yamashita. 2003. ‘Theorising Inner-City Masculinities: “Race”, Class, Gender and Education’. Gender & Education 15, no. 2: 115–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540250303856 Bell, Charlotte. 2013. ‘The Inner City and the “Hoodie”’. Wasafari 28, no. 4: 38–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/02690055.2013.826885 Bell, Charlotte, and Beswick Katie. 2014. ‘Authenticity and Representation: Council Estate Plays at the Royal Court’. New Theatre Quarterly 30, no. 2: 120–35. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X14000244 Beswick, Katie. 2019. Social Housing and Performance: The English Council Estate in and off the Stage. London: Methuen Drama. https://doi.org/10. 5040/9781474285186 Brewer, Mary F., Lynette Goddard, and Deirdre Osborne. 2015. Modern and Contemporary Black British Drama. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Butler, Judith. 1988. ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’. Theatre Journal 40, no. 4: 519–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893 . 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203824979 Cumper, Patricia. 2012. ‘I Will Not Put Another Dead Young Black Man on Stage’. In Hidden Gems II, edited by Deirdre Osborne, 419–20. London: Oberon Books. Davis, Geoffrey V. 2006. ‘This Is a Cultural Renaissance: An Interview with Kwame Kwei-Armah’. In Staging New Britain: Aspects of South Asian British Theatre Practice, edited by Geoffrey V. Davis and Anne Fuchs, 239–51. Brussels: Peter Lang. De-lahay, Rachel. 2011. The Westbridge. London: Methuen Drama. Ekumah, Ekua. 2015. ‘Bola Agbaje: Voicing a New Africa on the British Stage’. In Modern and Contemporary Black British Drama, edited by Mary F. Brewer, Lynette Goddard, and Deirdre Osborne, 178–93. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fragkou, Marissia. 2019. Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre: Politics, Affect, Responsibility. London: Methuen Drama. https://doi. org/10.5040/9781474267175 Goddard, Lynette. 2011. ‘Introduction’. In Mojisola Adebayo: Plays One, edited by Mojisola Adebayo, 12–17. London: Oberon Books. . 2015. Contemporary Black British Playwrights: Margins to Mainstream. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137493101 Gunter, Anthony. 2008. ‘Growing Up Bad: Black Youth, ‘Road’ Culture and Badness in an East London Neighbourhood’. Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal 4, no. 3: 349–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659008096371 Hill Collins, Patricia. 2006. ‘A Telling Difference: Dominance, Strength, and Black Masculinities’. In Progressive Black Masculinities?, edited by Athena Mutua, 73–97. New York and London: Routledge. hooks, bell. 2004. We Real Cool. Black Men and Masculinity. New York and London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203642207 Johns, Lyndsay. 2010. ‘Black British Theatre Is Blighted by Its Ghetto Mentality’. The London Evening Standard, February 9. https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/ front/black-theatre-is-blighted-by-its-ghetto-mentality-6709941.html Kene, Arinze. 2013. God’s Property. London: Nick Hern Books, 2013.

The Performance of Black Youth Masculinity 43 Kwei-Armah, Kwame. 2003. Elmina’s Kitchen. London: Methuen. Mac an Ghaill, Mairtin. 1994. ‘The Making of Black English Masculinities’. In Theorizing Masculinities, edited by Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman, 183–99. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. http://doi.org/10.4135/9781452243627 Majors, Richard, and Janet Mancini Billson. 1992. Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America. New York: Lexington. Mercer, Kobena. 1994. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203700594 Monrose, Kenny. 2020. Black Men in Britain: Ethnographic Portrait of the Post-Windrush Generation. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9 781351133432 Mutua, Athena, ed. 2006. Progressive Black Masculinities? New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203961438 Peacock, Keith D. 2015. ‘The Social and Political Context of Black British Theatre: The 2000s’. In Modern and Contemporary Black British Drama, edited by Mary F. Brewer, Lynette Goddard, and Deirdre Osborne, 147–60. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pearce, Michael. 2017. Black British Drama: A Transnational Story. Abingdon, Oxon, and New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315688787 Quinn, Ben. 2019. ‘Macpherson Report: What Was It and What Impact Did It Have?’. The Guardian, February 22. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/ 22/macpherson-report-what-was-it-and-what-impact-did-it-have tucker green, debbie. 2008. Random. London: Nick Hern Books. Williams, Roy. 2003. Fallout. London: Methuen.

4

ART’S POLITICAL POTENTIAL AND THE VIOLENCE THAT THE ART DOES ON THE PERFORMATIVE OPERATIONS OF KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO’S GUESTS (2016) Dorota Golańska and Aleksandra M. Różalska

Guests. A Brief Introduction We experienced Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Guests in Liverpool in October 2016 at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, while attending a meeting held in the building, which was also hosting a significant part of the Liverpool Biennale shows.1 Originally commissioned for the 2009 Venice Biennale, in 2016 the modified version of the work was again exhibited in a different institutional and geopolitical context, yet still offering a critical commentary on the situation in Europe at the time. Upon entering the dark room, which was filled with sounds coming from various conversations supposedly taking place outside, we suddenly found ourselves in a disquieting panoptical situation. The large-scale installation creates the illusion of windows through which the viewer sees people interacting with each other and exchanging remarks about their situation and everyday problems, all connected to the experience of cultural displacement as well as the challenges they face in their everyday life. The realisation of their status as migrants is almost immediate. The contours of their bodies are blurred, their faces unrecognisable. But it is easy to figure out from their movements that they are busy performing physical work, such as construction work or cleaning. Since the windows are displayed on the walls of the gallery, the installation creates a weird tension between the inside and the outside, situating the visitor—or rather, ‘the experiencer’, as Amelia Jones proposes (2015, 22)—in the middle of a discomforting arrangement, where the viewers seem to see without being seen themselves, while realising that their own seeing is very incomplete. 2 This makes the situation quite different from other voyeuristic experiences. The people whose shadows are displayed on the gallery walls appear to be at once both distant from and close to the visitor, partly visible yet unrecognisable, strange, and familiar. The wall separates, but also connects, the viewer and these perceived ‘others’, operating as a conceivable boundary. Its existence is felt bodily. DOI: 10.4324/9781003162759-5

Art’s Political Potential 45 This complex material-semiotic mode of performative engagement that the installation enables could produce deeper forms of connectivity, allowing for a more comprehensive grasp of the experiences of discrimination or exclusion. Hence, as we will argue in this chapter, through their important political potential, the bodily encounters with art—stimulating a profound and transformative inquiry—can possibly contribute to the production of cultures of equality and understanding.

The Politics October 2016 is also when the French government, in the context of intense media-based debates on the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe, and with journalists depicting the ‘massive’ arrival of people from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea in EU countries, launched an operation to empty the main refugee camp in Calais, destroying all the provisional infrastructures erected there. The camp was inhabited mostly by people fleeing political violence and severe living conditions in states torn apart by intra- and international wars and was meant to be a transient space for them on their way to the UK. One of the security measures that had been implemented was the building of a wall to separate the camp from the highway, with the aim of preventing refugees from attempting to cross France’s maritime border with the UK, which is—at the same time—a Schengen zone border. The wall, previously used at the London 2012 Olympics, was ‘donated’ by the UK government (Ansems de Vries 2016) as a contribution to the common effort of securing the external borders of the free movement area. Certainly, given the legal regulations concerning asylum seekers in the EU, the status of the residents of the Calais refugee camp was highly insecure. Technically, they did not yet qualify as refugees as they had not made an asylum claim in France, although the EU’s Common European Asylum System, under the Dublin Regulation, requires asylum seekers to make a claim in the first EU country in which they arrive. It also allows any country to which the refugees subsequently travel to return them to the one they initially arrived in and where their asylum claim should have been dealt with. Since those residing in the camps in the Calais region wanted to reach the UK, an asylum claim made in France would have put these efforts in jeopardy, as had the refugees already been in the UK when their claim was processed, they would have probably been forced to travel back to the other side of the English Channel. Despite the increased appearance of issues related to migration to the EU in the media, neither the establishment of refugee camps in the region of Calais nor the French government’s attempts at dismantling them were, however, new.3 What is now referred to as the ‘Calais Jungle’ was originally created in 2009 by a group of around 700 refugees from Afghanistan who established a provisional camp in the woods near the town of Calais. As Sophie Djigo explains (2016), the problematic term ‘jungle’, today used to describe the whole group of refugee camps in the Calais region, was actually

46  D. Golańska and A.M. Różalska coined by the first Afghan refugees. Jangal, meaning ‘forest’, referred to the location of the first camp and it originally had rather innocent connotations, although the term was appropriated later on by those contesting the presence of the refugees/migrants in France.4 Djigo notices, however, that even though the term has an overall negative meaning today, it is also often purposefully used by the refugees themselves with the aim of expressing the dangerous conditions and precarious status they experience.5 Traumatised by hostile, unliveable, and life-threatening situations in their home countries, and then once again distressed by inhospitable circumstances in a makeshift camp with very poor sanitary facilities and living in provisional housing, the refugees residing in the Calais region, as well as elsewhere, suffer severely from insecurity and exclusion. Yet their fragile condition has remained mostly unknown to general audiences preoccupied primarily with the imagined threat the arrival of refugees might pose for European societies. Our aim in this chapter is to reflect on the role installation art might possibly play in creating a truer understanding of the vulnerable position of refugees in contemporary Europe, alerting viewers to the issues of the dramatic inequalities experienced within the EU territory on an everyday basis, including those connected to the precarious status of people arriving in Europe from states in distress due to political instabilities. The fragile situation of refugees and migrants brings to mind the concept of ‘Fortress Europe’. Originally employed in the context of WWII propaganda, today the term is used to depict the state of immigration to the EU, in reference to both predominantly unfriendly attitudes towards immigrants and to the policies of fortifying EU borders to prevent the illegal arrival of nonEuropeans. This poses a significant challenge for individuals seeking refuge in this region. Importantly, in the context of the increased number of migrants arriving in Europe, the strategies of borderisation have been extensively used as a means of ‘managing’ migration, with the aim of monitoring the flow of newcomers and putting them under state surveillance. As many scholars argue, what has come to be problematically called the ‘refugee crisis’ is only partly related to the political instability of the countries the refugees come from. In fact, this situation is also caused by such processes as the growing restriction of legal channels of migration to Europe as well as the intensification of the securitisation of European borders (see, for instance, Huysmans 2006; Lutterbeck 2006; Neal 2009; Freedman 2018a, 2018b). Framing these processes in terms of a ‘crisis’, as has been the practice since at least 2013, highlights their exceptional nature or signals times of extreme strain. Based on such a discursive strategy, governments of the EU member states consider it legitimate to undertake or implement special measures, as is recommended in crisis situations, to deal with the ‘problem’ of refugees flocking to European countries. These processes, as many scholars note, translate into strategies of the securitisation of European borders, producing extremely insecure living conditions for the refugees (Freedman 2018a, 2018b). As Jane Freedman (2018a) claims, the politics of ‘crisis’ serves to justify repressive

Art’s Political Potential 47 governmental policies that target refugees as well as obscuring the experiences of insecurity and distress of those inhabiting the temporary refugee camps and detention centres. The means of control and security targeted at refugees living in temporary camps translate into making their precarious situation more permanent, restricting their mobility, and producing a state of limbo, all of which contributes to increasing the vulnerability of migrants and exposing them to various aspects of violence and hostility. In this context, works of art such as Wodiczko’s Guests could have considerable potential to draw attention to these problems by inviting the viewers to participate in the performances such installations demand. Guests, we argue, have to be understood in reference to its important agential capabilities in that it triggers profound engagement with and reflection on issues troubling contemporary European societies. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s definition of art as sensation and situating this approach within a new materialist philosophy, here we critically and creatively locate Guests in relation to questions of (in)equalities within (and beyond) European society, paying particular attention to the vulnerable status of migrants present within the EU’s social spaces. While displacement and social exclusion are transnational problems, they manifest differently in particular local contexts and in specific circumstances. In this analysis, we relate Wodiczko’s installation to the issues connected to the situation of those inhabiting the ‘Calais Jungle’, looking primarily into the processes of bordering and the related problems of (in)securitisation. As we underline, politically engaged art, operating simultaneously on both the micropolitical and the macropolitical level, has the potential to shed light on societal injustices in their various contextrelated manifestations. Through its performative qualities, and its capacity to engage viewers on both an intellectual and an immediately bodily horizon, it can create a platform for a better understanding that is grounded in the concept of shared vulnerability, a state to which art has the potential to expose us all. The performance in which the viewers of Guests are involved seems to reveal the fragile condition of their own bodies, susceptible to harm and violence of different kinds, including the violence the art does. This—through the production of meaningful outcomes—may potentially contribute to the invention of cultures of justice and response-ability.

The Work of Art Approaching art through a new materialist lens allows us to acknowledge that the experience of art consists in the entanglement of matter and meaning. The materiality of art gives form to its discursive layer, while art’s representational dimension enables sense to be made of matter—that is, making matter ‘matter’.6 Such an understanding of how art operates serves as a guiding principle for the analysis offered in this chapter. It owes much to both the philosophical ideas worked out within new materialism and to the non-representational philosophy (of art) developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1997).7 In the following pages, we put

48  D. Golańska and A.M. Różalska new materialist thinking into a creative dialogue with performance studies, paying attention to the performative qualities of the work of art. This formulation facilitates an understanding of art in terms of its forces, incitements, affects—that is, its micropolitical operations, rather than focusing solely on the generalising, or macropolitical, meanings it communicates. As a way of addressing problems, or a production of consequential transformations, aesthetic experience is a form of thought (Deleuze and Guattari 1997) which, due to its intense material operations, carries significant political potential. In a new materialist understanding, sensible encounters with art are creational—through sensations and intensities art produces intimate knowledge. As Elizabeth Grosz underlines, art is ‘capable of resonating bodily organs and the nervous system’ (2008, 62), so, given the profound materiality of affects, artworks ‘do not signify or represent. . . they assemble, they make, they do, they produce’ (75). Not only does a more-than-representational account of art revalue art’s material dimension, but it also underlines its generative qualities—that is, art’s ability to trigger transformations.8 Such a theorisation forces an understanding of arts in agential terms, which assumes that the artistic object (or event) can produce meaningful effects in the world. In a similar vein, Barbara Bolt (2004a, 2004b, 2008) proposes a concept of the ‘work of art’ as substantially different from that of an ‘artwork’.9 Whereas the notion of an artwork is, as Bolt explains, a noun, denoting a passive medium for the artist’s ideas, the term ‘work of art’ refers to a verb, signalling the work the art does. In contradistinction to the ‘instrumental-being’ of an artwork, Bolt points to the processual character of a work of art or its ‘work-being’ (2004a, 8). The artwork, she explains, ‘is what is published or exhibited or performed’; the work of art, on the other hand, ‘is the work that the artwork does; it is the movement in concepts, understandings, methodologies, material practice, affect and sensorial experience that arises in and through the vehicle of art and the artwork’ (Bolt 2014, 30; emphasis in original). This is what testifies to art’s ‘performative quality’ (30). Such an approach highlights the work of art’s capacity for forming assemblages with other bodies, hence it contributes to art’s affirmative redefinition. This is a strategy engendered by new materialist philosophy enabling the disavowal of the negativist logic of purely representational thinking.10 Art, in such a rendition, is approached through its affect, understood in terms of a ‘sensible force or style through which it produces content’ (Colebrook 2007, 24). Yet, to do justice to art’s agential forces, it is necessary to pay attention to its performative ‘materialsemiotic’ (Haraway 1988, 595) operations, rather than enclosing it solely within the realm of representational thinking. As Rebecca Schneider asserts, there are certain affinities in the ways of thinking typical to new materialism, on the one hand, and performance studies, on the other (2015, 7). Therefore, performance studies may have much to offer to current new materialist discussions on the destabilisation

Art’s Political Potential 49 of divisions between traditionally constructed binarisms, especially since theatricality, as Schneider explains, ‘has long rummaged at the habitual borders erected between subject and object, and troubled any hard line on what constitutes the animate and what the inanimate’ (-14). What new materialism shares with performance studies is the deprivileging of language, or of the representational dimension, as the sole or primary means of thinking about meaning making. After all, performance, as Schneider reminds us, relies on the ‘“copresence” of living beings with the “here and now” of space and time’ (7). The here and now, however, emerges from a material-semiotic entanglement, which includes a whole diversity of agents with different forces and capabilities. As Amelia Jones aptly points out, the combination of new materialist insights with performance theory allows for ‘a focus on how action intersects with materials to produce new spaces of meaning’ (2015, 21; emphasis in original). Bearing these theorisations in mind, we want to make clear that in order to understand the complex nature of an aesthetic encounter, it is necessary to consider the micropolitical, almost imperceptible, material, and temporary relations of the different forces involved in the artistic event, rather than focusing exclusively on art’s representational layer. Such an approach is in keeping with both new materialist thinking and theoretical perspective originating in the field of performance studies. These micropolitical forces include the materialities—the art’s spatial, temporal, technological, and natural dimensions, as much as the bodily, intimate, affective, or biological aspects of participation—and the virtualities—the art’s symbolic, abstract, generalised, cultural, and contextual appeal—of the artistic event. This approach enables us to focus more extensively on what art is capable of doing—as Schneider emphasises, ‘performance. . . becomes materialisation’ (2015, 12), meaning, through which it generates content. In a similar fashion, other theorists of performance art point to the fact that in order to understand the political potential of art we need to focus on the ‘micropolitical energy that is immanent to it’, rather than focusing on its ‘macro-dimension’ (Rolnik 2013; see also, Kunst 2015). As Bojana Kunst explains, we should acknowledge the micropolitical scope of the temporal potential of the artistic event—a performance, in her deliberations—understood as ‘an antagonistic knot of various temporal practices, a conglomerate of contradictory forces (human, non-human, spatial, natural, etc.) that constitute the moment of the present and the invention of its political potential’ (2015, 3). As she continues, performance ‘is a sum of contradictory, complementary, or causally related micro-actions and events that must invent the form for the temporal condensation of actions, moves, energies, materials, and things, and in that way open the creation of performance to the intensity of life’ (3). This means that approaching a temporary artistic event—and an encounter with art is always temporary—through its representational dimension, which might be nevertheless instrumental in understanding its potential global scale appeal, entails separating it from

50  D. Golańska and A.M. Różalska the ‘perpetually problematic, partial, material, situated, and embodied force. . . [or] from the singular conjunction of micropolitical forces’ (3). Yet, as we want to underline by adopting a new materialist perspective to the analysis of the performative workings of Wodiczko’s Guests, the potential of the aesthetic experiences facilitated by certain artistic projects resides in the entanglement of their micropolitical—predominantly material—and macropolitical—predominantly representational—operations at the same time. The interrogation of the how question of the work of art is crucial to understand what art is capable of unleashing. As Jones suggests, the adoption of a new materialist framework ‘provides a key method to examine how the complex of materialities in the art “works” to produce endlessly shifting meanings and values’ (2015, 23), rather than fixing them in any final way. This is of vital importance when discussing the political reverberations of the work of art, which can manifest in an intellectual activity or translate into a political action. When discussing the political potential of art, it is useful to resort to Deleuze’s theorising of a sign as ‘the object of an encounter’ (2008, 62) which ‘forces us to think’ (10; emphasis in original), and where ‘the contingence of the encounter’ is what ‘guarantees the necessity of what it leads us to think’ (62).11 Rather than being perceived in representational terms, signs need to be experienced and felt. As Deleuze explains, sensation generated in such an encounter is what grabs us through the senses and animates the process of thinking—these are ‘impressions which force us to look, encounters which force us to interpret, expressions that force us to think’ (2008, 61). This ‘shock to thought’, as Brian Massumi terms this sensational jolt that thrusts us into a mode of critical inquiry, ‘implicates something that does violence to thought, which wrests it from its natural stupor and its merely abstract possibilities’ (2002, 62). If the affective encounter with art is what forces us to think, as Deleuze insists, no longer can signs be understood as ‘recognisable objects’, but should be approached as ‘things that do violence, encountered signs’ (2008, 64; emphasis in original). What emerges from such an encounter consists in an entanglement of affective and intellectual knowing. Such ‘thinking/feeling’ requires the adoption of an attitude of radical openness—‘one must be endowed for the signs, one must open oneself to their violence’, as Deleuze explains (2008, 63). The sign, in such an understanding, is what ‘sets the soul in motion’ (64). Thus, the aesthetic offers new possibilities for affective apprehending.12 As Grizelda Pollock underlines, ‘certain kinds of . . . aesthetic practice can contribute to fundamental changes in the continuing tendency towards violence in our worlds through activating the ethical responsiveness to all others via the aesthetic “encounter-event”’ (2010, 872). In a new materialist account, which converges aesthetics with ethics, perception is not understood in terms of a distant or detached observation, but rather it becomes a force through which we make ourselves exposed and vulnerable to the operations of various others. Crucially, the ‘violence’ the aesthetic

Art’s Political Potential 51 encounter could do to us might possibly entail important political consequences. Thus, as Kunst remarks, even though ‘there is nothing inherently political in the performance . . . its practice is always pushing the limits of what could be political’ (2015). In order to understand the political potential of artistic production, however, we need to pay more attention to the material, sometimes imperceptible, operations of the aesthetic event. As Kunst explains, performance ‘is too often approached from a macropolitical perspective, as an example of specific political traditions, geopolitical constellations and contexts’. Even if it is, at least in part, a product of the context and specific circumstances, we need to keep in mind that performance also operates on the micropolitical level, producing intimate, embodied knowledges, and movements. These micropolitical workings require conditions of exposure or a radical openness to the violence the signs can do to us. Hence the aesthetic encounter is an exercise in being affected, even destroyed, by the other. Since, as Judith Butler notices, ‘the body cannot be relieved of . . . its exposure’ (2012, 141), this adjacency, or the condition of being vulnerable to each other, which manifests on the micropolitical, imperceptible level, needs careful attention in the context of how art can contribute to making us more responsive to the pain of others.

The Violence The experience of Wodiczko’s Guests is one of bordering, of a deeply divided society, or of separated communities which, nevertheless, remain closely interconnected. Evoking affects, the creative encounter between the installation and the visitor is meant to activate a critical reflection on the problems of marginalisation and non-belonging, as well as on how— through sharing the physical space—we are mutually implicated in each other’s lives. Even though the barrier between the viewers and those whose shadows are displayed on the gallery walls seems to be visually undetectable, it tends to be felt in very persuasive, material ways. The foggy windows, through which the visitors can discern the presence of the others and speculate on what they do, function as both a physical and imaginary border, separating those who belong ‘here’ from those who are unable to enter this space. The conversations in which people behind the illusory ‘glass’ engage disclose the harsh conditions of their lives and unveil the singular reasons motivating their decisions to undertake the challenge of commencing a new life in a different country. This brings to mind the severe difficulties of their journeys to Europe and the distressing situations of facing violent behaviours and stereotypical treatment with which these people are confronted on an everyday basis in their host societies. While the visitors can listen to their conversations and familiarise themselves with their experiences of misery and exclusion, the speakers remain figures without faces—their individual identities are never disclosed to the viewers, although the latter can easily realise that what is being displayed on the gallery walls

52  D. Golańska and A.M. Różalska presents the performances of migrants busy with their routine activities. As Wodiczko has explained, these anonymous individuals are in charge of a number of tasks that are absolutely crucial for the daily existence of many middle-class Europeans, which is the group to which a significant number of the experiencers of the show probably belong, such as caring for their children and elderly people, cleaning their apartments and offices, washing their clothes, cooking for them, or constructing and maintaining their buildings (Wodiczko in Lajer-Burcharth, Rajchman, and Czubak 2009). But the installation seems to suggest that, even though their contribution to the maintenance of the host countries’ social sphere is essential, it is deemed necessary for them to stay on the other side of the barrier established between them and the visitors to the show. Notably, the impression of the border existing between the two groups of people is conjured through the use of a number of carefully chosen technological devices and the immense preparatory work that had to be undertaken in order for Guests to be exhibited. The elicitation of the ‘here and now’, as it is experienced by the viewers, is only possible through reliance on a series of video recordings displayed simultaneously on different walls of the gallery and working together to fashion an area physically conceivable to the visitors’ bodies. Due to the specific arrangement of the gallery space—the dark ‘inside’ surrounded by the highlighted ‘windows’ projected on the walls—it seems that the people whose experiences of exclusion are brought to the attention of the viewers are located outside. Perceived by the viewer as situated behind the wall, the people whose shadows are displayed do not belong to the safe and familiar space of the gallery. The visitors, on the other hand, are placed in the position of insiders. Yet the hazy shadows of the ‘foreigners’ have been brought—through the projections—inside the exhibition space and made available to the gaze of the viewers (even though their seeing is incomplete), suggesting that they are awkwardly present and absent at the same time. This ambivalence is elicited through complex material-semiotic operations of technology—the previously directed and recorded movies, after all, are projected from the inside of the gallery, while the overall prearrangement of the technological performance makes the particular experience of the gallery as a bordered, divided space persuasively realistic. The division between us (the visitors) and them (the people outside) is experienced by the former in a very bodily, almost physical, way. Neither side can reach the other. Even though we are situated immediately adjacent to each other, and our lives are obviously entangled, we seem to belong to different worlds, remaining divided by some unbridgeable gorge. While for the visitors getting to know the people whose shadows they can see is unachievable, for the (representations of) migrants it is impossible to step inside (both the gallery and the EU social space). The foggy semi-transparent windows brutally hold the two realms apart. Hence, even though we appear to share the same physical space (the gallery/the EU), the two groups are dramatically distant from each other.

Art’s Political Potential 53 The aesthetic experience of Guests is produced in a multi-sensorial fashion, through the active engagement of the visitor’s body in being exposed to various material-semiotic becomings of the technological forces involved in the complex workings of the immersive installation. These consist in the smooth projection of the video recordings, the material operations of light and sound that the registration of moving pictures requires, as much as the socio-bodily experience of these arrangements by the viewers, all of which allows for the emergence of the ‘here and now’ of the Guests’ performance. This relies on the ‘replaying of the past’ (i.e., the recordings) in the present, hence entangling the different temporalities of the work of art, or the various moments of its production, by the artist on the one hand and by the experiencers on the other. The ‘present’ of the performance is created by technologically advanced machines—projectors, cameras, digitally registered and post-produced images and sounds, and the purposeful arrangement of lighting—and is inevitably related to earlier audiovisual practices, as the scenes have been pre-written, staged, recorded, and technologically processed. Hence it bears traces of the past and produces what Jane Blocker calls ‘a temporal falsehood’,13 a situation where things that supposedly belong to different temporalities can be mendacious in their conjunctive agential acting (2015, 38). Their continuous performances, or ‘posing’, as Blocker prefers to call it (39), however, make the visitors’ experiences both possible and potentially meaningful. The projection of the recordings, by virtue of their complex temporality whereby they are seen and heard in the present, triggers the production of complex spatial-temporal becomings. Within the installation the preregistered images and sounds are the ‘artifacts of another time’ acting again for the first time (40; see also Schneider 2005, 41). Even though both the spatial and the temporal dimension of this performance are obviously theatrical, their entangled operations are productive of the ‘present’ as it is lived through by the viewers. Thus, the materials from the past (here, the recordings) possess a certain vibrancy in the present, understood in terms of a capacity for producing effects. This enables the positioning of the experiences of Guests within the micropolitical ‘here and now’ of the performance, as well as in the macropolitical context of the situation of migrants on which the installation intends to comment. The production of such experiential content, however, would not be possible without the compound effervescent operations of different objects—human and non-human—(in the) past and present. As such, the how of the installation’s performance can only be understood if we acknowledge the material or the microscale, often imperceptible, aspects of its continuous emergence. The installation actively engages the visual, auditory, and proprioceptive capacities of the visitors, making the perceptual experience of the technologically elicited material-semiotic space possible and also, eventually, consequential. The mediation, or agency, of the technology is smooth and almost unnoticeable, even though absolutely crucial for the operation of this work of art. The aesthetic event is polyphonic in nature, engrossing

54  D. Golańska and A.M. Różalska the visitor via a number of different actions taking place simultaneously in the different projected windows. In order to experience the whole installation, the visitor needs to cruise between the windows, while the dynamically projected actions displayed constantly evolve. It is impossible to grasp the complexity of Guests from a single location—the aesthetic experience demands the visitors’ lively performance, activating their movement and troubling their perception. By performing, the experiencers assist in the installation’s ongoing meaning making. Within this performance, objects and humans are tangled in a variety of ways—both in the process of producing the recordings for the installation and in the procedures of its spatial-temporal ceaseless materialisations. As Jones reminds us, ‘the question of materialities in the context of art. . . is also about evoking and encouraging bodily responses and the possibility for social engagements’ (2015, 33). The mixed temporalities of the forces involved in the installation produce an intense and convincing experience, or an experiential ‘truth’ revealed in particular spatial circumstances, augmenting the impression of the perceived distance, or division, between the visitors and the guests. This translates into a certain tension in apprehending the workings of the exhibition, the weird experience of the past in the present, the inability of entering into any dialogue with the other side as— even though the narratives of the outsiders work in the ‘present’ of the gallery space—the viewers remain well aware of the fact that the displayed performances were recorded in the past, and hence the work of art offers no space for actual conversation. The temporal ambivalence of the installation’s becoming, its intentional suspension between the ‘here and now’ and the ‘there and then’, contributes extensively to its vibrant, sometimes puzzling, operations. After all, the agential forces making the aesthetic experience possible are located in the same gallery space, and are participating in the constant materialisation of the work of art, yet their complex, co-constitutive emergence produces an experience of a spatial-temporal cut between the inside and the outside. This is provoked by the smooth, invisible, and constant performances of the technologies that co-constitute the work of art, bringing the recordings from and of the past into the ‘present’ of the gallery space and letting them assemble with the visitors in the process of affecting and being affected. Existing simultaneously in different registers, this experience, or the primary affect produced in the encounter, stimulates intellectual becoming. In this particular case, it forces a critical reflection on the condition of a contemporary European society that is preoccupied with issues of identity and security, as well as on the complex nature of borders and the processes of bordering and securitisation. Interestingly, the installation places visitors in the somewhat disquieting and uncomfortable position of seeing without being seen, supposedly employing the voyeuristic technology of control and power. This brings to mind a number of questions concerning the surveillance techniques and apparatuses of supervision, and also those employed in the process of

Art’s Political Potential 55 ‘managing’ migration.14 The safe dark space of the gallery emerges, in a panoptical manner, as a location for the gaze of the visitor, to which those behind the displayed windows seem to be exposed. The viewers unresponsively participate in the conversations of those behind the windows, which sometimes disclose intimate experiences, not necessarily intended for the ears of the unspecified observers. Visitors can also see them performing their everyday professional tasks, such as cleaning or construction work. Yet the controlling gaze appears to work only on a very general, superficial level, as those under surveillance remain anonymous and unrecognisable, as if their individual identities did not matter. Consequently, they can only be approached as nameless individuals, whose personal details remain beyond the knowledge of the visitors, who—familiar with their stories and situations—are nevertheless unable to engage with them as threedimensional characters. The information that the viewers get within the aesthetic event is insubstantial. This is a highly uncomfortable situation for the visitor: hidden safely in the gallery, the viewer can—in a voyeuristic manner—stare at the foreigners whose figures and activities are displayed on the huge screens. This seeing, nevertheless, remains to a great extent without recognition, as the knowledge of the experiencer is subjected to fragmentation and partiality. This seems to parallel, at least to a certain extent, the practice of using sophisticated surveillance technologies, so often employed for the monitoring of ‘undesired others’, while revealing the shallowness and inconsequentiality of these means of visual control. The aesthetic encounter with Guests invites the contestation of the processes of bordering and securitisation, including augmented surveillance, with which the EU is so preoccupied given the increased number of people from outside of Europe crossing European borders. The work of art analysed here, through establishing an invisible yet physically perceptible border between the two groups of people and situating one under the supposed surveillance of the other, produces a rather discomforting experience for the viewers, evoking a certain degree of helplessness or impotency, stemming from, inter alia, a lack of knowledge. This disorientation may generate in the audience such affects as fear and pity, so often activated in the prevalent tone of media debates tackling the issue of migration from territories distressed by political conflicts. Through the experience of separateness and bordering elicited within the aesthetic encounter with Guests, visitors are forced to reflect on what the meaning of borders is for different actors and how these actors perform them (Andersen and Sandberg 2016, 7). How are these performances related to the concept of security? And whose security do we have in mind when discussing borders? Borders are experienced differently when they are approached as measures for increasing the security of those who are inside the bordered space. But they are understood in a radically dissimilar manner by those who attempt to cross them, especially in ‘illegal’ ways, with the aim of improving their own individual security (Freedman 2018a). Thus, the alleged security of one

56  D. Golańska and A.M. Różalska group often translates into conditions of insecurity for another. While the EU, as both a concept and a geopolitical entity, rests on the idea of unification and the unrestricted movement of European people of varied ethnic, national, or religious backgrounds, migration from non-European territories has typically been framed as a potential threat and hence criminalised. Even though based on principles of a civic community, rather than on the concept of the nation-state, the EU tends to erect new boundaries, drawing on racial or religious categories. No longer are these borders understood solely as geographical divisions marking which territories belong to which organised communities. Instead, attention should be paid to the cultural conditions and impacts of borders and how they contribute to creating the experiences of marginalisation or exclusion. After all, conceptually speaking, borders are about fencing people off from one another—both materially and discursively.15 As Étienne Balibar demonstrates, borders are not exclusively physical entities regulating flows of people between specific territories; rather, they must be approached as internalised, invisible divisions structuring people’s imaginations of themselves as much as of others. It is therefore of crucial importance to look into the intimate connections between the legal, geopolitical dimension of the border and its symbolic and imaginary function (Balibar 2010; see also Balibar and Williams 2002). The ambiguity of the experience of bordering inherent in Wodiczko’s installation—understood as a projected, yet bodily-experienced divide—exposes the visitor to this mixed material-semiotic nature of social divisions. Obviously, in the context of the government-ordered events taking place in the Calais camp in 2016 (and earlier), this experience inevitably brings to mind the ideologically informed practices of walling off migrant communities and excessive monitoring of them, as well as the eventual demolition of the makeshift infrastructures the inhabitants of the camp erected with the aim of ensuring their own security and survival. It also evokes the stereotypical, often prejudiced treatment of ‘foreigners’ present in the European social space, as well as the segregation of the European labour market where they—even though often qualified—usually perform menial tasks crucial for the everyday maintenance of the EU society. It brings to mind the problematic nature of borders, evoking both the distance and the adjacency of the two separated groups. Finally, it reveals the violence and discomfort involved in being a part of the everyday existence of the people from ‘behind’ the screens. The bodily experience, which the aesthetic encounter with Wodiczko’s installation produces, violently embraces the visitor, forcing their consequential intellectual engagement. In this ‘violent embrace’ resides the critical political potential of the work of art as a possibly disruptive, if not entirely vehement, force or event (hoogland 2014). This, as demonstrated in our analysis, operates on both the micropolitical (material, bodily, imperceptible) and the macropolitical (representational, cultural) level and can generate very practical outcomes or consequences. Yet, in

Art’s Political Potential 57 order to understand how something that does violence can be approached as productive or positive, we need to briefly turn to the principles of affirmative ethics that expose the political relevance of certain (violent) aesthetic confrontations. As Rosi Braidotti explains, ‘every event contains within it the potential for being overcome and overtaken—its negative charge can be transposed’ (2009, 53). Therefore, in order to figure out the ways in which painful, even violent, encounters with art can contribute to the transformation of our ways of thinking and acting, we need, in an affirmative spirit, to acknowledge the possibility of transcending the states of arrest or blockage which come as a result of an act of violence, including the violence which certain works of art (or signs) do to us. Certainly, the affirmative approach demands the sharpening of a critique, rather than amounting to a somewhat mindless affirmation of the experience of suffering or oppression. It is essentially, as Braidotti underlines, ‘about transformation of negative into positive passions. . . This does not mean denying the pain, but rather activating it, working it through’ (54). She warns, however, that ‘the positivity here is not supposed to indicate a facile optimism or a careless dismissal of human suffering’; rather, ‘it involves compassionate witnessing of the pain of others. . . in the mode of empathic copresence’ (55). In other words, an aesthetic encounter helps us to realise the conditions of exposure and vulnerability to different human and non-human others that we all share, even though they translate into very different experiences and situations. It also makes us understand the dynamic character of life as constant becoming with others. In that sense, the violence the signs do to us bears an important potential for the transformation of thinking about others and ourselves as always, though in different ways, affecting and being affected by each other. Such a realisation could encourage new, critical ways of addressing current politics in terms of relationality and response-ability, the latter understood here—along with Haraway (2016)—as the cultivation of the ability to respond to others.

In Lieu of Conclusions The close examination of the material-semiotic character of a work of art as well as of how it pairs with the bodily-intellectual nature of the visitor clearly exposes both the agency and the constant (often imperceptible) transformations of matter and its generative potentials. Such a perspective underlines the connectivity of bodies and their constant dynamic movement. The work of such immersive artistic installations as Wodiczko’s Guests must be approached as being about the conjunctive production of new knowledges, new qualities, and new subjectivities which emerge from the creative aesthetic encounter. In such an event, however, the knowledge is never simply given to visitors, but rather it performatively arises from a plenitude of material-semiotic micro-encounters. As Pollock (2010) reminds us, certain art practices invite us to consider the trauma and the

58  D. Golańska and A.M. Różalska suffering of others—other people, other times, other histories. But obviously, there are limits to the degree to which the experiences of others can be shared, not to mention be turned into our own. Even if deeply engaged with and thoroughly apprehended, these experiences will remain ineradicably and indelibly other. Art can, however, seek the means to create certain connectivities, to bring people closer to the possibility of recognising, and being affected by, the pain—and hence the life—of the other, as much as to assenting to carry some of their burden (Pollock 2010). This helps to realise, through connectivity once again, how we are tacitly implicated in the lives of others as well as how they are implicated in ours, urging us to increase our capacity to respond to, or even take responsibility for, the others whose lives are always already entangled with ours. In this context, aesthetic encounters—via their persuasive, even violent operations—have an important potential for making us more attentive to the issues of inequality and insecurity troubling the sociopolitical sphere that we co-inhabit with other people. Through their disruptive force, such artistic engagements can contribute to creating a more fertile ground for building cultures of equality, fairness, and understanding across, and beyond, Europe.

Notes 1. The name of FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) also stands for film, art, and creative technology. 2. Amelia Jones proposes the term the ‘experiencer’ rather than that of the ‘viewer’ in order to, as she writes, ‘evoke all levels of interpretative engagement’ (2015, 22). Given the nature of the installation analysed in this chapter, we use such terms as ‘visitors’, ‘viewers’, and ‘experiencers’ interchangeably. 3. The ‘Calais problem’ has a rather long history which only intensified in the context of the political instability in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa region. As Ansems de Vries (2016) indicates, attempts at dismantling, or at least terrorising, the main Calais camp had been undertaken by the French police in the past, and parts of the camp were destroyed on various earlier occasions, especially in the wake of the November 2015 Paris attacks. For her, ‘these new “security” policies . . . included heavy-handed attacks on the jungle during the night, including the use of tear-gas and rubber bullets in residential areas’ (2016). For a detailed discussion of the history of the Calais camp, see Ibrahim and Howarth (2018). 4. As Jane Freedman explains, the use of the term ‘migrant’ has become problematic, as it has started to be associated with negative claims that these people are rather ‘economic migrants’ who are abusing the system by only pretending to be refugees (Freedman 2018a; see also Long 2013). 5. As Nick Vaughan-Williams (2015b) notes, we need to explore the strategy of ‘animalisation’ as a specific spatial technology of power. Williams writes about the use of animalised metaphors and imagery pervading narratives of irregular migrants’ embodied experiences of detention across Europe. In his opinion, the task of understanding the work that the ‘zoopolitical threshold’ does in shaping contemporary ‘spaces of incarceration’ (and thus producing animalised subjects) provides an insight into the governmental logics of border security as well as exposing ‘the limits of humanitarian-based arguments’. See also Vaughan-Williams (2015a).

Art’s Political Potential 59 6. An earlier, and more extensive, version of the elaboration of a new materialist rendition of art was offered in Golańska (2017). 7. New materialist theories of art have emerged relatively recently, with the pioneering works of such scholars as Barbara Bolt (2004a, 2004b, 2008), Elizabeth Grosz (2005, 2008, 2011), Jill Bennett (2005), and Simon O’Sullivan (2001, 2006). For the intersection of new materialism and performance studies, see, for instance, Rebecca Schneider (2015), Amelia Jones (2015), Jane Blocker (2015), and Ioana B. Jucan (2015). 8. Even though new materialism is sceptical of the discourse theory and constructivist interpretation of culture/language, it nevertheless remains indebted to the poststructuralist framework and acknowledges the important work of representation. Hence, the term ‘more-than-representational’ well captures the new materialist approach, also signalling the affirmative, rather than negativist, orientation of this philosophical strand. 9. For a more detailed elaboration of the more-than-representational understanding of art, see Golańska (2017). 10. For Barbara Bolt representation always signals an absence or a gap. Something represented is not here and is not now (2004a, 171; emphasis in original); representation denotes non-presence and it is therefore a negative concept par excellence. A discussion of Bolt’s approach in the context of new materialism can be found in Golańska (2017, 49). 11. Deleuze elaborates on his different understandings of signs in Proust and Signs (2008). The understanding of art as a mode of thinking consisting in the production of affects is discussed by Deleuze and Guattari in What Is Philosophy? (1997). 12. For a more detailed elaboration of this issue, see Chapter 1 in Golańska (2017), where an earlier, and more encompassing, version of this discussion is included. 13. Jane Blocker uses this expression to describe a somewhat reverse situation when something that exists in the present poses as being from the past. 14. These procedures include, for instance, the allocation of better housing (containers instead of tents) in the Calais region on the condition that the refugees would agree to have their fingerprints recorded. 15. For a more detailed discussion, see Agnew (2008).

Works Cited Agnew, John. 2008. ‘Borders on the Mind: Re-Framing Border Thinking’. Ethics & Global Politics 1, no. 4: 175–91. https://doi.org/10.3402/egp.v1i4.1892 Andersen, Dorte Jagetic, and Marie Sandberg. 2016. ‘Introduction’. In The Border Multiple: The Practices of Borders between Public Policy and Everyday Life in a Re-Scaling Europe, edited by Dorte Jagetic Andersen, Martin Klatt, and Marie Sandberg, 1–19. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9781315614083 Ansems de Vries, Leonie. 2016. ‘The Transience and Persistence of the “Jungle” in Calais’. Open Democracy, February 27. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ can-europe-make-it/transience-and-persistence-of-jungle-in-calais/ Balibar, Étienne. 2010. ‘At the Borders of Citizenship: A Democracy in Transition?’. European Journal of Social Theory 13, no. 3: 315–22. https://doi. org/10.1177/1368431010371751 Balibar, Étienne, and Erin M. Williams. 2002. ‘World Borders, Political Borders’. PMLA 117, no. 1: 71–8. https://www.jstor.org/stable/823250

60  D. Golańska and A.M. Różalska Bennett, Jill. 2005. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. Blocker, Jane. 2015. ‘History in the Present Progressive. Sonic Imposture at The Pedicord Apts’. TDR/The Drama Review 59, no. 4: 36–50. https://doi. org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00495 Bolt, Barbara. 2004a. Art beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. https://doi.org/10.5040/ 9780755604876.ch-001 . 2004b. ‘Painting Is Not a Representational Practice’. In Unframed: Practices and Politics of Women’s Contemporary Painting, edited by Rosemary Betterton, 41–61. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. https://doi.org/10. 5040/9780755604524 . 2008. ‘A Performative Paradigm for the Creative Arts?’. Working Papers in Art and Design 5. https://www.herts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/12417/ WPIAAD_vol5_bolt.pdf . 2014. ‘Beyond Solipsism in Artistic Research: The Artwork and the Work of Art’. In Material Interventions: Applying Creative Arts Research, edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, 22–37. London: I.B. Tauris. https://doi. org/10.5040/9780755603695 Braidotti, Rosi. 2009. ‘Postsecular Feminist Ethics’. In Intimate Citizenships: Gender, Sexualities, Politics, edited by Elżbieta H. Oleksy, 40–62. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203887899 Butler, Judith. 2012. ‘Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation’. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2: 134–51. https://doi.org/10.5325/ jspecphil.26.2.0134 Colebrook, Claire. 2007. Gilles Deleuze. New York and London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203029923 Deleuze, Gilles. 2008. Proust and Signs. New York and London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1997. What Is Philosophy? London: Verso. Djigo, Sophie. 2016. Les migrants de Calais: Enquête sur la vie en transit. Marseille: Agone. Freedman, Jane. 2018a: ‘“After Calais”: Creating and Managing (In)Security for Refugees in Europe’. French Politics 16, no. 4: 400–18. https://doi.org/10.1057/ s41253-018-0071-z . 2018b. ‘Violences de genre et “crise” des réfugié-e-s en Europe’. Mouvements 93, no. 1: 60–5. https://doi-org.proxy.library.uu.nl/10.3917/mouv. 093.0060 Golańska, Dorota. 2017. Affective Connections: Towards a New Materialist Politics of Sympathy. New York and London: Rowman & Littlefield. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv125jkvq . 2008. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia UP. https://doi.org/10.37113/ideaj.vi0.192 . 2011. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham: Duke UP. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394433 Haraway, Donna. 1988. ‘Situated Knowledges. The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. Feminist Studies 14, no. 3: 575–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066

Art’s Political Potential 61 . 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke UP. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373780 hoogland, renée c. 2014. A Violent Embrace: Art and Aesthetics after Representation. Hannover, NH: Dartmouth College Press Huysmans, Jef. 2006. The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203008690 Ibrahim, Yasmin, and Anita Howarth. 2018. Calais and Its Border Politics: From Control to Demolition. New York and London: Routledge. https://doi. org/10.4324/9781315169712 Jones, Amelia. 2015. ‘Material Traces: Performativity, Artistic “Work”, and New Concepts of Agency’. TDR/The Drama Review 59, no. 4: 18–35. https://doi. org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00494 Jucan, Ioana B. 2015. ‘Sys. Begin to Sys. Exit: Software Performs a Piece of Work’. TDR/The Drama Review 59, no. 4: 149–68. https://doi.org/10.1162/ DRAM_a_00502 Kunst, Bojana. 2015. ‘The Troubles with Temporality: Micropolitics of Per­ formance’. Stedelijk Studies 3: 1–10. Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, John Rajchman, and Bozena Czubak. 2009. Krzysztof Wodiczko: Guests. Warsaw: Zacheta National Gallery of Art. Long, Katy. 2013. ‘When Refugees Stopped Being Migrants: Movement, Labour and Humanitarian Protection’. Migration Studies 1, no. 1: 4–26. https://doi. org/10.1093/migration/mns001 Lutterbeck, Derek. 2006. ‘Policing Migration in the Mediterranean’. Mediterranean Politics 11, no. 1: 59–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/13629390500490411 Massumi, Brian. 2002. A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203994368 Neal, Andrew W. 2009. ‘Securitization and Risk at the EU Border: The Origins of Frontex’. Journal of Common Market Studies 47, no. 2: 333–56. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468-5965.2009.00807.x O’Sullivan, Simon. 2001. ‘The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art beyond Representation’. Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 6, no. 3: 125– 35. https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250120087987 . 2006. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thinking beyond Representation. London: Palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512436 Pollock, Grizelda. 2010. ‘Aesthetic Wit(h)nessing in the Era of Trauma’. EurAmerica 40, no. 4: 829–86. Rolnik, Suely. 2013. Archive Mania. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Publishing. Schneider, Rebecca. 2005. ‘Solo Solo Solo’. In After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, edited by Gavin Butt, 23–47. Oxford: Blackwell. https:// doi.org/10.1002/9780470774243 . 2015. ‘New Materialisms and Performance Studies’. TDR/The Drama Review 59, no. 4: 7–17. https://doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00493 Vaughan-Williams, Nick. 2015a. Europe’s Border Crisis: Biopolitical Security and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford UP. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/ 9780198747024.001.0001 . 2015b. ‘“We Are Not Animals!” Humanitarian Border Security and Zoopolitical Spaces in Europe’. Political Geography 45: 1–10. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.polgeo.2014.09.009

PART II

Visualizing (In)Equalities

5

TINTED VISIONS PERFORMING EQUALITIES THROUGH FESTIVE DECORATIONS IN LGBT-THEMED EVENTS IN HULL (UK CITY OF CULTURE 2017) Barbara Grabher

Introduction In 2017, Hull celebrated its status as UK City of Culture. Central to the city’s event-based, culture-led regeneration scheme was the programming of ‘365 days of transformative culture’ (Hull 2017 Ltd 2015, 14). Structured across four programming seasons entitled Made in Hull, Roots and Routes, Freedom, and Tell the World, the programme included the week-long commemorative celebration of LGBT50 as one of the flagship events of the year. From July 22 to July 29, 2017, the LGBT50 event series conjoined activities in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales. The commemoration referred to the legislative change of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, in which the UK Parliament agreed to decriminalise same-sex intercourse between two male adults in private spaces (Hull 2017 Ltd 2017). In acknowledgement of this important date for the national Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) movement, local organisations including Pride in Hull and Hull 2017 Ltd curated the week-long series of events and exhibitions to celebrate gender and sexual diversity and equality.1 Inaugurating the week, the first ever UK Pride Parade and Party took place in the city on July 22, 2017. With over 40,000 participants, the outdoor event was of unprecedented scale for an LGBT-themed event in Hull. On the following days, audiences were invited to smaller, more intimate encounters concerning LGBT politics and experiences. A series of talks at the University of Hull ran alongside the Pride in Hull Film Festival. The exhibition House of Kings and Queens by Lee Price, the theatre performance Lads and Lasses by ApposArt, and the community zine Lost Property engaged the LGBT community and allies, fostering an atmosphere of LGBT visibility, awareness, and empowerment in the city. On the following Saturday, the event series ended with the Summer Tea Party by the queer arts collective Duckie as well as the I Feel Love concert organised by BBC Radio 2. As Coyle and Platt (2015, 275) declare: ‘Using festivity to champion a particular political viewpoint . . . is nothing new’. Within the literature DOI: 10.4324/9781003162759-7

66  B. Grabher canons on gender and event studies, LGBT Pride events dominate scholarly discussions. Interested in the histories, narratives, and structures of these events, scholars refer to various examples in order to discuss their potential in shaping societal meanings. Leading the debate, Kates (2003) and Browne (2007) point to the potential of LGBT events in terms of their ability to deand re-construct individual and collective identities. In his analysis of the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in Sydney, Kates (2003) argues that the liminal characteristics of such events allow for—or even invite—re-negotiations of conventional meanings of gender and sexualities. Examining LGBT Pride events in Dublin and Brighton, Browne (2007) suggests that genders and sexualities are (de)constructed through the conditions that the festive event creates and argues that the festive mood invites critical questioning of the gendered and sexualised codes of these structures. As such, these studies of LGBT events highlight the sociocultural significance of events for the negotiation and production of gender and sexual equality. As Browne (2007) argues, rather than being interpreted as a mere party, the politics of the party requires further attention. In order to consider events not only in their binary between ‘party’ or ‘politics’, I agree with Browne’s suggestion to analytically discuss events such as LGBT50 as ‘parties with politics’ (2007). Consequently, this chapter aims to investigate the ‘party’ and ‘politics’ (Browne 2007, 63) of the LGBT50 celebrations. My attention lies in the performance of equality through the material cultures of events. On the basis of my ethnographic investigation involving the producers and artists of and visitors to the LGBT50 event series, I interrogate in what way equality is negotiated in the decorative materials marking festive spaces. Contrasting the rainbow presence with the artistically informed search for counter-visualities, I argue for plural interpretations of equalities in the celebration of LGBT50. I outline that the celebration of equality does not unify the understanding of the concept; rather, the event series highlights differing, diverging, and even contradicting interpretations of equality. This chapter therefore demonstrates how celebrations and their decorative patterns give insight into the performative processes of festive settings with reference to the notion of equality. In the following chapter, I address equality as the political ambition of anti-discriminatory movements, including feminist and queer activism. I embrace equality as an intersectional notion. As such, I understand equality as intrinsically linked to various defining categories, including gender, ethnicity, class, and age. In the context of this particular research field, the intersections between gender and sexuality are of explicit relevance as the LGBT50 event series references such imbrications frequently in their programme outline (Hull 2017 Ltd 2017). Furthermore, my analytical focus on the material culture of events centres on the decorations of event spaces. My interest is guided by the importance of visual displays in festivals. However, I address decorations in general terms: rather than materially defining what decorations are, the overarching visuality of the festivity

Tinted Visions 67 determines my investigative attention. Therefore, while I consider bunting, banners, and signs, I expand the consideration of decorative materials to include paraphernalia such as face paint, costumes, and accessories as decorative-visual-markers of the LGBT50 celebration. This introduction is followed by a conceptual discussion of events and their sociocultural significance. With reference to liminality, I outline how meanings are produced in celebrations and discuss the performative and material aspects of these meaning-making processes. Through empirical resources, I discuss the visual spectrum of the LGBT50 event series. Paying particular attention to the rainbow- and counter-visualities, I argue for the plural notion of equality in the context of the event. I close the chapter with a discussion emphasising the performative relevance of events and their materiality in relation to the production of cultures of equality.

Events, Performances, and Liminality In order to understand the celebratory settings of LGBT50 as a productive site for cultures of equality, considerations of the sociocultural significance of events are crucial. Referring to debates in Critical Event Studies and Anthropology of the Festive, I depart from the assumption that celebrations hold the potential to engage, distort, and express the zeitgeist of their location. As Falassi (1987, 2–3) elucidates: Both the social function and the symbolic meaning of the festival are closely related to a series of overt values that the community recognises as essential to its ideology and worldview, to its social identity, its historical continuity and to its physical survival, which is ultimately what the festival celebrates. Following Falassi’s (1987) observation, Finkel (2015) points out that events do not take place in a vacuum, arguing that celebrations are embedded in and expressive of their contemporary situatedness. Based on this interpretation, I understand events as techniques for the promotion of political ideologies, communal values, cultural assets, and social dynamics that become meaningful through the concentrated temporality and spatiality of celebrations. Therefore, events need to be addressed as practices of meaningmaking with the potential to capture sociocultural significance. Celebrations are frequently discussed as transformative environments which invite subversions of the status quo (Taylor 2014). As a folklorist studying the cultural histories of the Americas, Abrahams explains: Festivals manufacture their own energies by upsetting things, creating a disturbance for the fun of it . . . . Festivals work (at least in their inception) by apparently tearing the fabric to pieces, by displaying it upsidedown, inside-out, wearing it as motley rags and tatters. (1987, 178)

68  B. Grabher With respect to their sociocultural significance and meaning-making practice, the transgressive potential of events is traditionally investigated in relation to Turner’s (1969, 1974, 1982a, 1982b, 1987a, 1987b) notion of liminality (Lamond and Moss 2020). 2 The concept of liminality is grounded in the anthropologist’s discussions of rituals and their procedural compilation of change. Turner (1969) describes liminal experiences as a momentary discontinuity of social structures, norms, and relationships: eventual rights and obligations are suspended; boundaries are redefined; and often the social order appears to be turned upside down. The concept’s analytical relevance becomes clear in relation to Abrahams’ interpretation of events as ‘disturbance for the fun of it’ (1987, 178). Even though subversive atmospheres are temporal, Turner (1969, 1974, 1982a, 1982b, 1987a, 1987b) argues for the necessity of such breaking points in strictly stratified societies. He even goes as far as to claim that society’s desires and imaginations become visible within the liminal expressions of festive encounters. The celebratory experience allows for the imagination of alternative models of living and leaves its traces within the normative conditions of society. Event-based subversions of norms supply societies with goals, aspirations, and structural models that would otherwise not be imaginable—capturing the transformative ambitions that celebrations entail. In this moment and experience of disruption and destruction, power dynamics are re-evaluated. Hence, liminal experiences are of crucial political potential for the negotiation and production of cultures of equality.

Performing Events In his book, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, Turner (1982a) links his notion of liminality to the consideration of performance. In reference to the concept of ‘social drama’, he establishes the grounds for interpretations of liminal experiences in relation to their dramaturgy.3 Imbricating experience, performance, and social drama through the concept of liminality, he elucidates the sociocultural significance of performances as follows: ‘Every type of cultural performance, including ritual, ceremony, carnival, theatre and poetry is explanation and explication of life itself. . . . A performance then is the proper finale of an experience’ (1982a, 13). Turner’s (1969, 1974, 1982a, 1982b, 1987a, 1987b) concept of liminality strongly influenced Schechner’s (2002) approach to performances and their study. Schechner (2002, 20) argues that ‘cultures are most fully expressed in and made conscious of themselves in their ritual and theatrical performances’ and he regards performances as ‘declarative of our shared humanity, yet it utters the uniqueness of particular cultures’. Moreover, for Schechner, ‘any event, action, or behaviour can be examined “as” performance’ (48). Though famously debated, his consideration of studying sociocultural realities ‘as’ performance also invites the study of events and their sociocultural significance in relation to their liminal features.

Tinted Visions 69 In line with McKenzie (2004), Boyd regards these imbrications between Turner’s and Schechner’s accounts as a construct of performative liminality. She points out that Turner uses ‘industrial leisure art forms’ to create ‘a temporal space which, because of the element of play, has the potential to radically critique and subvert’ (Boyd 2006, 26). Linking events, performances, and liminality, Boyd highlights that: Such theories conceive embodied performances (such as ritual or theatre) as potentially subversive in that they create liminal spaces, in-between temporal places, where social norms are played with and, at times, inverted. (25) In reference to Turner (1969, 1974, 1982a, 1982b, 1987a, 1987b) and Schechner (2002), McKenzie’s (2004) and Boyd’s (2006) interpretation of the conceptual features of performance match the descriptions of events by Falassi (1987), Abrahams (1987), and Finkel (2015) mentioned earlier. While Boyd (2006) regards performative liminality through examples of the English and Brazilian carnival, for the purposes of this chapter, I use Platt’s (2011, 2015) considerations of the Liverpool European Capital of Culture 2008 as my point of reference. The already discussed imbrications between event, performance, and liminality crystallise in her performative reading of Liverpool’s year-long celebration. Studying the creative and reflexive enactments of local identity during the event, she also highlights that the event was a liminal moment that was performative in character. While attentive to the existing power structures, Platt (2011, 2015) embraces the performative liminality of Liverpool European Capital of Culture 2008 as an invitation for reflexivity and experimentation through the consistent ‘What if?’ question. Due to spatial restrictions, I am not able to extend Platt’s reading further; however, her study of the performative context of events and its liminal characteristics pinpoints my understanding of the conceptual imbrications for the investigation of the LGBT50 celebrations. While performative liminality creates fruitful ground for the study of events as performances through their liminal features, the limitations of this proposed reading require explicit attention. Discussing these restrictions, I primarily draw on Boyd’s (2006) and McKenzie’s (2004) perspectives on ‘normative performativity’. Furthermore, I extend these considerations through recent debates on the concept of liminality in the context of Critical Events Studies. McKenzie (2004, 24) explains the restrictions of performative liminality as follows: ‘Performances can also reinforce or re-produce cultural hegemony’. Butler’s (1993) discussion of gendered performances informs McKenzie’s proposal of normative performativity. Arguing against the idea that gender is ‘rooted in a fixity of being-ness or essence of the self’ (Boyd 2006, 24), Butler (1993) outlines that gender is continuously performed and

70  B. Grabher therefore should be addressed as performative. While Schechner’s (2002) theatrical performance and Butler’s (1993) discursive performativity are distinct conceptual discussions, their relationship informs the central critique of performative liminality as relevant to the consideration of events.4 Boyd points out that, in her book Bodies That Matter, Butler (1993) considers that ‘although gender is performative, it is not simply a performance and should not be reduced as such; a predetermined limited range of “scripts” dictates the performance of gender. In other words, people are not free to simply decide which gender they will enact’ (2006, 25). Just as in the case of gender, the assumed liminality of performances and their subversive and transgressive characteristics in events need to be read through these restrictive scripts. Similar to the critique of liminality in performance studies, recent publications in the field of Critical Event Studies challenge assumptions concerning liminality in events. Lamond and Moss’s (2020) as well as Platt and Finkel’s (2020) publications problematise liminal experiences in events and interrogate the boundaries of liminality. Going beyond the fairly broad scope of critique in Lamond and Moss’s (2020) edited volume, Platt and Finkel’s (2020) work focuses on gendered violence at festivals. The contributing authors recount the harm done by the analytical disregard of social structures and highlight that vulnerabilities are constructed and enforced due to the false assumption of liberty in liminality.5 In my work I also support these debates as I argue that the re-evaluation of power structures is the privilege of those individuals and communities who can explore the subverted structures with the knowledge and security of returning to a non-discriminatory routine (Grabher 2020). Rather than promoting freeing transgressions of all normative boundaries, performative liminality— especially in events—requires an awareness of its inherent limitations. Following on from the discussion of the imbrications of events and performances through the concept of liminality, this section concentrates on the spatial—and further material—understandings of celebrations. While acknowledging the already discussed restrictions of liminal experiences, I seek to explore the event’s sociocultural significance beyond the experiential reflections predominantly addressed in the literature. Therefore, I interrogate the process of meaning-making in events through the material conditions of celebrations. While liminality is often regarded as a time-based concept due to the attention that is given to procedural experiences, Turner also highlights spatial conceptions of the liminal experience. As one of many examples, this description of carnival illustrates the relevance of spatiality in liminal conceptions: Truly [a festival] is the denizen of a place that is no place, and a time that is no time, even where that place is a city’s main plaza and that time can be found on an ecclesiastical calendar. For the squares, avenues

Tinted Visions 71 and streets of the city become, [during the festive occasion], the reverse of their daily selves. (Turner 1987b, 76) Beyond its temporality, the claiming of space and the production of place through festivities is also crucial to the interpretation of liminality and its materialisation. In Turner’s example, the intervention in public space materialises the event and its sociocultural significance. This spatial perspective of liminal event experiences influences the observations of LGBT Pride events by Browne (2007), Ammaturo (2016), and Taylor (2014). All three scholars pay crucial attention to the spatiality of events and discuss not only the temporal but especially the spatial visibility of the celebration as ‘queer appropriation’. Browne summarises by saying that the festival allows a ‘presence of sexual otherness in otherwise heterosexualised urbanities’ (2007, 66). Expanding upon the spatial discussions of Turner’s (1987b) liminality, I engage in further considerations of the material culture of events. Bennett and Woodward refer to the conceptual relevance of the materialities of events, contending that: ‘Festivals . . . produce a temporal, yet highly visible and in some cases inherently spectacular, display of commonly shared lifestyle preferences’ (2014, 14). While material features of events are often addressed descriptively, the study of material cultures as a practice of meaning-making in events is scarce. Bennett and Woodward contribute an important reflection as they acknowledge the materiality of so-called ‘nostalgia festivals’ and describe these events as ‘transcending the conventional blend of music, food and merchandise’ (14). In their study of the Wintersun festival in New South Wales, Australia, they recognise ‘classical cars, period fashion and various retro or reproduction consumer accessories as essential contributors to the festival experience’ (14). Christian Derbaix, Alain Decrop, and Olivier Cabossart similarly investigate the experience of football fans and their relationship with merchandise, pointing out that: ‘football fans conspicuously show a lot of support to their teams by such overt behaviour as singing, shouting and cheering but also through a lot of material merchandise: scarves, hats, shirts’ (2002, 517). While interpreting this merchandise in relation to its significance as a form of ‘identification, integration, expression and sacralization process’, Derbaix and Decrop acknowledge it as a crucial contribution to the ‘increasing theatricality of the game’ (2011, 272). In the case of LGBT Pride celebrations, material culture becomes a crucial symbol in the claiming of spaces. Similar to Derbaix and Decrop’s consideration of ‘the “true” football fan and its characterisation by their colours’ (276), Cooper declares that ‘distinct and diverse colours are often important components of queer signification, ranging from the tradition of coloured handkerchief codes for cruising to the reclaimed pink triangle and rainbow flags as symbols of gay liberation’ (2014, 10). While I will return to the ‘symbols of gay liberation’ in the later

72  B. Grabher analysis, the cited literature confirms events and the liminal experience materialise not only in terms of spatial features but also through paraphernalia including decorations, clothing, and flags. Therefore, as highlighted by Doyle (2012), the materiality of events influences—sometimes even enhances—event experiences and requires analytical attention, as decorations, merchandise, and other accessories contribute to the performative liminality and further the sociocultural significance of celebrations.

Committing to Colours: Mainstream Visuality The conceptual framework for my further analysis of the LGBT50 celebration is made up of the practices of meaning-making of events and the related sociocultural significance, their interpretations as performative liminality, and the inherent limitations of such interpretations. Turner’s (1987b) spatial attention and my further considerations of material manifestations of performative liminality in events guide me in the empirical analysis of the material production of cultures of equality in the LGBT50 celebration. Due to the vast amount of visual input in the LGBT50 event series, my focus below is concentrated on the opening and closing events of the week-long celebration. This attention to specific events in the series allows me to identify two dominant stylistic choices. I firstly address the mainstream decorative patterns of the rainbow, which aesthetically dominated the UK Pride Parade and Party. Secondly, I focus on alternative visual practices spearheaded by Duckie’s Summer Tea Party. With an emphasis on the colour patterns of each event, I argue that the material culture of events tints the visions of equality celebrated in the festival, as each decorative style associates with particular interpretations of equality. As a symbol strongly associated with the LGBT movement, rainbows were a crucial feature in the UK Pride Parade and Party, the opening event of the LGBT50 celebrations. Baker (2019) explains that the Pride flag was created in 1978 by Gilbert Baker, a San Francisco-based artist. By the mid-1990s, the horizontal stripes in rainbow colours replaced the reclaimed symbol of the pink triangle, which was used in Nazi concentration camps in order to visually stigmatise homosexual prisoners. Baker elucidates: the very idea of the pride flag [is] North American, but since the 1990s [it has] circulated transnationally through digital queer cultures, which have often borrowed language and iconography from Anglophone movements, making . . . the rainbow flag increasingly common sight at European Prides (and elsewhere). (2019, 178) Therefore, the rainbow flag has become an ‘international symbol of the LGBTQ rights movement’ (179) as celebrated internationally as well as in the context of Hull’s UK Pride Parade and Party in 2017.

Tinted Visions 73 Hull-based resident and visitor to various events in the LGBT50 series, Sophia, highlights the presence of the rainbow flag and outlines its sociocultural significance in relation to the event: ‘[The city was] trying to visibly show that [they] had moved on and that they were much more inclusive and LGBT aware’. Sophia explains that the visibility of rainbow colours was a crucial contribution to these ambitions as it served as an expression of related intentions: BARBARA: [How does Hull commit to the values of LGBT50?] SOPHIA: Well, I guess by sticking all the rainbow things. By the

police having rainbow beards and by the rainbow lashes on the uniform and the rainbow steps and all the rainbowyness everywhere. That sort of tells other people that this is LGBT. . . . Stick a rainbow flag on it and that makes you LGBT friendly.

While I return to Sophia’s comment in the next section, her awareness of the connotation of the colour palette as a visible clue for commitment and ambition strongly frames the usage of the rainbow flag during UK Pride Parade and Party. Sophia’s reference to the omnipresence of rainbow flags in Hull is framed by Hull 2017 Ltd’s social media campaign Challenge Hull in the run up to the LGBT50 celebrations. The campaign encouraged citizens and local organisations to ‘Make a Rainbow’ in reference to the colourful palette associated with the LGBT movement. Max, a member of a charity involved in the production of LGBT50, explains: As far as I am aware from Hull 2017 [Ltd] and also from others, Challenge Hull was one of the best campaigns . . . for reaching out to many people. . . . So many organisations even the presenting partners of [Hull UK] City of Culture [2017] have changed their logos. . . . How amazing! They put it on the branding of vehicles [etc.] and it was just a great opportunity for [the LGBT community]. The relevance of the rainbow colours and their supporting vision of equality crystallises further, when considering Max’s enthusiasm for a company’s commitment to rainbow colours in their slogan, logos, or general branding. He explains: One of the biggest bucket lists achievements for me this year was getting Smith and Nephew.6 On their building, they have lights. On the A63 coming into the city centre . . . you see their lights on their building. For years, they have been random. They are now in rainbow order . . . . That was their choice and at their expense. But that is sending out a message that says: we acknowledge this event. We in doing this say that it is ok. We support!

74  B. Grabher According to Max, the presence of the rainbow becomes a symbolic manifestation of the event of UK Pride Parade and Party. However, as did Sophia, Max understands the rainbow not only as a symbol linked to the liminal momentum of the UK Pride celebrations. Beyond the immediate event, the colour combination inherits an interpretation of celebrated equality struggles and demands. He elucidates: It is so heart-warming! [Smith and Nephew] kept them up for so much longer than necessary. . . . It means Pride is coming back to Hull and seeing those flags [is saying] actually LGBT rights are human rights. That is not just for [the LGBT community]. It is for everybody and that is the key. As previously alluded to by Sophia, Max concretises the idea that the colours of the rainbow are an expression not only of support for the event but also of the cause that the event celebrates. Clearly, Max identifies the colour palette through his involvement with the LGBT50 celebrations. However, and more importantly, Max articulates that the colourful mix serves as a statement and commitment: the rainbow flag signals acceptance, tolerance, and support for identities and their diversity, which becomes the key interpretation of equality according to Max’s description. In her study of the Eurovision Song Contest, Baker contextualises Max’s enthusiasm for the rainbow flag in relation to its symbolic relevance for international politics. She explains: Pride flags, especially the rainbow flag, have . . . become significant symbols in international politics. . . . Activist movements have used them to demand equal rights from states and to protest against police repression, using massed flags’ visual spectacle to stake a symbolic claim for visibility. (2019, 180) Max’s cheerful interpretations are clarified through Baker’s explanation of the relevance of the colourful decorations. Similarly, as addressed in the previous section, rather than being a design for the particular event, the rainbow flag as a decorative pattern for UK Pride Parade and Party needs to be read in relation to the symbolic value the colour palette holds for the international campaign for LGBT equality. While the colour palette receives international recognition and therefore carries great significance in the production of cultures of equality, Sophia critically reacts in her observations of the omnipresence of the flag. In the previous quotation, she acknowledged the symbol’s strong presence and its potential to create meaning in respect to LGBT equality. However, she is suspicious of the kind of commitment and support decorations can entail. In this vein, she continues: ‘[The rainbow colours] make you as much LGBT-friendly as a nodding dog. . . . People are supposed to think you own

Tinted Visions 75 then that message. Even though, you are not. You are just using the symbol for a day’. Rather than a mechanism of commitment and support, Sophia suggests that rainbow aesthetics may become a brand-like mechanism. In this way, she introduces a crucial question into the discussion of mainstream aesthetics of equality-themed events: is a rainbow flag a sign for the LGBT community and their right to equality, or has the symbol become generally associated with celebrations beyond an immediate political interest? Similar to Sophia’s considerations, the LGBT50 celebrations include several producers and artists who critically question the rainbow visuality of LGBT Pride events. Henry, one of the producers of the Summer Tea Party, vocalises his observations of trends of rainbow decorations as follows: Did you go to the gay pride thing? They put a show on the stage, and you know what those shows are going to be. This is a popstar from 10 years ago singing a song. . . . This is like being a doll on the stage singing a pop song, because it is popular. In opposition to the UK Pride Parade and Party, Henry argues that not only the content of the event but also the decorations do not necessarily correlate with an ambition or intention for equality; rather, Henry suggests that the recognition and visibility of the rainbow colours have become a branding tool linked to commercialised interests in the event and the celebratory cause. In contrast to Max, Sophia and Henry imply that the omnipresence and uniformity of rainbow decorations in Hull’s UK Pride Parade and Party lacks space for nuances. In opposition to the commodification of the celebrated value of equality, Henry responds to my question concerning the visuality of the Summer Tea Party with the exclamation: ‘No rainbow flags! No. Read my lips: No rainbow flags!’.

Somewhere over the Rainbow: Counter-Visualities In order to oppose the tendencies of brand-like strategies of rainbow decorations, Henry questions the essence of the celebrations and outlines the relevance of the notions of equality in his creative and conceptual work. His strict opposition to mainstream aesthetics is grounded in the intellectual and conceptual differences between his work and mainstream LGBT celebrations. Henry explains: [LGBT activism] comes from an artistic tradition of being oppositional, being against society. [For me] to be queer means that we should be asking other kind[s] of questions apart from just consuming the mainstream. . . . We are interested in asking more questions about: What does it mean to be a human being? What is happening in the world?

76  B. Grabher You know, who we are. All questions that aren’t asked. We want to ask those questions. We open it up. As outlined in the quote, Henry’s personal convictions regarding queer politics result in a search for alternative aesthetics marking the Summer Tea Party. These lie beyond the rainbow and the homonormative branding strategies. Hence, he embraces artistically informed, experimental visualities that allow for further discussion and considerations of the relations between humans, their conceptions of equality, and their claiming of their human rights. Alongside Henry’s account, my data collection reveals elaborate practices of counter-visualities in opposition to the commodifying tendencies of rainbow aesthetics. In the context of the final event of the Summer Tea Party, affiliated artists actively sought a decorative pattern beyond the rainbow-mainstream. Collaborations with performing and visual artists are a particularly fruitful approach for the search for counter-visualities. Through creative interrogations of the event and its values, new colour schemes and decorative designs are explored. Due to the spatial restrictions of this chapter, I am only able to discuss one example of these various alternatives regarding decorative visualities. As the lead artist of a community dance project, Thomas introduces me to his aesthetic standpoint in regard to his artistic devotion, stating that: People are already doing [the rainbow thing]. It is already being done a lot. . . . What is the point of repeating [it] again? . . . [In my creative work] I ask: Where is Thomas in that? How do I want to interrogate that as an artist? So this is my take. Where is my work on this? Where is my aesthetic? For me, this is a piece of work so it is about trying to get my point of view across visually and in the style of movement. . . . So, it is trying to get all of that—without relying too much on what is already [being done]. Thomas explains his opposition in terms of the mainstream aesthetics not suiting his artistic vision. Rather than repeating ‘what is already being done’, he searches for his own artistic expression in relation to the celebration of equality. As a result, he refrains from rainbow colours in the final performance of his community dance project. Instead, the 50 participating performers are dressed in an androgynous look from the 1950s. Grey, white, and brown dominate the scene, interrupted by shimmers of gold. Rather than attracting through bright colours, the pieces of clothing draw attention through tags attached to them with terms such as ‘lesbian’, ‘homosexual’, ‘trans’, or ‘Section 28’, among others written on them. Referring either to historical facts or identity labels, their random placement on the jackets, ties, or trousers of performers is independent of the performers’ own identifications or experiences. Embracing such visual clues, Thomas

Tinted Visions 77 elucidates that the visuality of the performance is continuously driven by an understanding of the uniformity of lack of representation. Therefore, the individual dancers blend into one moving mass. However, when considered close-up, the uniqueness of each label, costume, and individual story becomes clear. His artistic vision and opposition to rainbow palettes crystallise when the use of flags becomes relevant to the performance. In an informal conversation, Thomas explains to me that the rainbow flag in the performance is an important reference to the formation of the political movement for LGBT equality. While wanting to incorporate the reference in the performance, Thomas is conscious to avoid mainstream visuals of the horizontal stripes of multiple colours. Rather, he chooses to represent the political movement through individual uni-coloured flags being waved in synchronous movements by different individuals. As stated above, his aesthetic and intellectual approach demanded more nuances than a mainstream rainbow aesthetic would allow. Therefore, in refusing to restrict himself to the limitations of the conventional colour palette, Thomas’ artistic vision enables him to explore beyond the already existing strategies for visualising the struggle for equality.

Conclusions In this chapter, I have interrogated the LGBT50 event series as part of Hull’s celebration of the UK City of Culture title in respect to its visual negotiations of equality in the form of decorative materials. With reference to Turner’s (1969, 1974, 1982a, 1982b, 1987a, 1987b) and Schechner’s (2002) combined discussions of performative liminality and its material characteristics, I have argued for the sociocultural significance of festivals, celebrations, and events. I explained that in liminal moments, society is challenged to explore, negotiate, and imagine its potential and possibilities. Even though bound by its limitations, the performative liminality of celebrations creates fruitful circumstances for the study of the production of cultures of equality. To this end, I foregrounded the potential to investigate these productions of cultures of equality through the material cultures of events as I argued that materialities such as decorations constitute part of the meaning-making practice of events. On the basis of these conceptual discussions, I focused my analysis on the decorative materials used in the context of the opening and closing events of the LGBT50 celebration. By examining the UK Pride Parade and Party and the outdoor Summer Tea Party, I have observed two distinct stylistic patterns of decorations in the event series. UK Pride Parade and Party emphasised their visuality through a ‘rainbowyness’, as described by visitor Sophia. On the other hand, producers and artists affiliated with the Summer Tea Party distanced themselves and even rejected the rainbow symbol for their event. Their aesthetics were dominated by artistic explorations of alternative styles, which went beyond the already expected

78  B. Grabher rainbow visualities. I demonstrated that the visualities of both events are not bound to the mere preferences of producers, artists, or visitors but are related to conceptual and intellectual considerations of what values of equality are being celebrated. As key representatives of the two events, Max and Henry both gave insight into their understanding of equality as a reclaiming of human rights. Nevertheless, while Max saw the rainbow flag as constituting the symbol of this struggle, Henry was reluctant to claim any pre-scripted symbol for the fight. In reference to Sophia and Henry, I understood his oppositional stand to the rainbow colour combination as a rejection of the branding mechanism that the rainbow flag has become associated with. In further explanation, Henry elucidated that the event’s vision and decorative design encouraged the continuous questioning of what humans, their rights, and their being can be. As such, Henry’s approach to the event’s visuality was particularly informed by his collaboration with performing and visual artists. In my outline, I concentrated in detail on Thomas, who rather than employing a mainstream aesthetic in his community dance project, embraced his personal vision of a different representational spectrum by highlighting the individuality in uniformity through the dancers’ appearance. This discussion of visualities of equality emphasises multiple interpretations, which influence the negotiation of cultures of equality in celebratory contexts. Rather than a singular perspective of equality, which the celebrations of LGBT50 might embrace, my analysis of decorative materials introduced a multiplicity of considerations of equality. Mainstream and oppositional decorative styles painted not only the festival spaces, but also gave further insight into the differing, diverting, and even contradicting interpretations that underlie these celebrations of equality. In summary, I argue for attention to be given to the plurality of the promoted and produced cultures of equality as expressed in the decorative materials of mainstream and alternative LGBT Pride celebrations.

Notes 1. Hull 2017 Ltd was founded by Hull City Council to execute the event of Hull 2017. The company was led by Martin Green as CEO and artistic director and supported by a board chaired by journalist and cultural commentator Rosie Millard. 2. Alongside liminality, Bakhtin’s (1968) consideration of the carnivalesque is a frequently used conceptual framework and can be linked to and understood in relation to the concept of liminality. Due to the spatial restrictions of this chapter, I draw merely on Turner’s (1969, 1974, 1982a, 1982b, 1987a, 1987b) notion of liminality and exclude further in-depth discussions of carnivalesque considerations. 3. Schechner (2002, 25) describes the notion of ‘social drama’ as one of Turner’s ‘most fruitful yet problematic ideas’. He summarises that ‘social dramas are units of aharmonic processes, arising in conflict situations’ (Schechner 2002, 25) of any scale. From personal disputes to large-scale international

Tinted Visions 79 conflicts, each social drama is executed in four periods: breach-crisisredressive action-reintegration or schism. Due to the focus of this chapter, I am not going to address this notion in further detail but mention its existence in regard to the notion of performance. 4. While the two notions inform each other, performance and performativity essentially derive from different scholarly traditions and discuss distinct phenomena. Boyd (2006) cites Sara Salih in order to clarify that ‘whereas performance presupposes a pre-existing subject, performativity contests the very notion of the subject’ (in Boyd 2006, 25). 5. See Aborisade (2020); Bows, King, and Measham (2020); Fileborn, Wadds, and Tomsen (2020); Mlotshwa (2020); Morero Beltrán and Camps Calvet (2020); and Silvestre, Royo, and Linares (2020). 6. Smith and Nephew is a multi-national medical equipment company, which originates from Hull and still has a factory in the city.

Works Cited Aborisade, Richard. 2020. ‘Sexual Violence in Nigerian MusiCultural Festivals’. In Gendered Violence at International Festivals: An International Perspective, edited by Louise Platt and Rebecca Finkel, 39–53. Abingdon: Routledge. Abrahams, Roger. 1987. ‘An American Vocabulary of Celebrations’. In Time Out of Time: Essays on the Festival, edited by Alessandro Falassi, 173–83. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Ammaturo, Franscesca. 2016. ‘Spaces of Pride: A Visual Ethnography of Gay Pride Parades in Italy and the United Kingdom’. Social Movement Studies 15, no. 1: 19–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2015.1060156. Baker, Catherine. 2019. ‘“If Love Was a Crime, We Would Be Criminals”: The Eurovision Song Contest and the Queer International Politics of Flags’. In Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956, edited by Julie Kalman, Ben Wellings, and Keshia Jacotine, 175–200. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-139427-0 Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1968. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana UP. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-30-4-605 Bennet, Andy, and Jody Taylor, eds. 2014. The Festivalization of Culture. Surrey: Ashgate. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315558189 Bennett, Andy, and Ian Woodward. 2014. ‘Festival Spaces, Identity, Experience and Belonging’. In The Festivalization of Culture, edited by Andy Bennet and Jody Taylor, 11–26. Surrey: Ashgate Bows, Hannah, Hannah King, and Fiona Measham. 2020. ‘Conceptualising Safety and Crime at UK Music Festivals: A Gendered Analysis’. In Gendered Violence at International Festivals: An International Perspective, edited by Louise Platt and Rebecca Finkel, 86–103. Abingdon: Routledge. Boyd, Jade. 2006. ‘Considering Performance’. Graduate Journal of Social Science 3, no. 2: 23–42. Browne, Kath. 2007. ‘A Party with Politics? (Re)Making LGBTQ Pride Spaces in Dublin and Brighton’. Social & Cultural Geography 8, no. 1: 63–87. https://doi. org/10.1080/14649360701251817 Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London and New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203828274

80  B. Grabher Cooper, Danielle. 2014. ‘Rainbow Flags and Donor Tags: Queer Materials at the Pride Library’. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 10, no. 2: 2–21. Coyle, Tasmin, and Louise Platt. 2015. ‘Feminist Politics in the Festival Space’. In The Routledge Handbook of Festivals, edited by Judith Mair, 273–82. London and New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315186320 Derbaix, Christian, and Alain Decrop. 2011. ‘Colours and Scarves: An Ethnographic Account of Football Fans and Their Paraphernalia’. Leisure Studies 30, no. 3: 271–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2010.527356 Derbaix, Christian, Alain Decrop, and Olivier Cabossart. 2002. ‘Colors and Scarves: The Symbolic Consumption of Material Possessions by Soccer Fans’. In NA—Advances in Consumer Research Volume 29, edited by Susan M. Broniarczyk and Kent Nakamoto, 511–18. Valdosta, GA: Association for Consumer Research. Doyle, Stephen. 2012. ‘Merchandising and Retail’. In Festival and Events Management: An International Arts and Culture Perspective, edited by Ian Yeoman, Martin Robertson, Jane Ali-Knight, Siobhan Drummond, and Una McMahon-Beattie, 156–70. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9780080477701 Falassi, Alessandro. 1987. Time Out of Time: Essays on the Festival. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Fileborn, Bianca, Phillip Wadds, and Stephen Tomsen. 2020. ‘Gender, Transgression, and Sexual Violence at Australian Music Festivals’. In Gendered Violence at International Festivals: An International Perspective, edited by Louise Platt and Rebecca Finkel, 69–85. Abingdon: Routledge. Finkel, Rebecca. 2015. ‘Introduction to Special Issue on Social Justice & EventsRelated Policy’. Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events 7, no. 3: 217–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/19407963.2014.995905 Grabher, Barbara. 2020. ‘The Privilege of Subversion. Reading Experiences of LGBT-Themed Events during Hull UK City of Culture 2017 through Liminality’. In Liminality and Critical Event Studies: Boundaries, Borders, and Contestation, edited by Ian Lamond and Jonathan Moss, 79–98. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hull 2017 Ltd. 2015. Hull UK City of Culture 2017: Strategic Business Plan 20152018. Hull: Hull 2017 Ltd. . 2017. ‘LGBT50’. https://www.hull2017.co.uk/whatson/events/lgbt-50/ Kates, Steven. 2003. ‘Producing and Consuming Gendered Representations: An Interpretation of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras’. Consumption, Markets & Culture 6, no. 1: 5–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/10253860302699 Lamond, Ian, and Jonathan Moss, eds. 2020. Liminality and Critical Event Studies: Boundaries, Borders, and Contestation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40256-3 McKenzie, Jon. 2004. ‘The Liminal Norm’. In The Performance Studies Reader, edited by Henry Bial, 26–31. New York: Routledge. Mlotshwa, Khanyile. 2020. ‘Between Patriarchy and Capitalism: The Gendered Violence of Intwasa International Arts Festival, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’. In Gendered Violence at International Festivals: An International Perspective, edited by Louise Platt and Rebecca Finkel, 54–68. Abingdon: Routledge. Morero Beltrán, Anna, and Clara Camps Calvet. 2020. ‘Fiestas, Public Space and Rape Culture. A Study of the Wolf Pack Case’. In Gendered Violence at

Tinted Visions 81 International Festivals: An International Perspective, edited by Louise Platt and Rebecca Finkel, 24–38. Abingdon: Routledge. Platt, Louise. 2011. ‘Liverpool 08 and the Performativity of Identity’. Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events 3, no. 1: 31–43. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/19407963.2011.539380 . 2015. ‘Transformation and Liverpool European Capital of Culture 2008’. In Ideological, Social and Cultural Aspects of Events, edited by Omar Moufakkir and Tomas Pernecky, 86–99. Wallingford: CAB International. Platt, Louise, and Rebecca Finkel, eds. 2020. Gendered Violence at International Festivals: An International Perspective. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/ 10.4324/9780429344893 Schechner, Richard. 2002. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315269399 Silvestre, Maria, Raquel Royo, and Estibaliz Linares. 2020. ‘Analysis of the Response of the Feminist Movement and Institutional Feminism to Gender Violence in Local Festivals in Northern Spain’. In Gendered Violence at International Festivals: An International Perspective, edited by Louise Platt and Rebecca Finkel, 9–23. Abingdon: Routledge Taylor, Jody. 2014. ‘Festivalizing Sexualities: Discourses of “Pride”, CounterDiscourses of “Shame”’. In The Festivalization of Culture, edited by Andy Bennet and Jody Taylor, 27–48. Surrey: Ashgate. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315134666 . 1974. ‘Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology’. The Rice University Studies 60, no. 3: 53–92. https:// doi.org/1911/63159. . 1982a. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications. . 1982b. Introduction to Celebrations: Studies in Festivity and Ritual, edited by Victor Turner, 11–33. Washington, DC: Smithsonian IP. . 1987a. ‘Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage’. In Betwixt and Between: Patterns of Masculine and Feminine Initiation, edited by Victor Turner, 3–19. Chicago: Open Court. . 1987b. ‘Carnival, Ritual and Play in Rio de Janeiro’. In Time Out of Time: Essays on the Festival, edited by Alessandro Falassi, 74–90. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

6

SOCIAL MEDIA REVERBERATIONS OF FEMINIST ASSEMBLIES REFLECTIONS AFTER NON UNA DI MENO’S VERONA TRANSFEMMINISTA RALLY Tommaso Trillò

Introduction: Choreographed Assemblies in the New Global Cycle of Feminist Protests Around 2014, feminist movements in several locations around the world inaugurated a new cycle of protests (Tarrow 1993, 287). A few examples of participating social movement organisations include Ni una menos in Argentina and across Latin America; the Women’s March and the #MeToo movements in the wider US context; the Black Protest in Poland; the collectives that promoted participation to the 8M Strike in Spain; and Non una di meno in Italy. The tactical innovations (Snow and Benford 1992, 146) that accompanied this new cycle of protests included the widespread use of social media for coordination and campaigning. Famous successful deployments of these tools include the appearance of #Niunamenos at the top of Twitter’s global trending topics on the day of the first Ni una menos rally in Buenos Aires in 2015 and Alyssa Milano’s viral 2017 tweet that helped popularise the pre-existing #MeToo movement. In this chapter, I focus on the performative aspects of the social media practices (Mattoni 2017) of the Italian feminist movement Non una di meno (literally, ‘not one [woman] less’). Following Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993, 2015) work on gender performativity and the performative theory of assembly, I understand performativity as first and foremost a linguistic property of illocutionary speech acts—that is, words that, once spoken, produce that of which they speak. Illocutionary speech acts produce normative matrices within which some subjects are viable while others simply are not. However, these norms are not all-pervasive: failing to reproduce them opens up the potential for their contestation (Butler 1993, 235–7). In Butler’s earlier work, this primarily applied to the individual performances of bodies that refused to conform to gender expectations. In her more recent work, contestation takes place through the collective performances DOI: 10.4324/9781003162759-8

Social Media Reverberations 83 of those who refuse their marginalisation, take to the streets, and demand recognition as viable subjects. In what follows, I analyse one of Non una di meno’s most successful initiatives to date: the Verona transfemminista (Transfeminist Verona) rally that took place in the streets of Verona, Italy, on March 30, 2019. Specifically, I examine a corpus of images posted to the social media platform Instagram by Non una di meno constituents on the occasion of the rally. Given the approach to performativity described above, I adopt a methodological toolbox from discourse analysis (Van Leeuwen 2008) that borrows from adjacent disciplines such as media studies (Shifman 2013), social movement studies (Snow and Benford 1988), and affect theory (Ahmed 2004). I unpack the ‘collective’ and ‘connective’ elements of the protest in order to assess whether Non una di meno is an organisationally brokered, organisationally enabled, or self-organising network (Bennett and Segerberg 2013, 256). Verona transfemminista was organised as a protest against the ultraconservative XIII World Congress of Families (henceforth, WCF), held in Verona on March 29–31, 2019. The WCF is a reactionary convention that ‘seeks to unite and equip leaders, organisations, and families to affirm, celebrate, and defend the natural family as the only fundamental and sustainable unit of society’ (World Congress of Families 2019). Indeed, the WCF is one of many collective actions of the so-called anti-gender movement, which includes a coalition of pre-existing ultra-conservative groups alongside new groups specifically created to counter the so-called ideology of gender, and allies such as conservative pseudo-intellectuals, politicians, and journalists (Pavan 2019, 238). The goal of the anti-gender movement is to contain and roll back the political impact of a more or less imagined adversary known by the shorthand of ‘gender’; a reductio a unum of virtually all feminist and queer theories and activism. According to their narrative, this enemy is spreading an ideology—the ideology of gender—that will undo the very fabric of society (Pavan 2019, 236). To put it differently, the anti-gender movement produces frames that, on the one hand, delegitimise feminist arguments problematising the sexist violence of the current social order and, on the other, legitimise hyper-conservative understandings of sex, sex relations, homosexuality, and reproductive rights. To voice its dissent with the positions of the Congress of Families, especially in light of the support the WCF received from the right-leaning coalition governing Italy between June 2018 and September 2019, Non una di meno mobilised its supporters for a set of initiatives designed to make Verona a ‘transfeminist city’ for the weekend of March 29–31, 2019. The mobilisation was announced through a communiqué circulated on Non una di meno’s website, social media channels, and wide network of collectives in the Italian territory (Non una di meno 2019). As the organisers summarise in this pronouncement, the initiative was part of the wider work of Non una di meno as a social movement that, since 2016, has challenged

84  T. Trillò the hierarchies and the power relations behind the violence of strict gender roles and male-perpetrated violence against women. The initiative in Verona was presented as complementary to other recurring events organised by the movement, such as the yearly rally for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women—held on November 25—and the annual strike on International Women’s Day, in March. A large-scale rally on March 30 was the main event of the mobilisation, complemented by workshops, conferences, shows, and performances throughout the weekend, along with an international assembly featuring the participation of several guests from sister movements abroad. The initiative was a success and, according to social media posts by the organisers, around 100,000 people gathered in the streets of Verona for the main event. Verona transfemminista can be read as an intervention to counter the signification of ‘family’ proposed by the WCF. I see the interplay between the narratives of Non una di meno and the anti-gender movement in Verona as a case of two social movement organisations competing over the meaning of the same social phenomenon: the family and the place of women therein (Pavan 2020, 3). Social movement scholars David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford have famously argued that social movements are agents heavily involved in the politics of signification (Snow and Benford 1988, 198; see also Benford and Snow 2000); in other words, agents that compete over the meaning of social phenomena. Reading their work through the lens of Butler’s theory of performativity, I argue that the signifying work of social movements not only defines social phenomena but also produces the subjects of the social phenomena it tries to describe. Thus, the contestation between Non una di meno and the anti-gender camp in Verona can be read as a debate over which version of family and womanhood should be considered viable.

Choreography and Affect at Verona transfemminista: A Theoretical Framework As previously noted, my understanding of performativity is based on Butler’s (2015) performative theory of assembly. Starting from her theory of gender performativity (Butler 1990, 1993), Butler argues that bodies are produced by a matrix of norms created by illocutionary speech acts. Gender identity is thus the result of a ‘stylised repetition of acts’ (Butler 1990, 140) performed by bodies that forcibly cite the gender norms that produce them (Butler 1993, 232). In other words, norms dictate which performances are viable and which are not. Normative bodies pass unnoticed, while nonconforming bodies are exposed to arbitrary violence on a daily basis. Butler summarises the differential exposure to arbitrary violence with the term ‘precarity’ (Butler 2015, 33). Precarity is a common feature of all disenfranchised bodies—that is, all the bodies that are produced as non-viable by normative forces. This logic applies equally to heteronormative regimes

Social Media Reverberations 85 that exclude queer subjects as much as other forms of disenfranchisement, such as neoliberal regimes that dispossess people through privatisation, financialisation, and debt-ocracy (Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 12; Butler 2015, 34). Simply put, the arbitrary violence of precarity enforces norms according to which some bodies ‘pass’ while others are unintelligible and therefore dispensable. These norms are, however, not all-powerful. Butler (1993, 235–7) argues that a number of practices can expose the weakness of gender norms, including when bodies perform hyperbolic and exaggerated versions of these norms; when some bodies perform a norm that was not meant for them; or, when bodies mix norms in unexpected ways. Similarly, precarious bodies can overcome exclusion by coming together despite their abjection. Relying on Hannah Arendt’s notion of the space of appearance, Butler (2015, 41) contends that excluded subjects have to create the conditions for their inclusion.1 When precarious bodies ‘assemble on the streets, in the square, or in other forms of public spaces (including virtual ones) they are exercising a plural and performative right to appear’ (11). Abjected bodies can, therefore, reclaim the agency that precarity denies them by coming together and collectively staging a claim for their viability as subjects. In her performative theory of assembly, Butler gestures towards the relevance of online spaces and the mediated reverberations of embodied protest (Butler 2015, 20; 102–8; 126) without exploring their implications. I therefore now turn to the work of social movement scholar Paolo Gerbaudo (2012) to operationalise this framework for the case study at hand. In his Tweets and the Streets, Gerbaudo presents a strikingly similar understanding of disenfranchisement and the necessary conditions for precarious bodies to access political visibility. Echoing Butler’s take on the Arendtian space of appearance, he claims that spaces of political visibility come about when bodies get together, occupy spaces, and act politically within them (Gerbaudo 2012, 38; see also Arendt 1958, 199). Elaborating on this notion, he argues that the production of spaces of political visibility almost necessarily requires a group of movement leaders. These leaders act as choreographers, setting the stage for the collective performances of their adherents in what he calls ‘choreography of assembly’. Gerbaudo further contends that neoliberal regimes have produced circumstances under which the gathering of otherwise dispersed bodies requires at least some degree of technological mediation (2012, 159). For example, commercial social media can facilitate the process of gathering bodies together by offering the opportunity to establish connections and share information among physically dispersed individuals. More than a mere organisational tool, social media platforms can be used by social movements to choreograph performance constellations (Fuentes 2015, 26–7) that go beyond the time and space of any single embodied protest. Social media platforms unlock the opportunity to reverberate a protest beyond its physical location as well as the possibility of joining the protest at different times and from different

86  T. Trillò spaces. Thus, social movements confronting the dislocated oppression of neoliberal regimes can use social media to assemble otherwise dispersed bodies in asynchronous and unexpected ways. Gerbaudo’s (2012) choreography of assembly is a powerful tool to explain the functioning of what Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg called organisationally brokered and organisationally enabled networks in terms of performativity (2013, 755–6). Organisationally brokered networks are social movement organisations that primarily operate through the logic of collective action, a centralised process through which they first articulate their grievances within the movement and then communicate them outside their community through collective action frames. For social movement scholars, ‘to frame’ is to assign meaning and interpret events ‘in ways that are intended to mobilise potential adherents and constituents, to garner bystander support, and to demobilise antagonists’ (Snow and Benford 1988, 198). In other words, framing performs the crucial tasks of diagnosing the problems at stake, outlining a set of preferred solutions, and providing a rationale for individual adherence to the collective’s cause. Unlike organisationally brokered networks, organisationally enabled networks are social movements that combine the traditional logic of collective action with elements of a new logic for social mobilisation called ‘connective action’. This refers to the processes facilitated by social media technologies in which the message of a movement is shaped through the accumulation of individual messages posted by loosely affiliated individuals that share their personal views on a given issue through personalised action frames (Bennett and Segerberg 2013, 757). The advent of commercial social media has partially re-shaped social mobilisation by erasing many of the barriers individuals previously encountered when trying to add their voice to a social movement. Under the traditional logic of collective action, participation in a movement required active membership in one of its collectives and physical presence at its assemblies. Under the new logic of connective action, participation can take the form of a single tweet. However, spaces of political visibility on social media are not inherently different from their analogue counterparts. They do not exist prior to the collective performance of bodies coming together to speak politically therein. That is to say, they still need to be produced and occupied, in most cases, through the intervention of a core group of choreographers. Social movement leadership may have become more fluid but is far from absent. Gerbaudo argues that movement leaders choreograph their constituents by producing a sense of shared identity through a set of empty signifiers or signs that have been deprived of their particularistic content and can therefore resonate with the grievances of a wide and diverse set of constituents (2012, 42; see also, Laclau 2005, 94). Recent examples of such empty signifiers include ‘We are the 99%’, ‘Me too’, and indeed ‘Non una di meno’. These phrases delimit the boundaries of a stage within which adherents are substantially free to perform at will. In this sense, the

Social Media Reverberations 87 message of a social movement is less coherently framed than it was in the past. Rather, it emerges out of a combination of the frames centrally produced by the movement’s leaders and the individual yet collective voices of its sympathisers (Papacharissi 2015). Far from being individual opinions shouted into the void, social media posts that express solidarity with a social movement are performative acts that quite literally turn the personal into the political. Together with leadership, participation in social mobilisations has also become more fluid. Indeed, performances of solidarity with a social movement under the logic of connective action seem to be tied to affect rather than identity (Papacharissi 2015, 6). As social media scholar Zizi Papacharissi argues, ‘affective publics’ materialise through their shared expression of sentiment (25). In this chapter, I adopt Sarah Ahmed’s (2004) understanding of affect. Starting from the question of ‘What do emotions do?’, Ahmed offers an account of ‘how emotions circulate between bodies. . . how they “stick” as well as move’ (Ahmed 2004, 4). She concludes that the stickiness and movement of emotions are inevitably tied to the relationship between signs and bodies. Emotions create alignments and divergences that materialise the boundary between self and object, as well as the boundary between self and other (191). Some of these alignments produce communities while some produce marginalisation. Through repetition, the emotional response to a given sign grows stronger and can eventually form a material rhetoric that shapes our modes of life.

Analysing Collective and Connective Action: Frames and Affect My analysis in this chapter starts with an overview and interpretation of ‘29/30/31—Verona città transfemminista’ (‘29/30/31—Verona Transfemminist City’), the 1,300-word text circulated by Non una di meno to launch the initiative. In this part of the analysis, I concentrate on the diagnostic and prognostic framing that Non una di meno’s leaders voice as choreographers of the assembly in Verona. That is to say, I pay particular attention to the elements of collective action that facilitated the choreography of assembly of Verona transfemminista. Snow and Benford argue that one of the crucial tasks of a social movement organisation is to identify a social problem—‘diagnostic framing’—and offer a tentative solution—‘prognostic framing’—that is resonant with the positions of its adherents (Snow and Benford 1988, 201). In my view, diagnostic and prognostic framing is an essential part of the work that movement leaders perform when choreographing an assembly. I then turn to the analysis of a corpus of user-generated memes posted on the social media platform Instagram with the hashtag #VeronaTransfemminista on the occasion of the rally. Memes are understood, following Shifman, as ‘units of popular culture that are circulated, imitated, and transformed by individual Internet users, creating a shared cultural experience in the

88  T. Trillò process’ (2013, 367). As of November 2020, the publicly available data from a keyword-search on Instagram for #VeronaTransfemminista contains 764 posts. Out of this initial corpus, I have selected memes with the following characteristics: they (1) are inferred or implied selfies (Zhao and Zappavigna 2018, 1745); (2) are posted by people present at the initiative in Verona; (3) have protest banners as their main participant. At least 176 of the images posted on Instagram with the protest hashtag contained a protest banner as one of the protagonists of the visual composition. The majority of these photos contained the face of one or more participants at the rally. Given the politically charged context from which the data is extracted, I have chosen to limit my analysis to inferred or implied selfies in order to minimise the risk of recognition for the activists. Inferred and implied selfies are a sub-genre of self-portraits that presents a meta-meta-perspective on an object that is not the producer of the image (Zhao and Zappavigna 2018, 1747–8). The elements composing an implied or inferred selfie typically include a body part of the author, one or more foregrounded objects and the scenery. The final selection features 55 images from the rally. Given the Butlerian understanding of performativity outlined in the previous section, my analysis relies mostly on a discourse analysis toolbox. Since the case study clearly revolves around the production and contestation of norms, I pay particular attention to strategies of legitimisation. Theo Van Leeuwen’s (2008, 105–23) model for the study of (de)legitimisation through discourse relies on four categories: authorisation, moral legitimisation, rationalisation, and mythopoesis. Authorisation involves legitimisation via references to authority, such as powerful individuals, laws, or traditions. Moral legitimisation involves references to an implicit or explicit value system. Rationalisation involves legitimisation through reference to specific social goals—instrumental—and the knowledges that socially construct their validity—theoretical. Finally, mythopoesis refers to legitimisation through storytelling. In light of the multimodal character of the texts under scrutiny, I also draw on Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen’s (1996) toolbox for visual analysis. Kress and Van Leeuwen’s grammar of visual design is concerned with how the combined elements of visual composition produce meaningful—visual—statements of greater and lesser complexity (1996, 1). Just as the grammar of language structures the combination of words regardless of the speaker, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s grammar of visual design describes visual composition regardless of the author of the visual text under scrutiny. In my analysis, I pay particular attention to the participants in the visual representation—i.e., what is represented—the camera angle—which codes relations of power between the viewer, the maker, and the object of the representation—and the composition. With respect to composition, Kress and Van Leeuwen argue that the placement of participants in different portions of the image influences the viewer’s interpretation (175–215). As these authors note, in a Western cultural context, information presented on the left is

Social Media Reverberations 89 processed before information presented on the right. Thus, participants positioned in the left part of the picture occupy the place of ‘the old’, while those positioned in the right part of the picture occupy the place of ‘the new’. Similarly, Western viewers tend to have different perceptions of information presented in the top and bottom portions of an image. The top part of the representation is the space of ‘the ideal’, while the bottom part of the representation is the space of ‘the real’. Going beyond a strict focus on the visual text, I also seek to capture and highlight the relevance of affect in the mediated reverberations of the protest taking place in Verona. As outlined in the previous section, emotions are a constitutive part of the relation between objects and bodies. This includes objects such as the norms that produce bodies as viable or nonviable subjects. Arguably, the vision of womanhood and family presented at the WCF was composed of many illocutionary speech acts and signs that aimed to precaritise and disempower women and queer subjects. Beyond the discursive contestation of the narrative of WCF, the story of Verona transfemmminista is also that of the shared affective reactions expressed in the posts that Non una di meno’s constituents shared in response to these signs. In other words, the public that gathered for Verona transfemminista was not only mobilised by the movement’s leadership through collective action frames but also as part of an unbrokered and ‘connective’ emotional reaction to unfolding political events (Papacharissi 2015, 125). In their movement between sign and body, between self and other, these affects created both alignments within the community of Non una di meno’s constituents and boundaries between them and the anti-gender camp. I operationalise the affects that Ahmed (2004) specifically mentions in The Cultural Politics of Emotions: pain, hate, disgust, shame, and love. To do so, I searched the text of each meme for cues that resonate with Ahmed’s description of these affects. Specifically, I looked for hints of political action motivated by the memory of pain or for indications of community boundaries being formed as a consequence of hate or disgust. I also looked for the circulation of fear in a framework similar to political economy, the coercive force of shame over non-conforming individuals, and the ambiguous work of inclusion and exclusion that is conducted by love.

Diagnostic and Prognostic Framing in Non una di meno’s Communiqué Non una di meno’s communiqué revolves around a rather clear set of diagnostic and prognostic frames. The diagnostic framing relies heavily on the self-definition of the movement, as well as the definition-as-other of its political adversaries gathering at the WCF. Non una di meno’s self-definition appeals to the moral legitimacy of the movement in light of its emancipatory project, as well as to a theoretical rationalisation drawn from a range of feminist knowledges to explain the movement’s positions.

90  T. Trillò The text announcing the mobilisation in Verona begins with an explicit diagnosis of the problem at hand, namely, that: within the heteronormative and patriarchal family, a hierarchical and sexist social model is produced and reproduced: it is the place where the majority of gender-based violences take place and it is the apparatus that reproduces the sexual division of labor and of oppression. Furthermore, the family is an ideological tool used for racist purposes when it is used to support the reproduction of a white-skinned national identity. (Non una di meno 2019; emphasis in original) The diagnosis is foregrounded at the start of the document with a set of linguistic devices that leave little room for alternative interpretations. It defines the problem as ‘the patriarchal and heteronormative family’, characterised as a space of violence, a place of sexist oppression, and an ideological tool for racist nationalism. It is thus safe to state that the diagnosis identifies the hyper-conservative positions of the WCF and delegitimises them through theoretical rationalisation via definition. In the second paragraph of the communiqué, the diagnosis is scaled down and linked to the immediate issue at stake: The WCF held in Verona on March 29–31, 2019. The WCF is antagonised because of its definition of family, as discussed above. More interestingly, this part of the diagnosis delegitimises the Congress by directly referencing the institutional figures scheduled to participate: the congress will be co-organised by the local administration and will enjoy the endorsement of the ‘Presidency of the Council of Ministers— Ministry for the Family and Disability’, and that of the Veneto Region. The Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini, the Minister for Family and Disability Lorenzo Fontana, the Minister of Education Marco Bussetti, and Lega’s senator Simone Pillon will participate. In these names we recognise the chief promoters of heteropatriarchal and racist violence and its institutionalization. (Non una di meno 2019) The diagnosis from the first paragraph is here substantiated with personal reference to right-wing politicians described as prominent spokespersons for heteropatriarchal violence. The passage also expresses concern for their over-representation in institutional settings, including the current governing coalition. More precisely, the text aims to corroborate the diagnosis of the problem by delegitimising the—lack of—personal authority of the people involved in the WCF. One further passage in the text is crucial to the diagnosis of the problem. Namely, where Non una di meno states that

Social Media Reverberations 91 ‘in this moment, all the rights conquered by the fights of women are under attack: divorce, abortion, and the reform of family law’ (2019; emphasis in original). By speaking of an attack on the rights of women, the movement expands its diagnosis by arguing that the objectives of its opponents are by definition reactionary, insofar as they aim at undoing progressive legislation. The reference to rights, conquests, and fights suggests that the strategy adopted is either delegitimisation by calling to the impersonal authority of the law or moral delegitimisation via an appeal to an overarching progressive ethos that should guide society. The prognosis proposed by Non una di meno is just as clear. At the immediate level, the text claims that the movement will counter the immediate threat posed by the WCF by ‘occupying the city with rage, determination and fabulousness’ and will oppose the official narrative of the congress with ‘the strength of a transnational movement of liberation’ (Non una di meno 2019; emphasis in original). In other words, the text prescribes direct actions in the streets of Verona as necessary measures to counter the problem outlined in the diagnosis. Scaling up from the setting of Verona, Non una di meno’s responds to the reactionary wave with ‘the strength of the demands from our Feminist plan against male violence on women and all forms of gender-based violence’ (Non una di meno 2017). The plan referenced here is a document published on the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women in 2017. It is the product of the first year of activities of Non una di meno and has since provided the baseline for the claims that the movement makes in public forums. The document is an explicit attempt to gather feminist knowledge on genderbased violence, understood as a systemic phenomenon that can only be eradicated with systemic measures that question all current social structures, including the family and the nation-state. In other words, the plan offers a feminist baseline that can legitimise the claims of the movement via theoretical rationalisation. The movement’s prognosis is further clarified in a list of 16 demands or claims at the end of the text. For this chapter’s purposes, the most salient ones are: • • •

Schools and universities should become prime sites to counter gender-based violence: let’s do away with the anti-gender associations and make space for diversity, sexual and gender education!. . . We know that conscientious objection in the national health service damages women’s right to self-determination, we want full access to every abortive technique for every one of the women who request them; We encourage the opening of new and ever more numerous feminist and transfeminist family planning centers, understood as spaces of experimentation (and of life), of self-inquiry, mutuality and redefinition of welfare. (Non una di meno 2019; emphasis in original)

92  T. Trillò These are only a few examples of the demands that Non una di meno advanced on the occasion of its protest against the WCF. All of the prognostic suggestions cohere with the above-mentioned feminist anti-violence plan and the wider narrative of the movement throughout its activities. Arguably, these demands tend to ground their legitimacy in a feminist set of knowledge that offers them some degree of theoretical rationalisation. However, I contend that they draw most of their legitimacy from moral arguments tied to their fundamentally emancipatory objectives. Either way, the prognostic and diagnostic frames voiced by Non una di meno’s leadership in the communiqué serve the purpose of mobilising the movement’s sympathisers while defining the boundaries of the collective action taking place under the banner of Verona transfemminista.

Navigating the Protest: Users Re-Interpret the Frames of the Communiqué The memes in the corpus selected for analysis can be roughly divided into three themes. The first theme collects together posts that voice general indignation about the apparent resilience of reactionary views on family values, primarily female sexuality, and reproductive rights. The second more closely addresses the topics of the WCF and attempts to discursively delegitimise their arguments. The third one expresses discontent about the endorsement that the WCF received from the—at the time—governing coalition and especially from Matteo Salvini’s far-right party La Lega. All three of these themes are arguably tied to the diagnostic or prognostic frames advanced by the movement and described in the previous section. However, they also present a strong affective charge. While the three themes seemed equally prominent, providing an exact count proved to be an elusive task due to their overlapping character. I choose to present examples that are as clear cut as possible without providing an exact number of posts for each category to underscore the messy character of multimodal texts, as well as the intertwined character of the three topics. Figure 6.1, which reproduces a picture from @legarconcynique on Instagram, offers an example of the first theme of general indignation with the resilience of hyper-conservativism over time. Posts in this group are tied to the diagnostic framing from Non una di meno that the WCF is a reactionary initiative that aims to undo progressive social achievements. The image is an implied selfie featuring a protest banner resting against a shop’s window. The window displays a set of coloured vertical bands— probably drapes—that recall the colours of a rainbow flag. A reflection of some human figures, possibly including the author of the picture themself, can be seen in the window itself. The protest banner contains a recurrent statement in the recent wave of progressive mobilisations, which reads: ‘I can’t believe I am still protesting this shit’. The delegitimisation strategy is that of moral evaluation: the positions of the Congress of the Families are

Social Media Reverberations 93

Figure 6.1  ‘I can’t believe I am still protesting this shit!’. Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/BvpTCyIHgye/

said to be morally bankrupt and anachronistic to the point that having to protest against them in the present time elicits a feeling of disbelief. The visual composition is worth discussing because of its peculiarities. Through the front-facing camera angle, the viewer is drawn into the composition. The elevated angle suggests that the viewer is in a position of power with respect to the representation. The vertical axis of the representation is also worth noting. The banner occupies the bottom part of the picture, while the ‘rainbow flag’ window occupies the top part of the picture. In terms of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s framework (1996), the banner occupies the position of the real, while the rainbow flag window occupies the position of the ideal. Thus, the reality of having to protest against hyper-conservativism is represented in opposition to a more progressive ‘ideal’ scenario evoked by the allusion to the rainbow flag in the shop window. The banner also conveys a rather strong affect that falls within the range of disgust. The elicitation of disgust is straightforward due to the reference to excrement in the protest banner. This affect has an

94  T. Trillò ambivalent character; it pushes subjects away as it also draws them towards the very object of aversion (Ahmed 2004, 84). The creator of the banner in the example and the other banners expressing indignation for the resilience of reactionary views on family values seem to suggest that the opinions voiced at the WCF are repulsive. And yet, despite being repelled by those views, they nonetheless choose to engage with them, making them the object of their collective mobilisation. This group of banners suggests that a shared affective disgust travelled between subjects, creating an alignment between at least some of the bodies in the community of Non una di meno’s adherents. This affective alignment also created a boundary between them and the object of their disgust. Figure 6.2 provides an example of the second theme directly addressing the proposition of the Congress of Families in order to delegitimise their views. Posts in this group echo the diagnostic framing produced by the movement where the positions of the WCF are delegitimised via definition in terms of their reactionary ethos. This figure is an implied selfie featuring a protest banner resting on a red brick wall, originally published by Cristina Pelegatti on her Instagram account. The message on the banner succinctly states: ‘[we] are not incubators [female suffix]’ and includes the hashtag of the movement #nonunadimeno. The ‘we’ of the banner presumably encompasses the wide collective

Figure 6.2  Protest banner resting against a brick wall. Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/BvrLmo7FAf7/

Social Media Reverberations 95 category of ‘women’. The banner’s strategy of delegitimisation is theoretical rationalisation via definition, insofar as both the implied subject ‘we’—‘women’—and ‘incubators’ are objectivated and generalised nouns bound by an existential process—‘are’—in which the latter is an attribute of the former. To put it differently, the banner discursively contradicts one of the ways in which participants in the WCF define women—that is, in terms of their reproductive capacity. The image of the female body turned into an object—‘the incubator’—hints at a de-humanising injury that has left an impression upon the body of ‘women’ as the implied subjects of the narrative—that is, an image of pain. However, affect seems to be somewhat backgrounded in this case. The visual composition seeks to involve the viewer—frontal angle—on an equal footing with the represented participants—eye-level. The horizontal axis of the composition features the bare brick wall on the left in the position of the ‘old’ and the protest banner on the right in the position of the ‘new’. The composition lends itself to speculations that the message contained in the banner belongs in the present, while the ideas it delegitimises belong in the past, possibly symbolised by the vintage aesthetics of the brick wall. Figure 6.3 is an example of the third theme: discontent with the support that the WCF received from Matteo Salvini and his La Lega party, the

Figure 6.3  ‘La Lega out of our panties!’. Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/BvqnxTOgjBV/

96  T. Trillò right-wing partner of Movimento 5 Stelle in the then governing coalition. This group of posts points to the personal delegitimisation contained in the diagnostic framing expressed in Non una di meno’s communiqué. The example features a banner held by a hand against the background of a crowded space where people hold flags and other banners, photographed by Alessia Giangrande. The message on the banner states ‘La Lega out of our panties!’, singling out that the banner’s strategy of legitimisation is not as straightforward as in the previous examples. Salvini’s La Lega is the object of an imperative to stop its interference with the free exercise of sexual and reproductive rights, represented by the metaphor of ‘our panties’. The collective ‘we’ whose metaphorical panties are currently occupied by the unwanted presence of Salvini’s La Lega is presumably composed of ‘women’, although it may also refer to a wider ‘we’ composed of ‘Italians’. It is probably safe to venture that the message seeks moral legitimisation through abstraction. Through the rhetorical device of the metaphor, the issue at stake—political interference with sexual and reproductive rights—is lifted out of its source domain, placed in a destination semantic field where privacy has strong moral value—one’s own underwear—and is therefore delegitimised. As in the previous examples, the viewer is drawn into the visual composition through a frontal camera angle. The relation of the viewer to the banner and its message is one of proximity—close shot—and equality—eye-level shot. As in Figure 6.1, the banner is positioned at the bottom of the composition, with the top part of the representation occupied by a rainbow flag. This composition can be interpreted to mean that ‘the real’ scenario is one in which hyper-conservative politicians are hindering sexual and reproductive rights, while the ‘ideal’ would be one in which sexual and reproductive rights are opened up so as to be more inclusive of sexual minorities. The role of affect here is easier to infer as a source of legitimacy from the message on the banner. Direct reference to something as intimate as underwear conjures embodied memories. In this case, the emotion elicited is that of disgust for the presence of an undesired object that violates personal autonomy. The post appeals to the collective memory of undesired objects in close proximity to one’s own body. In the process, it creates an alignment between those included in the collective ‘we’ of the narrative, while also singling out Salvini’s La Lega as an alien object that must be dealt with. The post also makes a veiled reference to love, as suggested by the rainbow flag above the banner. Indeed, love has been widely used in LGBTI advocacy across the West as a strategic rhetorical device, for example, in campaigns that sought to enhance the visibility and legal recognition of nonnormative family formations. Ahmed argues that love is ‘a way of bonding with others in relation to an ideal’ (2004, 124). In the case under scrutiny, that ideal is the achievement of sexual liberation and/or equal rights for sexual minorities. This alignment depends on the existence of its ‘other’, in this case, the participants of the WCF. Reverberating the affect that aligned

Social Media Reverberations 97 the bodies that were protesting in the streets with Non una di meno, this post extends the affective pull of love to a wider affective public of social media adherents and sympathisers, while being sustained by reference to subjects that do not share the same ideal: the participants in the WCF.

Performing a Collective Self into Being: Occupying Spaces of Political Visibility Verona transfemminista is an example of how social movement organisations are heavily involved in the politics of signification and the production of meaning for adherents, adversaries, and bystanders. Through a set of clear diagnostic and prognostic frames, Non una di meno’s communiqué challenges the definition of family and womanhood advanced by the WCF. In Non una di meno’s framing, women and allied subjects are invited to defy the narratives that render them subordinate and precarious by coming together on the streets of Verona, thus speaking themselves into being as viable political subjects. With the communiqué, Non una di meno’s leaders choreographed a set of easy-to-personalise action frames for their adherents that functioned as a platform for their collective performance in the streets of Verona and its mediated reverberations, including those posted at #VeronaTransfemminista. Once the scene was set, Non una di meno’s constituents entered the space of political visibility that the leadership of the movement orchestrated and collectively performed their protest. While substantially free to voice their own interpretations of the frames produced by the movement, most deployed strategies of delegitimisation that were close to those in the communiqué that launched the initiative. Their messages, however, were heavily charged with individually felt yet collectively voiced affects. In the examples above, affects such as disgust, pain, and love helped to both draw together the community of Non una di meno and separate it from the anti-gender camp. Based on the analysis above, I contend that Non una di meno should be interpreted as an organisationally brokered network that primarily operates through the logic of collective action. It is certainly the case that the shared affective reaction of its constituents to the narrative of the WCF makes the case of Verona transfemmminista somewhat distinct from Bennett and Segerberg’s ideal types (2013, 755–7). However, this notwithstanding, Non una di meno clearly has a prominent and active group of choreographic leaders that do not shy away from explicitly producing frames that resonate and are easily adopted and mimetically reproduced by constituents themselves in their embodied protests and mediated reverberations on social media. Despite the duality of collective and connective action in Non una di meno’s choreography of assembly, I contend that the role of the movement’s choreographic leaders is too crucial to the functioning of the movement to qualify as an organisationally enabled network. I also argue that the public that gathered for Verona transfemminista to

98  T. Trillò protest against the WCF staged a collective claim to visibility in the face of a competing narrative that advocated for the dispossession and precaritisation of the subjects that it comprised, mostly, women and queer subjects. Non una di meno’s leadership choreographed the embodied protest taking place in the streets of Verona as well as its mediated reverberations. In this sense, Non una di meno acted as an organisationally brokered network mostly operating through the logic of collective action. Despite this, the collective body of Verona transfemminista also materialised in part through the work of alignment and division performed by individually felt yet collectively voiced emotions such as disgust and love. To put it another way, affect played a crucial role in gathering the otherwise dispersed bodies that occupied the streets of Verona and spoke of their right to exist as viable political subjects in the face of a competing narrative that rendered them subordinate and precarious.

Note 1. See also Arendt (1958, 199).

Works Cited Ahmed, Sarah. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203700372 Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226586748.001.0001 Benford, Robert D., and David A. Snow. 2000. ‘Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment’. Annual Review of Sociology 26, no. 1: 611–39. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.611 Bennett, W. Lance, and Alexandra Segerberg. 2013. ‘The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics’. Information, Communication and Society 15, no. 5: 739–68. https://doi.org/10. 1080/1369118X.2012.670661 Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203824979 . 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge. . 2015. Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MT: Harvard UP. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. 2013. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Fuentes, Marcela A. 2015. ‘Performance Constellations: Memory and Event in Digitally Enabled Protests in the Americas’. Text and Performance Quarterly 35, no. 1: 24–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2014.975268 Gerbaudo, Paolo. 2012. Tweets and the Streets. London: Pluto Press. https://doi. org/10.2307/j.ctt183pdzs Kress, Gunther, and Theo Van Leeuwen. 1996. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Psychology Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9781003099857

Social Media Reverberations 99 Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. New York: Verso. Mattoni, Alice. 2017. ‘A Situated Understanding of Digital Technologies in Social Movements: Media Ecology and Media Practice Approaches’. Social Movement Studies 16, no. 4: 494–505. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2017.1311250 Non una di meno. 2017. Abbiamo un piano: Piano femminsta contro la violenza maschile sulle donne e la violenza di genere. Self-published pamphlet. . 2019. ‘29/30/31–Verona città transfemminista’. Last modified March 17, 2019, https://nonunadimeno.wordpress.com/2019/03/17/verona-cittatransfemminista/ Papacharissi, Zizi. 2015. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford UP. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199999736. 001.0001 Pavan, Elena. 2019. ‘Il movimento va al congresso: reti di movimenti antigender tra dispositivi retorici, partecipazione dal basso, conoscenza e alleanze politiche’. Polis 33, no. 2: 323–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1424/94250 . 2020. ‘We Are Family: The Conflict Between Conservative Movements and Feminists’. Contemporary Italian Politics: 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 23248823.2020.1744892 Shifman, Limor. 2013. ‘Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker’. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18, no. 3: 362–77. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12013 Snow, David A., and Robert D. Benford. 1988. ‘Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization’. International Social Movement Research 1: 197–217. . 1992. ‘Master Frames and Cycles of Protest’. In Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, edited by Aldon D. Morris and Carol Mueller, 133–55. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Tarrow, Sidney. 1993. ‘Cycles of Collective Action: Between Moments of Madness and the Repertoire of Contention’. Social Science History 17, no. 2: 281–307. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0145553200016850 Van Leeuwen, Theo. 2008. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford UP. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/ 9780195323306.001.0001 World Congress of Families. 2019. ‘About the Congress – World Congress of Families XIII’. https://wcfverona.org/en/about-the-congress/. Zhao, Sumin, and Michele Zappavigna. 2018. ‘Beyond the Self: Intersubjectivity and the Social Semiotic Interpretation of the Selfie’. New Media and Society 20, no. 5: 1735–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817706074

7

GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE AND THE PERFORMANCE OF MASCULINITY A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE DOCUMENTARY FILMS MA L’AMORE C’ENTRA? AND SERÁS HOMBRE Orianna Calderón Sandoval and Adelina Sánchez Espinosa

Performativity and Emotionality: Performing Gender-Based Violence and Masculinity in Documentary Cinema As opposed to aggression, which could be related to survival instinct, violence always implies the conscious will to inflict harm on another and is based on the assumption of an asymmetric power relation, insofar as it implies some form of annihilation of the other as equal (Bernárdez, García, and González 2008, 19). In patriarchal societies, the exercise of violence is inextricably linked with social constructions of masculinity and with the gender inequalities resulting from ‘masculine domination’ (Bourdieu 2000). Not only are men constantly encouraged to subdue the other, but violence against women has also been legitimised as the instrument for men to correct women’s transgressions of gender norms, regardless of how oppressive those norms might be (Lorente Acosta 2001, 167). Consequently, gender-based violence is one of the main issues on feminist agendas all over the world, and the feminist movements in the countries where the films discussed in this chapter have been produced, Italy and Spain, are no exception.1 For instance, the Italian movement Non una di meno (‘not one [woman] less’) has brought together activists, artists, journalists, and academics to demand a stop to violence against women.2 On November 25, 2017, International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, this movement organised a demonstration in Rome where they launched a ‘Feminist Plan Against Male and Gender Violence’. Their position is that violence is systemic—that is, individual violent episodes are part of a larger structure of violence based on entrenched behaviours connected with the social construction of the so-called ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. Therefore, laws are necessary but represent only a small part of a more DOI: 10.4324/9781003162759-9 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Gender-Based Violence 101 comprehensive approach which needs to operate at all levels of cultural (re)production, including education and the media. In the Spanish context, the implementation in 2004 of the Organic Law for Measures on Integral Protection against Gender Violence was a legal landmark which crystallised decades of feminist fighting. 3 This law, nevertheless, has its lights and shadows since the toll of gender-based violence has not been reduced and there are not enough material resources allocated to its actual implementation (Bernárdez, García, and González 2008, 11). The law certainly marked a growing interest in the mainstream media to expose cases of gender-based violence. However, as feminist thinkers (Navarrete, Ruido, and Vila 2005; Bernárdez, García, and González 2008; Villaplana Ruiz 2008) have highlighted, this interest has often meant a superficial appropriation of feminist discourses, representing women as fearful and dependent beings who can only overcome what is portrayed as an exceptional, extreme situation if they receive protection and assistance from others. Thus, the State and the media present themselves as experts in the subject at the expense of women’s representation as ‘assisted and subsidised victims’ (Navarrete, Ruido, and Vila 2005, 161). Additionally, the hyper representation in the mass media of only the most brutal manifestations of gender violence renders women’s subordination invisible at almost all levels within a system in which physical violence is one of the many manifestations of a much larger structural problem (Bernárdez, García, and González 2008, 33). In opposition to such portraits of gender-based violence in the mass media, the directors of our two case studies, Elisabetta Lodoli and Isabel de Ocampo, propose a different approach: to place the focus on men as perpetrators, analysing the interrelation between the performance of hegemonic masculinity and the (re)production of gender-based violence. In her now classical study Masculinities (1995), Raewyn Connell identified two patterns in the connection between the performance of masculinity in a patriarchal society and the exercise of violence: First, many members of the privileged group use violence to sustain their dominance. Intimidation of women ranges across the spectrum from wolf-whistling in the street, to office harassment, to rape and domestic assault, to murder by a woman’s patriarchal ‘owner’, such as a separated husband. . . . Second, violence becomes important in gender politics among men. Most episodes of major violence (counting military combat, homicide and armed assault) are transactions among men. (2005, 83) According to Connell, these patterns are held and reproduced through four paradigms of masculinity in patriarchy: hegemonic, subordinated, complicit, and marginalised. ‘Hegemonic masculinity’ is not fixed but contingent in that it occupies ‘the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations, a position always contestable’ (76). It manages to present itself as legitimate due to a correspondence between cultural practices

102  O. Calderón Sandoval and A. Sánchez Espinosa and institutional power so that, for instance, men from the top levels of business, the military, and the government convincingly claim their authority without having to employ direct violence. Hegemonic masculinity also defines itself in opposition to ‘subordinate masculinity’, which is embodied by certain homosexual men. Subordination comes from the association of gayness with femininity, such that effeminate heterosexual men are also ‘expelled from the circle of legitimacy’ (79). ‘Complicit masculinity’ is performed by the majority of men who, without meeting the normative standards of hegemonic masculinity, ‘benefit from the patriarchal dividend, the advantage men in general gain from the overall subordination of women’ (79). And finally, ‘marginalised masculinity’ refers to the differences between men due to other structures of inequality such as race and class. More recently, transfeminist philosopher Sayak Valencia has reflected on how certain marginalised masculinities resort to direct violence in an attempt to achieve hegemonic masculinity. She calls them ‘endriago subjects’ (2010, 90).4 Within a context of structural violence, where living a desirable life becomes the privilege of a few and hyper-consumerism leads to the frustration of many, endriago subjects, in a perverse reinterpretation of entrepreneurial freedom, resort to violent mechanisms in order to transcend their own victimisation. And in so doing, they become victimisers themselves, by violating laws while maintaining absolute obedience to the demands of the market, to their (male) bosses, and to the dictates of hegemonic masculinity. The documentary films we discuss in the next sections critically explore this interrelation between gender-based violence and the performance of masculinity. Our proposal is to analyse how the aforementioned typology of masculinities is displayed in these films by paying attention to the performative and affective dimensions of documentary cinema. The ‘performative’ and ‘performance’ are understood following the interpretations by Judith Butler (1990, 1993, 2015) and Stella Bruzzi (2000). As for the affective dimensions of cinema, we rely on Ilona Hongisto (2015), Anneke Smelik (2007), and Sara Ahmed (2004, 2014). Elaborating on JL Austin’s concept of ‘performativity’ as a way to refer to linguistic utterances that bring what they state into being or make a set of events happen as a consequence of the utterance being made, Judith Butler explains that one becomes a woman or a man by means of repeated acts which, like performative utterances, depend on social conventions and bring about our becoming one gender or the other. Importantly, rather than something we can freely choose, this repetition is regulated by power dynamics: Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. . . . This iterability implies that ‘performance’ is not a singular ‘act’ or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat

Gender-Based Violence 103 of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance. (Butler 1993, 95) The moment we are born we are forced to enact the gender that we are assigned. Something, however, might go ‘awry’ or queer in such enactment, thus opening up possibilities for change. Butler points out that choice in such deviations from the norm comes later in the process, for we are ‘gendered prior to understanding anything about how gender norms act upon and shape us, and prior to our capacity to reproduce those norms in ways that we might choose’ (2015, 63). Moreover, these deviations from gender norms are often punished rather than celebrated. She also points out that they are also linked with unequal distributions of vulnerability: ‘those who do not live their genders in intelligible ways are at heightened risk for harassment, pathologisation, and violence’ (34). Gender performativity theory is at the basis of Butler’s discussion of Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1991), which portrays the African-American, Latino, gay, and transgender communities involved in the drag balls of New York City during the 1980s. Butler asserts that this documentary manages to render gender performativity visible through the drag figure (1993, 125), while also exposing the fact that deviation from the norm is penalised, as the different fates of two of the main characters show—that is, the murder of Venus Xtravaganza, whose performance fails to pass as that of a light-skinned woman, and the commercial success of Willi Ninja, who passes as a straight man. Similarly, the patriarchal system rewards the successful performance of hegemonic masculinity, while failure to perform gender norms by subordinate or marginal masculinities is usually punished. While Butler’s analysis focuses mainly on the contents of the documentary she discusses, Stella Bruzzi, a film studies scholar, has developed an understanding of the form and production process of documentary cinema as performative. Bruzzi claims that the truth of documentary cinema ‘comes into being only at the moment of filming’ (2000, 7). She argues against classic and mainstream ideas of authenticity that rely on unmediated transparency and lack of intervention from the filmmaker. Instead, she thinks that ‘documentaries are inevitably the result of the intrusion of the filmmaker onto the situation being filmed . . . they are performative because they acknowledge the construction and artificiality of even the non-fiction film’ (8). Building on Bruzzi and on Butler, we propose here that performativity can help us reflect on the power of documentary ‘to bring about a new situation or to set into motion a set of effects’ (Butler 2015, 28). We consider it useful to bring into this conversation the affective dimension of documentary cinema, since as Ilona Hongisto has argued, ‘moments of affection’ (2015, 107) might be those at which ‘change or transformation through affect’ (104) occurs. Hongisto, a film studies scholar who specialises in the ethics and aesthetics of documentary cinema, uses the term

104  O. Calderón Sandoval and A. Sánchez Espinosa ‘moments of affection’ to refer to ‘ruptures and breakpoints where transformation can begin’ (137) or encounters ‘between a documentary work that depicts bodies at the throes of potential—in a state of becoming—and the ways in which the film in question facilitates the viewers’ tapping into the bodies’ passages from one experiential state to another’ (103). Hongisto’s performative approach changes the ethical stakes of documentary cinema ‘from producing accurate and authentic representations to creatively contributing to the transformability of actual beings in the real’ (12). For new materialist methodologies, a key to understanding how this transformation might happen is to be found in affective flows. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed, an intersectional feminist scholar, proposes emotionality as a tool to describe ‘how texts are “moving”, or how they generate effects . . . [and] the way in which texts name or perform different emotions’ (2014, 13). She explores ‘how emotions work to shape the “surfaces” of individual and collective bodies’ (1) in various texts, by taking a specific emotion as a point of entry. She approaches emotions as ‘effects rather than origins’ (196) but asserts that emotions also have performative effects, since they repeat past associations in ‘generating their object’ (32). While challenging the idea that emotions are located in the text or in any specific place or subject, Ahmed pays attention to how the very acts of naming emotions produce such emotions as effects: ‘the different words for emotion do different things precisely because they involve specific orientations towards the objects that are identified as their cause’ (13). Therefore, with emotionality as her methodological tool, she tracks ‘how words for feeling, and objects of feeling, circulate and generate effects: how they move, stick, and slide’ (14). Anneke Smelik has also highlighted the importance of emotion and affect for contemporary film studies where the main question has moved from what a film means to what a film does (2007, 190). Similar to Hongisto’s ‘moments of affection’, Smelik identifies ‘moments of becoming’ in cinema—that is, affirmative moments ‘of resistance, of change, of escaping from an identity that imprisons us’ (191). These moments, she argues, are those at which spectators can establish an affective relationship with the film. Moving from the above considerations to our specific case studies, we pose the following questions: how do affects and emotions work in and through gender-based violence so as to generate performances of masculinity? How could specific ‘moments of affection’ or ‘becoming’ open up possibilities for restoration and change, thus performing cultures of gender equality? In the next two sections, we try to find answers to these questions. We first summarise the documentary films Ma l’amore c’entra (Lodoli 2017) and Serás hombre (de Ocampo 2018). Then, with hate and anger as our entry points, we close-read selected scenes from each film. We incorporate opinions expressed by Lodoli and de Ocampo themselves, as well as reactions from audiences attending screenings of these films.5

Gender-Based Violence 105

Ma l’amore c’entra?: Male Anger and Violence in the Promise of Happiness The director of Ma l’amore c’entra? (Is It About Love?), Elisabetta Lodoli, was unsure about making a film about gender-based violence because she was tired of the victimising gaze on women from mass media. She had directed Stolica (Chair, 2013) 20 years after the end of the Bosnian War, and it was a question from a woman in the audience after a screening of the film that made her turn her gaze towards perpetrators. The woman asked Lodoli if she had never thought of interviewing those who had inflicted violence on others: ‘it is always the victims speaking and we don’t get to understand the reasons for such evil. And above all, these people escape their responsibility in some way’.6 Lodoli then decided that ‘it was certainly more interesting to have men speak at this point’.7 She approached the making of Ma l’amore c’entra? as a research project, trying to understand the connections between masculinity and gender-based violence. She did not attempt to judge her filmed subjects. She simply wanted to grasp the origins of gender violence in heterosexual romantic relationships: ‘It was a matter of understanding, precisely, what was going on in their heads, what their life stories were, why they had come to that point there’.8 Ma l’amore c’entra? presents the testimonies of three men who committed violent acts against their female partners. Their voices join four other narrative strands in the film: shots of domestic interiors, EmiliaRomagna landscapes, found footage, and domestic objects on a theatre stage. Each testimony starts with the description of the violent act they committed followed by the men’s reflections upon arriving at the Modenabased Liberiamoci dalla violenza Centre (LDV; ‘Let’s Free Ourselves from Violence’). The psychologists working in this centre provide guidance for men who have committed violent acts against their partners and who want to change. The protagonists’ faces are never shown and, as we discover at the end of the film, they are actors performing as the real men who were interviewed by Lodoli. A precedent of re-enacted interviews in feminist documentary cinema can be found in Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), in which ‘natural’ interviews are combined with staged interviews conducted as performances, ‘to call attention to the politics of interviews, and to set into relief the manipulations that tend to be taken for granted in documentary’ (Minh-ha 1992, 165). In Ma l’amore c’entra? we never see the ‘real’ interviews, since the men involved asked to remain anonymous. While we see re-enacted interviews by three actors who are presented as if they were the actual characters, hidden in shadows or behind panes of etched glass, the actions they describe are never re-enacted. Rather, Lodoli shows empty everyday spaces in which these ‘normal’ individuals—as opposed to the stereotype of violent men as monsters—carry out their lives: their homes, streets, and the countryside.

106  O. Calderón Sandoval and A. Sánchez Espinosa The editing of the film combines the performed interviews with archival footage that helps reconstruct the sociocultural context in which the testimonies are inscribed. The sequences with the domestic objects on a theatre stage highlight the contrast between the pretended security of home and the violence that takes place there. They produce an uncanny atmosphere which mainly operates at an affective level: against a tense musical background, shots of broken plates, hanging knives, and flickering light bulbs on a dark stage are presented at a fast pace with repetitions and jump cuts. Lodoli co-produces the reality she films: the ‘real’ testimonies collected at the beginning of the production process end up generating a performance staged for the purpose of her filming. We would now like to direct our attention to how affects and emotions work in the performances of masculinity and gender-based violence in the film. As such, we aim at exploring how certain ‘moments of affection’ could open up possibilities for change, thus performing cultures of gender equality. Hate and anger are the affects named throughout the film: as the origins of the violent acts, as emotions experienced when the three men were witnesses of violence, and as feelings directed towards themselves for having been unable to control their violent outbursts. Therefore, we take those emotions as our entry points into the testimonies of two of the characters. At the end of this section, we describe what we consider possible moments of affection or becoming for the characters and for the audience. The first testimony is that of Giorgio, who describes himself as a righteous man: ‘I have a strong sense of justice’ (Lodoli 2017, 00:14:25) he asserts and tries to justify his violent temperament arguing genetics and ethics.9 What he identifies as the origin of his anger is feminism. He openly blames women’s liberation movements for male violence. His criticism of ‘rebellious’ women, rather than his recognition of men’s responsibility for their own violence, echoes the sexist belief that feminism is ‘the origin of bad feeling’ (Ahmed 2010, 65). Ahmed coins the expression ‘feminist killjoy’ to describe this identification of feminists with the cause of unhappiness: ‘Any deviation from gender roles defined in terms of women being trained to make men happy is a deviation from the happiness of all’ (55). Giorgio’s reasoning is also in line with the ways in which patriarchy has strived to legitimise violence against women as a rightful way for men to force them to follow gender norms (Lorente Acosta 2001, 167). In the scene we hear Giorgio’s voice-over while we see archival footage showing a girl and a boy: he plays with a gun and she kisses a doll. The voice-over of the girl normalises female submission: ‘little girls have to say “yes, Sir little boy” to the little boys going to war’ (Lodoli 2017, 00:30:55). As Giorgio complains about the ‘brashness and arrogance’ (00:32:07) that women have begun to show since the 1970s and argues that ‘the phenomenon of violence exists because women have started to compete with men’ (00:32:31), we see found footage shots of a parade of giant inflatable figures, among

Gender-Based Violence 107 which the figure of Superman and the figure of Marilyn Monroe with giant breasts and heavy makeup stand out. This juxtaposition of testimonies and archival footage renders gender performativity visible—that is, the ways in which gender is a kind of enactment of gender norms that ‘inform the lived modes of embodiment we acquire over time’ (Butler 2015, 29). In the testimony of Luca, the origin of anger is located in the unfulfilled promise of the happy housewife. Ahmed has traced the genealogy of the ‘fantasy figure’ of the happy housewife (2010, 50) and has discussed how happiness has been used to keep women compliant with patriarchy, sustaining an unequal gender division of labour. One of her references is the 1762 work Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, where he maintains that women should only receive education in order to become good housewives: ‘For Rousseau the good woman has a duty to keep the family together, to preserve the integrity of its form. . . . It is women’s duty to keep happiness in house’ (55). Another one of her references is to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), in which the frustration and anger behind the illusion of the happy American housewife is exposed. We first listen to Luca’s description of his violent act as we see wide shots of buildings at night. He argues that his violence erupted after seeing his wife being violent with their son: ‘She literally dragged him—like an animal to the slaughterhouse—to his room and sat him on a chair, giving him a timeout. That was when my anger erupted. It was in defence of my child, . . . seeing my partner’s violence’ (Lodoli 2017, 00:11:14). As Ahmed explains, certain affects stick to certain bodies (2010, 4): while men’s anger outbursts are normalised, women’s anger explosions are demonised. The latter becomes clearer later on in Luca’s testimony. This time we see archival footage of families at the beach as we listen to Luca admitting that he longs for ‘a beautiful family . . . This desire I have for the cookie cutter family, the perfect family’ (00:40:58). When his partner fails to meet these stereotypes and, what is more, when she claims that anger is what she feels in the domestic sphere, Luca feels legitimised to resort to violence so as to bring her back to the correct ‘gendered script’ (Ahmed 2010, 59). Nevertheless, between the lines of these toxic testimonies, we can also identify ‘moments of affection’ at which a possibility of ‘affirmation and becoming’ (Smelik 2007, 191) outside the framework of hegemonic masculinity could take place for both characters onscreen and those watching them. Each of the three men completed a therapeutic programme at the LDV Centre, which Ma l’amore c’entra? reflects accurately. As LDV psychologist Giorgio Penuti asserted at the film premiere at Bologna’s MAST Foundation in February 2018: The path of change is an act of courage. . . . It forces [the perpetrators of domestic violence] to look inside themselves, which they are not used to, discovering something that is really disturbing. They discover how much they have invested on their partner in a phantasmatic way,

108  O. Calderón Sandoval and A. Sánchez Espinosa pretending that the woman would adapt to their needs. . . . We work with them to give them hope.10 Ahmed has warned that merely transforming so-called ‘bad feeling into good feeling’ (2014, 193) does not mean that inequalities and damage get repaired. What could be useful for enabling the performance of cultures of equality is that the film creates a space for men on both sides of the screen to reflect on their emotions and behaviours in connection with the perpetuation or eradication of an unequal system. This might lead them to a breakpoint ‘where transformation can begin’ (Hongisto 2015, 137). Giorgio describes this awareness as being ‘as if they had let me turn on a light bulb in a room in which I didn’t even think there was electric power’ (Lodoli 2017, 00:46:31). Luca makes fun of the fact that his wife now calls him ‘Father Pio’. This reveals that he is haunted by his former identity as a violent man and also that he is consciously fighting this identity: ‘Father Pio is ironic, seeing someone who used to be the devil and now offers his hand for help. . . . I don’t stir up the conflict, I try to mediate’ (00:47:44). Another interesting comment after the film premiere in Bologna was made by journalist Paolo di Paolo. He said that the emotion he felt while watching the film was embarrassment: How is it possible that we men, we human beings do not find the words to talk about this violence? Because this embarrassment which does concern my gender, as a male, was something I had to look in the face, to ask myself what I could say. . . . His violence concerns me. Because that violence has had a concrete, real and general effect, even by abstracting it, and it is something to which I must pay attention.11 Even though the film only partially manages to ask its subjects to be accountable for their actions (since they use the screen mainly to justify their actions, even blaming their partners), di Paolo’s experience of spectatorship indeed demanded response-ability from him. Another spectator, psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati, asserted that though laws are no longer permissive towards gender violence, decades of patriarchal order have nurtured many of the traits embedded in gender norms. He also responded to the question raised by the title of the film: despite the cliché, ‘love doesn’t have anything to do’ with gender-based violence.12

Serás hombre: The Anger of Marginalised Masculinity and Violence in Gore Capitalism After having portrayed women as victims of sex trafficking in her fiction films Miente (2008) and Evelyn (2012), director Isabel de Ocampo thought that a change of strategy could help her connect better with male audiences. Thus, in 2013 she started the production of Serás hombre

Gender-Based Violence 109 (You’ll Be a Man), a documentary film intended to convey the message that gender-based violence involves men as either perpetrators or partners in crime and it is, therefore, a men’s problem in the first place (Calderón Sandoval 2019). Along similar lines to the feminist critiques mentioned earlier in this chapter (Navarrete, Ruido, and Vila 2005; Bernárdez, García, and González 2008; Villaplana Ruiz 2008), de Ocampo disapproves of the ways in which mass media and governmental representations tend to victimise and blame women: Concerning the fight against gender violence in Spain, right now, we are at that preschool stage of ‘it’s your fault, woman’. The responsibility for getting away from gender-based violence is yours in that you have to report it to the police. But the discourse should actually be: ‘Men, you are mistreating women, you are raping women, you are using prostitution, what’s wrong with you guys?’ But of course, that means poking your finger into a wound, digging around in the dirt of a subconscious in which men don’t want to deal with their own education.13 (in Calderón Sandoval 2019, 339) This is the reasoning behind her decision to explore the relation between gender-based violence and the construction of masculinity within a patriarchal framework, placing particular emphasis on sex trafficking. This is also why she decided to interview male experts only and to have men as her main film subjects. In order to promote empathy from her spectators, de Ocampo supplements talking-head format interviews with four narrative strands which are closer to those of fiction films embodied by more developed characters. Hence, two characters are presented with an arc—that is, as experiencing a transformation over the course of the film: an ex-pimp—Rafa—and a performance artist—Abel. The other two strands are discussion sequences: a high school class and a meeting in an advertising agency. Rafa’s arc is one of repentance, moving from training newbie pimps to claiming that he will destroy the sex-trafficking network that he himself built. The core of Abel’s arc is the search for his father who was a client of his mother, a drug-addicted prostitute. He describes this as ‘a process of denunciation’ (de Ocampo 2018, 00:52:53), not as an act of reunion, completion, or empathy, thus subverting a patriarchal narrative in which finding the father and achieving masculinity in so doing would be the ultimate goal. The sequences of the advertising agency meeting show a group of marketing experts discussing the design of a campaign against gender-based violence (00:46:40) while the sequences of the high school class focus on fatherhood (00:36:18). The interviews with experts are interweaved through the rest of the sequences. De Ocampo’s strategy to present only male voices as valid could be interpreted as, paraphrasing Audre Lorde’s famous phrase, using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house (Lorde 2007). However, the

110  O. Calderón Sandoval and A. Sánchez Espinosa results of her decision are controversial. The men in Serás hombre come across as authority figures: at the end of the day, they are white European middle-class men placed in settings that highlight their epistemological superiority. In this regard, one particularly problematic sequence is that where Pol Galofre, a trans activist, talks about his experience. His testimony is intended to convey a different approach to masculinity, one that challenges biological essentialism. Nevertheless, the editing interweaves his testimony with philosopher Joan Melich’s transphobic reading of transsexuality in the following terms: ‘Why do transsexuals feel uncomfortable in their own bodies? Because implicitly, they are accepting an extremely brutal social logic that tells them they can’t act or think that way’ (de Ocampo 2018, 00:28:52). Thus, instead of complementing each other, the putting together of the two testimonies ends up reproducing a hierarchy where the academic expert seems to understand the trans experience better than the trans person. The performative element in Serás hombre is mainly related to the film’s capturing of ‘the performance of reality’ (Bruzzi 2000, 123) in the sequences with the most developed narrative plots. These sequences, Rafa’s and Abel’s arcs, are interesting examples of performances of masculinity and their being recorded within a documentary format allows for a closer examination. As with Ma l’amore c’entra?, our main focus is on how affects and emotions work in the performances of masculinity and gender-based violence, as well as the possibilities opened up by certain ‘moments of affection’ towards the performance of gender equality. We take hate and anger as our entry points, since those are, once again, the dominant affects in the portraits of Rafa and Abel. The opening sequence in Rafa’s arc is his training of newbie pimps. We are shown shots of a sordid brothel office where Rafa is talking to a young procurer advising him to see women as money if he wants to make it big in the sex trafficking business (de Ocampo 2018, 00:03:35). This argument is pervaded by what Sayak Valencia has called ‘gore capitalism’: the economics of globalisation in areas where predatory exploitation is part of the logic of the market (2010, 15). Gore capitalism is sustained by a rigid construction of gender and, especially, by the exercise of hegemonic masculinity. Hegemonic, violent, masculinity is nurtured by the hatred towards the feminine which lies at the heart of patriarchy. As gender violence expert Miguel Lorente Acosta explains in the film: ‘culture establishes that being a man is not being a woman’ (de Ocampo 2018, 00:05:05). Women are regarded as radical others against whom men desperately try to differentiate themselves. Moreover, they are dehumanised, turned into exchange objects whose worth depends on how they are exploited in men’s paths, as Rafa’s attitude and behaviour demonstrate at the start of his arc. Women are what he sells in order to become a successful and proud ‘businessman of the night’ (00:11:10). Therefore, the origin of Rafa’s hate and anger is precisely the failure to become such a successful embodiment of hegemonic

Gender-Based Violence 111 masculinity. In an eloquent sequence, Rafa asks the newbie why he wants to become a pimp, to which he replies: I don’t want to be a sheep in a company, as I was, for one thousand euros. Treated like shit, while they get rid of you whenever they like. That’s also being a sheep. Not such [sic] bad reputation as prostitution, but it’s being a sheep. You work hard, with a degree and everything. And when Ford decides, you get thrown out after six months. . . . Those wolves are well considered because they drive BMWs and Mercedes and work during the day. I’m going to be a wolf. I won’t mistreat any woman. But I will have guts and rise in my business.14 (01:03:58) These words provide a clear picture of Sayak Valencia’s ‘endriago subjects’ (2010, 90). Unable to embody hegemonic masculinity, in this case due to their social class and failure to fulfil the male provider patriarchal role, these marginalised masculinities resort to extreme violence as a tool for empowerment and capital acquisition. Structural violence and social inequalities, with gender inequality at its core, create the scenario for these frustrated men to transfer their hatred from the exploitative system of gore capitalism towards women who are turned into objects of consumption and exchange. When we interviewed de Ocampo, she revealed that the aforementioned scenes were staged performances of what Rafa used to do as a pimp. She had met Rafa in 2010, during the pre-production of her fiction film Evelyn. To her surprise, on contacting him again in 2016, he told her that he was no longer working in prostitution and that he regretted having done so in the past. Still, they decided to set up these scenes so audiences could get a glimpse of the hell of sex trafficking. Towards the second half of Serás hombre, Rafa claims to have undergone a transformation and expresses regret and remorse for having done so much harm to the women he trafficked. Nevertheless, Rafa’s violent ego re-emerges intact in the last sequence. After developing Rafa’s and Abel’s arcs separately, the director brings them together for the denouement of the documentary. When Rafa, invited by Abel to one of his performances, doesn’t turn up, de Ocampo suggests Abel should visit Rafa at the nightclub that used to be his brothel. It is interesting to see Rafa being intimidated by Abel’s questioning and portrayed, for the first and only moment in the film, as vulnerable (de Ocampo 2018, 01:21:20). The tension between them escalates as their encounter moves forward, eventually becoming a masculinity performance contest. At the bar counter, Rafa starts explaining how the business works by pointing at bottles of different sizes and prices: ‘A woman is this, she is a bottle and gives me money. . . . We have the clients. This is the waiter. I am this one. And above me, the government social policies’ (01:23:45). Rafa then starts justifying himself, arguing that he was being manipulated and asks Abel if he had ever tried to commit suicide, to which Abel replies that he has. Rafa tells him that he has shot himself twice. Finally, in a brutal performance

112  O. Calderón Sandoval and A. Sánchez Espinosa of his dominant masculinity, Rafa asks for a billiard cue and smashes all the bottles, proudly saying: ‘Now it’s me who wants to destroy all this’ (01:26:19). Abel hugs him and explains that, despite all his qualms and complaints, he respects him for what he has just done. Abel ends up, therefore, performing a complicit type of masculinity that ultimately celebrates Rafa’s arrogant way of claiming his role as the boss. What becomes evident in this sequence is that they are both trapped by a patriarchal construction of hegemonic masculinity, based on competition and the concealment of one’s vulnerabilities. This behaviour, along with Rafa’s paternalistic and victimising tone when talking about women in the film, casts doubt on his repentance. As a female spectator from a focus group organised by de Ocampo before the premiere puts it: ‘Of course, this man Rafa, what he says, he is an enormous liar. He tells you what he wants you to hear. He is such a manipulator’.15 The main concern shared by several viewers was that this final sequence ended up reinforcing hegemonic masculinity rather than the opposite. Consequently, this cannot be considered a ‘moment of affection’ for change to take place.16 There are moments in the film, however, when we can envision possibilities for transformation as is the case with the high school class sequence. The teacher dismantles gender stereotypes and elicits other ways of understanding what being a man could mean. The models of masculinity that the film offers as alternatives to those that are violent are indeed those of this teacher and the father he invites to his class. The latter arrives with his two-year-old daughter and answers questions about his experience of fatherhood. De Ocampo describes this sequence as luminous and tender: ‘He gave us a beautiful history lesson. You could understand the extent to which kids inherit prejudices and preconceived ideas’.17 As part of the GRACE research project, Orianna Calderón Sandoval carried out participant observation in the shooting of this sequence in June 2016. The crew, especially the gaffer, a man in his 30s, showed interest in the teacher’s lesson and, once the shooting was over, approached him with questions. The students also expressed curiosity about the content of the ‘fake’ class during a shooting break. It is in this sense that we can verify that the very action of making this film co-created a space for discussion and reflection, ‘a moment of affection and becoming’, for those involved on either side of the camera. After a screening organised at the University of Granada in 2018, a female professor of Gender Studies praised the potential of this sequence: The teacher is a hymn to hope. . . . To see [the adolescents] in the classroom is to imagine them within an exciting chain of values: pupils and students breaking out of their stereotyped boxes and learning from the teacher as coeducator and as a committed and sensible man.18 In the focus group and at the private screening of Serás hombre most reactions concentrated on Rafa as a character and the violent, though also

Gender-Based Violence 113 fascinating and charismatic, type of masculinity he performs. It was interesting to realise, however, that some other spectators, though admitting the importance of exposing hegemonic masculinities, chose to pay more attention to the other masculinities shown by the film: men, like the teacher, who construct themselves on their awareness of gender politics and against the inequalities that sustain male privileges.

Final Thoughts: Performing Cultures of Gender Equality with Documentary Cinema In their exploration of the connections between the performance of hegemonic masculinities and gender-based violence, Ma l’amore c’entra? and Serás hombre manage to set into motion three ways of performing cultures of gender equality. The first is Lodoli’s and de Ocampo’s response to mainstream representations of gender-based violence which tend to focus on the most brutal expressions of violence, portraying women as vulnerable victims who need to be protected, thus allowing men to escape their responsibility while also rendering invisible the structural inequality which sustains the whole system. What these directors do to counter these biased depictions is to turn their gaze towards men, asking them to be accountable for the roles they play in the perpetuation of gender-based violence. The second way in which these films contribute to building cultures of gender equality is by means of their representation of intimate journeys through the affects and emotions connected with the (de)construction of masculinity. Their attention is directed towards how patriarchal constructions of masculinity have privileged men at the expense of women, resulting in the use of violence against the latter in order to keep gender norms intact. In both films, anger and hate are at the basis of the violent performances of hegemonic masculinity on display. What the characters name as the origin or object of their anger and hate is precisely their failure to fulfil gender norms. In Ma l’amore c’entra?, men try to explain their violent outbursts as responses to challenges to their idealised images of femininity and family life, while the men in Serás hombre try to justify their violence as attempts at embodying an idealised image of hegemonic masculinity. In both cases, therefore, gender-based violence is directly linked to the prevalence of toxic gendered performances. While happiness is exposed as problematic, both films do open up possibilities for hope through moments of affection or becoming where opportunities for transformation are envisioned. This is the third way in which the performance of cultures of equality is set into motion. In Lodoli’s film we follow the characters’ therapeutic process as they delve into their emotions and embrace a much-needed change. As for de Ocampo’s film, a gender equality perspective on education is proposed as the main arena for transformation. In short, as we have suggested in this chapter, paying attention to the affective and performative dimensions of documentary films like

114  O. Calderón Sandoval and A. Sánchez Espinosa Ma l’amore c’entra? and Serás hombre does indeed help us understand that the eradication of gender-based violence is inescapably linked to a different performance of masculinity, one that does not legitimise itself by means of exploitation and dominance.

Notes 1. The choice of a Spanish and an Italian case study firstly stemmed from our work package being based at the Universities of Granada and Bologna. The pertinence of the comparative analysis lies on the fact that both films were produced and released during the same time span (2016–2018), in southEuropean countries with a similar type of hegemonic masculinity, as well as with long-standing feminist movements in which gender-based violence is a hot topic of the current agenda. 2. Originally called Ni una menos in Argentina, where it was created in March 2015. For more information on the Italian branch, see also Tomasso Trillò’s discussion of this movement in Chapter 6 in this volume. 3. The ‘Ley Orgánica de Medidas de Protección Integral contra la Violencia de Género’ establishes a series of measures that range from supporting victims in labour matters to the creation of centres which would cover measures related to security, justice, education, and health. 4. The endriago monster is a literary character that combines human features with those of a hydra and a dragon. It is one of the monsters killed by the protagonist of Los quatro libros del Uirtuoso cauallero Amadis de Gaula (Rodríguez de Montalvo 1508), an influential chivalric romance novel in Hispanic letters. 5. This data was collected through interviews and fieldwork carried out as part of the GRACE project. 6. ‘Parlano sempre solo le vittime, allora noi non capiamo le ragioni del male. E soprattutto, queste persone sfuggono in qualche modo alla loro responsabilità’ (in Calderón Sandoval 2019, 643). All interviews cited in this chapter were carried out by Orianna Calderón Sandoval and all translations from these interviews are ours. 7. ‘Sicuramente era più interessante far parlare gli uomini a questo punto’ (in Calderón Sandoval 2019, 643). 8. ‘Capire, appunto, che cosa passava nella loro testa, quali erano le loro storie di vita, perché erano arrivati a quel punto lì’ (in Calderón Sandoval 2019, 645). 9. The language spoken in the film is Italian, with English subtitles. We use these subtitles as sources for the quotations. 10. Il percorso di cambiamento è un atto di coraggio. . . . li costringe a esplorare lo sguardo dentro si stessi, cosa a cui non sono abituati, scoprendo qualcosa che è davvero perturbante o scoprendo quanto loro hanno investito in modo inappropriato su un altro, sulla compagna nel modo fantasmatico e quindi pretendendo che la donna se adeguasse ai loro bisogni. . . . lavoriamo con loro per dargli speranza. (in Calderón Sandoval 2019, 650) All translations from the cited screenings are ours. 11. Ho pensato è possibile che noi uomini, noi esseri umani non troviamo le parole per commentare questa violenza? Perché questo imbarazzo che invece questo si è di genere, di me come maschio, era qualcosa che dovevo guardare in faccia, che cosa posso dire io. . . . La sua

Gender-Based Violence 115 violenza mi riguarda. Perché quella violenza ha avuto un effetto concreto, reale e generale anche astraendolo, e una cosa verso la quale devo avere attenzione. (in Calderón Sandoval 2019, 651) 12. ‘No, l’amore non c’entra’ (in Caruso 2018). 13. En la lucha contra la violencia de género en España ahora mismo, estamos en ese paso de parvulario, que es “la culpa es tuya, mujer”, la responsabilidad de salir de la violencia de género es tuya en tanto que tienes que ser tú la que vaya a denunciar a la comisaría. Cuando el discurso verdadero sería: “Hombres estáis maltratando mujeres, estáis violando mujeres, estáis utilizando la prostitución, ¿chicos qué os pasa?”. Pero claro, eso es meter el dedo en una herida, meter el dedo en una zona oscura del subconsciente en el cual los hombres, pues no quieren enfrentarse a su propia educación. (in Calderón Sandoval 2019, 339) 14. The language spoken in the film is Spanish, with English subtitles. We use these subtitles as sources for the quotations. 15. ‘Este hombre Rafa, claro, él lo que cuenta, es un gran mentiroso. Él cuenta ahí lo que él quiere que tú oigas. Es un manipulador terrible’ (in Calderón Sandoval 2019, 394). This focus group was organised by de Ocampo in Madrid with both of us and fifteen friends of hers on June 9, 2018. The informal discussion was led by de Ocampo. 16. We might argue, however, that these sequences could spark change among certain spectators through a different mechanism closer to what Jose Esteban Muñoz defines as ‘dis-affection’ or ‘dis-identification’ (1999). 17. ‘Nos dio una lección de historia preciosa y además te das cuenta cómo los chavales van heredando los prejuicios, cómo van heredando las ideas que tenemos preconcebidas’ (in Calderón Sandoval 2019, 381). 18. ‘El maestro es otro canto a la esperanza. . . . Verles en el aula es imaginarlos en una cadena de valores: alumnas y alumnos rompen sus encasillamientos estereotipados y aprenden del maestro por maestro coeducador y por hombre implicado y sensato’ (in Calderón Sandoval 2019, 404).

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2004. ‘Collective Feelings: Or, The Impressions Left by Others’. Theory, Culture & Society 21, no. 2: 25–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276404042133 . 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham and London: Duke UP. https:// doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781 . [2004] 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Bernárdez, Asunción, Irene García, and Soraya González. 2008. Violencia de género en el cine español. Análisis de los años 1998 a 2002 y guía didáctica. Madrid: Editorial Complutense. Instituto de Investigaciones Feministas. Bourdieu, Pierre. [1998] 2000. La dominación masculina. Barcelona: Anagrama. Bruzzi, Stella. 2000. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203133873 Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. . 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London and New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203828274

116  O. Calderón Sandoval and A. Sánchez Espinosa . 2015. Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674495548 Calderón Sandoval, Orianna. 2019. ‘Visualising In/equalities through Contemporary Documentary Cinema: A Diffractive Reading of Feminist Practices in Spanish and Italian Non-fiction Films’. PhD diss., University of Granada and University of Bologna. Caruso, Federico. 2018. ‘Violenza di genere: quando le sedie volano come fossero baci’. AVIS Legnano. February 9, 2018. https://www.avis-legnano.org/ violenza-maschile-elisabetta-lodoli/ Connell, Raewyn. [1995] 2005. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. de Ocampo, Isabel, dir. 2008. Miente. Madrid: Producciones Líquidas. . 2012. Evelyn. Madrid: La voz que yo amo. . 2018. Serás hombre. Madrid: Gris Medio. Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: WW Norton and Company. Hongisto, Ilona. 2015. Soul of the Documentary: Framing, Expression, Ethics. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789089647559. Livingston, Jennie, dir. 1991. Paris Is Burning. San Francisco: Miramax Films. Lodoli, Elisabetta, dir. 2013. Stolica. Rio de Janeiro: IES Abroad. . 2017. Ma l’amore c’entra? Bologna: MaxMan Coop. Lorde, Audre, ed. [1984] 2007. ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 110–14. Berkeley: Crossing Press. Lorente Acosta, Miguel. 2001. Mi marido me pega lo normal: Agresión a la mujer: realidades y mitos. Barcelona: Ares y Mares. Minh-ha, Trinh T, dir. 1989. Surname Viet Given Name Nam. San Francisco: Trinh T. Minh-ha. . 1992. Framer Framed: Film Scripts and Interviews. New York: Routledge. Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Navarrete, Carmen, María Ruido, and Fefa Vila. 2005. ‘Trastornos para devenir: entre artes y políticas feministas y queer en el Estado español’. Desacuerdos: Sobre arte, políticas y esfera pública en el Estado español 2: 158–87. Rodríguez de Montalvo, Garci. 1508. Los quatro libros del Uirtuoso cauallero Amadis de Gaula. Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. Smelik, Anneke. 2007. ‘Lara Croft, Kill Bill, and the Battle for Theory in Feminist Film Studies’. In Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture, edited by Rosemarie Buikema, Liedeke Plate, and Kathrin Thiele, 178–92. New York and Oxon: Routledge. https://doi.org./10.4324/9781315268026 Valencia, Sayak. 2010. Capitalismo gore. Madrid: Melusina. Villaplana Ruiz, Virginia. 2008. ‘Nuevas violencias de género, arte y cultura visual’. PhD diss., University of Murcia.

PART III

Inscribing (In)Equalities

8

STRANGERS, PERSISTERS, AND KILLJOYS CONFRONTING GENDER INEQUALITY THROUGH PERFORMANCE POETRY Esther Álvarez López

Introduction Since the upsurge of spoken word in the late 1980s, the performance of poetry—one of the varied manifestations of this expressive practice—has developed into ‘one of the most undiluted vehicles of artistic and activist (self)expression available to women’ (Olson 2007b, xv), and has increasingly become a fertile ground for women performance poets to address gender issues as well as other embodied forms of inequality and discrimination. For almost four decades now, US and UK spoken wordsters whose marginalised identity has been shaped by gender, sex, race, ethnicity, class and/or mental health, have decisively taken the mic in both conventional and unconventional venues and used their artistic practice to challenge society on all fronts, diagnosing inequalities, identifying deficiencies, and demanding hitherto denied agency and subjectivity. By performing (gender) equality they aim at accessing possibilities for bringing about transformation and social change. In what follows, I will explore US and UK women’s performance poetry and activism in the twenty-first century, on and beyond the stage, through the lens of Sara Ahmed’s conceptualisation of wilfulness (2014, 2017a) and its associations with the figure of the stranger (Simmel 1908/2016; Ahmed 2000, 2006, 2014) and the feminist killjoy (Ahmed 2010a, 2010b, 2017a, 2017b), with their potential to interrogate the gender malfunction inherent in the Western social system and reveal (hetero) normative structures as flawed.1 The poets I will be dealing with here are all internationally well-known feminists of the spoken word scene in the US and the UK, women of various backgrounds and ages, who nevertheless share a commitment to artivism—art as activism—and are intent on critically using their poetry in performance as a source of transformational energy with which to challenge sexism while helping to build a freer, more diverse, tolerant, and equal society. The first part of this chapter focuses on the hybrid nature of performance poetry as a genre that can be both written on the page and performed on the stage, that is both personal and public, individual and collective, DOI: 10.4324/9781003162759-11

120  E. Álvarez López engaging the performance poet and the audience in an affective, emotional encounter that may potentially reach out to, affect, or transform society. In their performances, the artists that are the subject of this analysis reveal that they are at odds with the dominant sociocultural and heteronormative system, which they critically examine and find wanting. Their strange (r)ness can be read as wilfulness because they insist on remaining different: they will not adapt to the norm nor go with the flow; they are killjoys, persisting in their critiques through repetition, in the hope that, insistence will eventually bring about change. In this way, as Sara Ahmed asserts, ‘perhaps wilfulness can be an electric current, passing through each of us, switching us on. Wilfulness can be a spark. We can be lit by it. It is an electric thought’ (2014, 168). Drawing on Georg Simmel’s and Sara Ahmed’s theorisations of the stranger, I will examine this figure in connection with the wilful subject, the feminist killjoy, and the performance poets’ poe(li)tics of persistence that aims at creating, and dealing artistically with, disturbance as a horizon of possibility. The last section will engage wilful gender strangers as they deal with their queer sexuality in a binary, essentialist, and heteronormative culture. On and beyond the stage, they create ‘dissensual spaces’ (Durán-Almarza 2015) through their aesthetic practices, which function as strategic tools of resistance and dissent that may affectively and effectively mobilise the audience to dissent too, and thus to wilfully and collectively enact cultures of equality.

Performance Poetry, the Utopian Performative, and the Audience Although best appreciated in live performance (Somers-Willett 2012, 18), whether in competitive—i.e., slam—commercial or artistic format, performance poetry is verse that lives both on the page and the stage, and in audiovisual media as well. The visual/oral performance becomes a highly signifying component that complements and enhances the word, conveying nuances that the page cannot, and creating an ‘extended semantic repertoire in which poetry fulfils more of its potentialities’ (Middleton 1998, 295). Performances become physical, fully sensory experiences aiming at the ‘total image complex’ (Veronica Forrest-Thomson, cited in Bernstein 1998, 5), with the aural and the visual amplifying the effects of the poem as a performative, plural event (9): vocal dynamics, physical dynamics, appearance, dialects, formats, gestures, hoots and hollers from the audience, and even setting, are some of the performative aspects of a poem (Somers-Willett 2012, 16). Together, they provide the audience with a multisensorial experience that will ultimately shift the poem’s meaning and effect. Performance poets use words with a performative potential to deliver not only meaning but also action, to make it happen in the act of voicing and performing. Conventionally, the poets speak in the first person and draw on personal and political themes, the most common being the expression of their

Strangers, Persisters, and Killjoys 121 marginalised identities (Somers-Willett 2012, 7). Despite focusing on the self-conscious performance of identity, however, in this poetic practice the personal usually intersects with the public, the individual with the collective, through the immediate, interactive, and physical relationship between author and audience, making both the aesthetic or lyric and the political essential constituents of the poetic performative act. Spoken word is therefore more than just words, rhythms, and expressive body language: it is a doubly instrumental genre that enables performance poets to analyse the reality that surrounds them and reveal the flaws of the social system they live in, while also providing them with the possibility of a personal encounter with the audience, an ‘intersubjective network’ (Middleton 1998, 291), bringing its members into the performers’ world, allowing words, experiences, and gestures to transcend borders and emotionally resonate with their public. In Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Kwame Anthony Appiah advocates that ‘we need to develop habits of coexistence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, association’ (2007, xvii). As a public practice, the performance of poetry may well serve as a starting point in that conversation, where spectators are interpellated into a critical conversation and then moved into ‘the theoretical and experiential realm of affect’, so that they are not only witnesses or passive consumers, but active participants (Dolan 2005, 97) through their physical as well as emotional connection. In a type of Levinasian encounter with the other, during the performance of the poem the audience are witness to ‘a nakedness and stripping away of expression as such—that is, extreme exposure, defenselessness, vulnerability itself’ (Levinas 1998, 145). A challenging concept for feminist theorising, vulnerability to Erinn Cunniff Gilson is ‘of special value because of how it captures and expresses the complexities, tensions, and ambiguities of experiences of gender, sexuality, and power in contemporary life’ (2016, 73). Oftentimes considered in negative terms, I argue that vulnerability—resulting from gender, sexual, and/or mental strange(r)ness and alienation—may become a positive vulner-ability in the dynamic, transformative process of the performance, a powerful condition for potential that enables women who suffer any kind of oppression—be it physical, psychological, or emotional—to regain their agency while they attempt to establish allegiances and convert their audience into allies. Through this affective intra-communication, performance poets hope to change the way spectators, or rather, spect-actors, perceive and experience identity/gender politics, ultimately contributing to the reshaping of their world views and, as a result, to the reimagining of altered social communities. This reorientation of the audience, which can be read from the perspective of emotion and encounter, entails a repositioning, a ‘withness’, a concurrence of wills or social willing (Ahmed 2014, 48) that may lead to the collective enactment of cultures of equality and ultimately to a common world-changing project. Somers-Willett contends that slam poetry—and by extension other types of performance poetry as well—‘is largely dedicated to the ideals

122  E. Álvarez López of democracy, equality, and diversity’, ideals that surface frequently both at the poetic event and ‘as some aspect of the poetry itself, inviting (and at times demanding) a shared sense of liberalism and tolerance among those in attendance’ (2012, 20). Likewise, in her studies on performance, Jill Dolan (2001, 2005) affirms that—theatrical—performance offers an important venue for grassroots activity and for the rehearsal of democracy (2005, 91) through the establishment of a public, dialogic communication between author and audience. For Dolan, this public practice can be a tool for making the world better, offering us ‘consistent glimpses of utopia’, be in itself a utopian gesture where audiences are compelled to see people perform live ‘hoping perhaps, for moments of transformation that might let them reconsider and change the world outside the theatre, from its macro to its micro arrangement’ (2001, 456). Dolan believes that performance can articulate a more just and equitable common future, in which we can all participate more equally, with more chances to live fully and contribute to the making of culture. The affective codes generated in performance give rise to what she calls ‘the utopian performative’, or a way in which utopia can be imagined or experienced affectively through performance. In line with Dolan, performance theorist Monica Prendergast (2011) claims that spectatorial participation and agency are key to activism. It is the intersubjective network between poet and audience, the feeling of communitas (Turner 1974, 1982; Prendergast 2011; Koppelman 2016), of empathetic intelligence, that incites people to profound responses that shake their consciousness, creating a social imaginary and a poetic world-making that arise from the articulation of desires for a better world (Prendergast 2011, 63). Performance poets would ultimately be ‘utopographers’ (69) who map utopias, who create sociality and engagement through performance in the belief that performance not only ‘allows opposition and marginal identities to be expressed and explored’ (Marvin Carlson, cited in Dolan 2001, 461), but may also be an effective means to extend the aesthetic into the social and political. Such artistic and activist—artivist—practices foment contestation, resistance, and dissent, at the same time that they generate an intersubjective understanding that also facilitates the audience’s engagement, so that through a complex affective exchange between author and audience, together they can envision, and potentially contribute to creating, a more equitable society. Spoken wordsters Turiya Autry and Walidah Inarisha assert that performance poets try ‘to write a new world with their tongues’ (2007, 338). The tongue is the organ of rebellion that these warriors of the word use to identify multiple inequalities, raise consciousness, and encourage collective responsibility. Their words prompt alternative readings and ultimately ally with the ‘wilful ears’ (Ahmed 2014, 137) of their audience, such that they can ‘hear each other in each other’ (169) and ‘hear what is not being heard’ (Ahmed 2017a, 203). Through voice, gesture, and ears the poetic performance opens up the possibility of collective transformation

Strangers, Persisters, and Killjoys 123 and sociopolitical mobilisation in order to advance cultures of equality. The multiplying effects of the performance also stem from the fact that most performers—like those dealt with here—take their artivism outside and beyond the stage: many of the most acclaimed women poets at the mic accompany their art with social and political engagement that foregrounds the urgency and legitimacy of their claims.

Wilfulness, Strange(r)ness, and the Poe(li)tics of Persistence Performance poetry attests to the intersections between emotions and the encounter with others—audience—both of which are fundamental in the construction of the wilful subject. Sara Ahmed conceptualises wilfulness as ‘a style of politics’ (2014, 161), ‘a political art’ in the struggle to exist or to transform an existence, and sees willing ‘as a project form, as how subjects aim to bring certain things about’ (19). In her theorisation, the will has a queer potential, since, in fact, both are related to the possibility of deviation. She bases her arguments on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s elaboration on the etymological history of the word ‘queer’ (twerk) and its Indo-European origins, where it signified to turn or twist, as well as its relation to the word ‘thwart’, to transverse, perverse or cross. Ahmed affirms that it is no accident that this word came to describe sexual objects, ‘those who do not follow the straight line’, who deviate from the right course (11). Thus, to queer the will is ‘to show how the will has already been given a queer potential’, a potential that is often narrated as a problem or threat. Wilfulness is to Ahmed the conversion point, or how a potential is converted into a threat: that subjects might not follow the right path (11). In Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Ahmed argues that queer politics involves moments of ‘generative disorientation’, which she interprets as moments of radical possibility rather than despair or desperation: although episodes of disorientation can be unsettling and ‘shatter one’s sense of confidence in the ground or one’s belief that the ground on which we reside can support the actions that make a life feel livable’ (2006 157), they can also be thought of as vital bodily experiences, as a purposeful process within self-development that eventually evolves toward a constructive reorientation and productive and revolutionary action. In this way, rather than a problem, disorientation may turn out to be a solution, in the sense that it can reorient, ‘redirect us and open up new worlds’ (19). Hence, reorientation entails a different kind of orientation: a moving away, a wilful trespassing of norms, a re-inhabiting of spaces and opening up of futures that may become a source of empowerment through prompting alternative readings of the self and the world. These generative moments of disorientation-reorientation enhance the embodiment of wilful acts, which are translated into acts of disobedience, of insistence—‘a form of political labor’, ‘a political grammar’ (Ahmed 2014, 149)—and of persistence, of failure to willingly fit the norm and comply with the dominant system.

124  E. Álvarez López Alix Olson, the editor of Word Warriors, the first US all-women spoken word anthology (2007b), and winner of the National Slam Poetry competition in 1998 with her team from the Nuyorican Poets’ Cafe, recounts such a moment of generative disorientation after her participation at a spoken word event in Portugal, the Faladura International Poetry Festival, where she was one of the handful of women artists and the only openly queer one amidst a good number of male national poet laureates. At the end of the shows, they would speak to her about her ‘feminist art’, which they declared did not resonate with them for what these poets considered to be a number of powerful reasons, ranging from their—clearly misinformed—belief in the lack of sexism in their country to the idea that poetry should be universal, subtle, and not confrontational or direct, all of which led them to try and persuade Olson to change the nature of her poetic work, make it more low-key. On the plane back to the US, and while pondering this patronising piece of advice, she first felt disoriented, overcome by a mixture of emotions that at first made her doubt her artistic merit. However, this disorientation eventually evolved towards a generative re-orientation, since the incident actually motivated and inspired her to write one of her best-known pieces, significantly entitled ‘Subtle Sister’, a poem that details ‘the anger of living within global sexism, the frustration of working inside a male-dominated poetic world and its correlative naïve response to feminist art. It was a pissedoff diatribe, a call to resistance. . . It was not, and defiantly not so, subtle’ (Olson 2007a, 168). The germ of this poem can also be read as a snap experience in Sara Ahmed’s terms: when all the frustration and rage can become ‘a tipping point. It is only when you seem to lose it, when you shout, swear, spill, that you have their attention’ (2017b). According to Ahmed, feminism can be what happens in these moments (2017b). Snaps like Olson’s can be construed as feminist outburst in the face of injustice, biases, microaggressions and inequality. ‘Subtle Sister’ is such an outburst: it is a call to take action and break the rules of the patriarchy that have kept women subdued and silent, and to wilfully oppose the impositions of a misogynist system. The poem ends with a reference to the differences underlying both Olson’s and her male peers’ understanding of the concept ‘subtle’, to which she gives a gender twist: whereas they ask her to, as a woman and a poet, be less angry, softer, she replies back with potent rhetorical questions that refute the alleged evenness in male and female experiences, as women are still the target of multiple—and indeed violent—forms of male sexual aggression which she unsubtly brings to the fore: subtle like a penis pounding its target? subtle like your hissing from across the street? subtle like the binding of my sisters’ feet? subtle like her belly raped with his semen, draped in his fuck, funny, doesn’t seem even. (171)

Strangers, Persisters, and Killjoys 125 Thus, Olson’s snap moment after her international encounter at the Faladura strengthened her conviction of ‘the dire need to poet forcibly’ (2007a, 168); it also motivated her to name her independent production company ‘Subtle Sister Productions’. She thinks of it ‘as a personal tribute to [her] encounters in Portugal’ and is ultimately grateful to those poets for their inadvertent contribution to that particular stage of her personal feminist evolution. As an artivist, she has continued to tour the US and abroad, performing at folk festivals, pride marches, national protests and rallies, high schools, colleges, and prisons. Through Subtle Sister Productions she also teaches spoken word poetry workshops for all kinds of groups—from LGBTQ+ national organisations to feminist leadership camps for high school students—who learn to appreciate art as activism and forge a deeper connection between all domains of political struggle. Olson reacted boldly against her male poet peers’ notions of what (feminist) poetry should be like and that wilful act of defiance eventually pushed her spoken word career and professional life forward in many productive areas. She thus proved Ahmed’s contention that wilfulness involves persistence ‘in the face of having been brought down’, and that simple persistence can be an act of disobedience (2014, 2). Likewise, Megan Beech, one of the most powerful voices of spoken word and of young feminism today in the UK, brings together these concepts in ‘Nevertheless, She Persisted’ (2017), where this expression—adopted as a slogan by the feminist movement, especially in the US—illustrates the perfect interaction between wilful acts, persistence, and disobedience. 2 The ‘She’ in the title stands for US Senator Elizabeth Warren, who was voted to silence by the United States Senate in 2017 when she persistently objected to the confirmation of Senator Jeff Sessions as US Attorney General. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made the following remark in defence of the silencing during his comments following the vote: ‘She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted’. Beech uses these same words in her poem as an indictment of the pervasive silencing of women. The pronoun ‘she’ extends in her piece to encompass the poet herself and, with her, a whole genealogy of women—an-sisters, as Beech calls them in an ingenious wordplay—who, now as well as in the past and all over the world, have struggled and managed to lift bans and defy quietness with ‘every sentence they have finished, defiant and distinguished, / undiminished’ (2017, 43). Like them, Elizabeth Warren’s wilfulness made her persist in her decision to speak out loud, disobey McConnell’s command, and stand up for her ideas despite the warnings she received to keep silent. Beech construes these warnings, ‘the sound of silencing’, as an ongoing practice of oppression used by men ‘in the house, in the senate, in the streets, in the President’s tweets’ that only reveals ‘the festering fear of letting women speak’ (42). The poet feels inspired by the Senator’s defiant act and, with another suggestive wordplay, expresses her determination to will a collective

126  E. Álvarez López change against the repression of women’s lives and the suppression of their voices: So let our symphony sing free and let them hear our demands. For I stand with my persisters, my ansisters, resisters, the glass ceiling chisellers, the outspoken ministers, the victors invictus. ........ I stand with women in their millions whose lives we rewrite or deny or let live unlistened. . . I stand persistent, sisterly, insistently. (43) Like their ansisters, female performance poets have been subject to various forms of silencing while trying to do their work: for many years, most organisers and hosts of spoken word events were male, and, as a consequence, the presence of women in slam competitions, for example, was almost non-existent.3 Furthermore, as genderqueer poet and activist Andrea Gibson reveals in ‘Shaking It Off’, an essay included in the Word Warriors anthology, male performers used to justify this limited number of women by saying that the competition of the slam was intimidating and, much like what the Portuguese poets had expressed to Alix Olson, ‘that spoken word was loud and women don’t like to be loud’ (2007b, 216). In contrast to this remark, the women in the audience would approach Gibson to thank them not only for the topics that they were addressing on the stage but ‘for just simply speaking’ (216). They also recall how one male poet said to them after one of their performances: ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but do you ever write about anything other than the struggles of women?’, a remark that reinforced Gibson’s view that the slam space ‘still mirrored US culture, a patriarchy that silenced women’ (216). Shortly after, and as an active and deliberate response to that question, the poet joined Vox Feminista, a multimedia performance collective of women political activists bent on bringing about social change through cultural revolution, who urged them to become increasingly fearless in raising their feminist voice. Vox Feminista—which was awarded the Westword Mastermind Award for Literary Arts in 2007—blends entertainment with education ‘to inspire and awaken our audience to take action toward global justice’.4 As seen above, emotions and encounters intersect in the work and life experiences of spoken word artists. Yet, emotions of despair, anger, shame, and pain, rather than being negative can be positive when used to prompt activism, confront injustices, and foster cultures of equality through performance. These performance poets agree on the need to be vocal about misogyny on the mic, just as they strive to create much desired spaces that welcome and host female poets wanting to perform their work on stage. That was the motivation behind the creation of Sister Spit, a lesbianfeminist spoken word and performance art collective based in San Francisco, a city where Sini Anderson, one of the co-founders, found that the spoken

Strangers, Persisters, and Killjoys 127 word scene was just as male dominated as the one that she had left back in Chicago. To put an end to the underrepresentation of women as well as their lack of impact, she established a partnership with Michelle Tea, a talented local queer writer, and together they formed Sister Spit, described in an article in The Independent Weekly magazine (June 27, 2001) as a ‘literary celebration of outspoken and courageous feminists’. And an impact they made: their first show was packed to capacity and since then queer girls have either hit the stage for the first time or returned to it before an enthusiastic audience (Anderson 2007, 279). The group took to the road with their Ramblin’ Roadshow, performing across the US before its dissolution in 2006. In many ways the tour itself was an act of defiance of a group of people who ‘had heard the word No too much. No to being queer, to wanting to be artists, to thinking anyone would want to listen to our attitudinal manifestos’ (Tea 2007, 16). In their successful performances in unconventional venues across the country they had their ambitions validated, a definite proof ‘that if you want something bad you can make it happen through sheer will, ingenuity, and community support’ (20). Tea revived the tour in April 2007 with Sister Spit: The Next Generation, which included some of the original members of the collective and has since evolved to reflect changes in the gender identity and sexual orientation of the touring artists. Vox Feminista, Sister Spit, and Subtle Sister Production are indeed exemplary of insistent, persistent, and wilful acts carried out by audacious dissenters who have become estranged from a society grounded in unfair and defective gender paradigms.

Wilful Killjoys: Ruining the (Sexist) Atmosphere In my analysis, spoken word artists can be said to embody the condition of the stranger, as defined by German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel (1908), for whom s/he is an element of the group itself but is not strongly attached to it.5 Simmel bases his examination of this figure on the opposition between distance and proximity, which he argues can be both geographical and social. Thus, in his view, the stranger embodies a synthesis of closeness and remoteness: s/he is paradoxically near and far at the same time, ‘as in any relationship founded on generally human commonality’ (Simmel 2016). According to Simmel, between closeness and distance there arises a specific tension when ‘the awareness of what is common to all pulls into focus that which is not shared’ (2016). Ultimately, these performance poets epitomise the notion of ‘familiar strangers’, which Ahmed, drawing on Simmel’s theorisation, describes as those who are ‘in their very proximity, already recognized as not belonging, as being out of place’ (Ahmed 2000, 21; emphasis in original), suggesting that rather than strangers being those we do not recognise, some bodies are inherently recognised as strangers (in their non-normativity, marginality, strange(r)ness).

128  E. Álvarez López To Simmel, the stranger’s paradoxical position of nearness and distance endows this figure with a specific attitude of objectivity, which he interprets as freedom, for the objective individual is freer practically and theoretically, and thus constrained by no commitments that could prejudice their perception, understanding, or judgment; neither is s/he bound in their action ‘by habit, piety, and precedent’ (Simmel 2016). In his argumentation, the stranger is, then, an objective—although not necessarily detached—analyst with an active mind ‘operating to its fullest capacity according to its own laws’ (2016). From their strange(r)ness, US and UK performance poets objectively dissect the world around them and find it lacking. It is in their ‘consciousness of being not’ part of that society and sociocultural system that they ‘recognize [themselves] as the stranger’ (Ahmed 2010a, 589). It is precisely by becoming a stranger, Ahmed contends, that wilful acts of this kind become instrumental in diagnosing inequalities and effectively interrogating the normativity of the system. Through a focus on the marginal and the ‘strange’, spoken word artivists explore normative structures that are revealed as flawed. In their poetic performances, these wordsters identify multiple forms of inequity while voicing their disconformity with a patriarchal, heteronormative system that marginalises and estranges those who do not fit in, those who wilfully refuse to adjust. In her theorisation on the concept of happiness (2010a, 2010b, 2014), Ahmed brings together the stranger, emotions, and wilfulness in the figure of the feminist killjoy. In ‘Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Unhappiness’ (2010a), she elaborates on the genealogy of the word ‘wretched’, which she states comes ‘from wretch, referring to a stranger, exile, or banished person’; the wretch is likewise one who is ‘a miserable, unhappy, or unfortunate person’ (573) who has been banished not only from a place but also from happiness, or those who enter the history of happiness only as ‘troublemakers, . . ., strangers, dissenters, killers of joy’. According to Ahmed, ‘the sorrow of the stranger might give us a different angle on happiness, not because it teaches us what it is like to be a stranger but because it might estrange us from the very happiness of the familiar’ (573). In this line of thought, the feminist recognises herself as the stranger, in the consciousness of being already estranged from happiness, of being ‘not’ and ‘not with’. Thus, in Ahmed’s argumentation, the feminist is a stranger or affect(ively) alien; and she is doubly so since, on the one hand, she is affected in the wrong way by the right things (583) and, on the other, she affects other people in the wrong way: she is a killjoy and, as such, gets in the way of and kills other people’s enjoyment by bringing up or talking about unhappy topics, such as sexism, functioning therefore as ‘an unwanted reminder of histories that are disturbing, that disturb the atmosphere’ (584). This negative affect that the feminist-stranger is attributed with goes hand in hand with the charge of wilfulness, and consequently ‘the willful subject shares an affective horizon with the feminist killjoy as those who “ruin the atmosphere”’ (2014, 152).

Strangers, Persisters, and Killjoys 129 The title of Megan Beech’s second collection of poems, You Sad Feminist (2017), pointedly underscores Ahmed’s association of the feminist and sadness, and therefore, the feminist’s embodiment of the characteristics of the killjoy, the affect alien. The three words of the title together, ‘you-sadfeminist’, merge into a single one that is launched as an insult, a reproach, an emphatic descriptive expression meant to offend the mouthy, snappy woman who ‘ruins the atmosphere’ and kills the joy of others by revealing the causes of female unhappiness. In ‘Women of the World’, ‘Deeds in Words’, ‘Baby’s Face’, and ‘Broader Broadcasting Corporation’, Beech speaks about injustice, power, and inequality in a heteropatriarchal culture and how that brings unhappiness to women. In ‘99 Problems’, from When I Grow Up I Want To Be Mary Beard (2013), Beech critically plays on Ice-T’s ‘99 Problems’, which in turn inspired American rapper Jay Z’s 2004 single of the same title, where the latter enumerates the many problems that he has to face in a racist American society, among which, as he acknowledges in the chorus hook, ‘a bitch ain’t one’.6 If in his song Jay Z showcases problems that affect him as an artist and as a Black man, such as dealing with rap critics, racial profiling, and an aggression, Beech counters in hers with the many issues that have always been entrenched in a sexist culture—such as that depicted and performed in mainstream hip-hop, with its pervasive portrayal of women as whores or bitches—and are still a source of sadness, anger, and distress for the feminist killjoy of the twenty-first century: from the ‘misogynistic vocabulary’ and ‘overbearing toxic doctrines of masculinity as sovereign’ to pervasive gender inequality in allegedly democratic, egalitarian societies (-2013, 40). The poet also laments the recurrent scenes of hypersexualisation and objectification of the female physique, even of teens, in the media, where these images, alongside unimportant issues, such as the ‘unconvincing size [of] our Kate [Middleton] and her baby bump’, take up much more space than that devoted to dealing with the pervasive gender violence that besets women all over the world and which inexplicably does not seem to be part of the general concern (40). According to Beech, another significant problem is the difficulty of summoning names of women in the public eye that can serve as positive examples that young girls have available to aim for in their lives, other than being a ‘mother, / footballer’s wife or lover, insignificant other’; or the underrepresentation of women in (national) political institutions, as the UK Parliament, where, at the time of writing the poem, ‘less than twenty five percent / of MPs’ were women’. Beech finishes this piece by urging to be given ‘more Mary Beards, / more Germaine and Bonnie Greers’ (40–41), wise women with successful intellectual careers who are respected by their peers, wilful feminists, and killjoys themselves who, like Beech, have refused to remain silent and inhabit the norm. In ‘Does This Taste Like Rohypnol to You?’, Beech manifests her unwillingness to go with the flow after she reads a ‘poem’ in her halls of residence on Valentine’s Day: ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, / Does this taste like

130  E. Álvarez López Rohypnol to you?’ (2017, 21). The altered popular rhyme makes fun of this potent odourless, colourless tranquiliser, included in the category of date-rape drugs, that produces the immediate loss of consciousness as well as amnesia in the person who consumes it, so that after the sexual assault she cannot remember what happened to her until later or maybe even ever. When Beech complains about these lines, the student manager, a female in her thirties, replies that ‘It is just a joke’, a ‘joke’ that the poet does not share or understand. She also cannot grasp why her peers normalise rape by means of a careless use of words related to sexual assault, with expressions such as ‘last night was a little bit rapey’ or ‘someone on Facebook / just fraped me’ (—21).7 Beech expresses her strange(r)ness by distancing herself from her environment, an affect alien emotionally estranged from what seems to be the general, though insensitive, reckless, and sexist, happiness of her peers: And I’ll stand back, stop shouting this poem the day I can truly say there is no such thing as blurred lines or victim blame, and my society, far from quietly, states, ‘Do not rape’, not ‘Do not get raped’! (21) Beech’s words particularly resonate now with the powerful participative protest performance ‘A Rapist in Your Path’, created by the Chilean feminist collective LasTesis.8 Like LasTesis’ hymn, Beech’s poem also calls attention to society’s implied complicity in rape culture and victim shaming: By putting the blame on the victim, she is doubly victimised, first as the object of the rape and then as responsible for her own victimisation, whereas no imperative obligation to stop rape and gender violence is demanded from those who actually commit such repugnant acts against women—with dire consequences for the latter’s physical and mental wellbeing—or from the authorities who should protect females’ integrity instead of further denigrating them. The poet’s attitude is, as such, a tactic for survival and resistance in the face of a malfunctioning world, her wilfulness not only a diagnosis but also a call: ‘Don’t adjust to an unjust world!’ (Ahmed 2014, 157). And thus, Beech refuses to be well adjusted or keep quiet for the sake of comfort, and is intent on ruining the atmosphere and killing the joy of familiar happiness, for, as Ahmed contends, ‘there can be joy in killing joy. And killing joy we must, and we do’ (2010a, 592). With these subversive acts, Beech and women like her challenge a rather general complacency within a sexist culture that they seek to destabilise, thus contributing to raising gender consciousness and, with their wilful insistence, keeping us ‘proximate to scenes of violence’ (Ahmed 2014, 158). Together, these performers of the word build upon a political and feminist framework, contributing with unabashed voices to a backbone of persistence, in order to promote, when not force, a change in gender paradigms. However, persistence, wilfulness, and strange(r)ness are not often found

Strangers, Persisters, and Killjoys 131 without accompanying troubles and consequences. A refusal to adjust and the rejection of normative societal paradigms may imply either developing a mental illness or being diagnosed with one in spite of one’s sanity. In You Sad Feminist, Beech acknowledges having gone through a crippling anxiety and depressive illness, with associated agoraphobia that prevented her from leaving her room and made her avoid life outside, her ‘capacity for joy and all hope. . . extinguished’ (2017, 15). Likewise, US performance poet and activist Leah Harris recounts in ‘A Mad Poet’s Manifesto’ (2007a, 73–79) how she spent most of her adolescence in and out of psychiatric institutions, forced to take harmful psychiatric drugs that drove her from depression to an obsession with self-injury and suicide, which created ‘a vicious circle of hospitalizations and further despair and hopelessness’ (74). She ultimately equates the psychiatric ward with the society outside its walls, both authoritarian places where dissent (willing not), the trespassing of normativity, is construed as a symptom of illness (strange(r)ness), where patients/women are ‘expected to comply with absolutely every rule without question or complaint’ (75). As a young woman, Harris learned to hide her true thoughts and feelings and, like the nameless narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s groundbreaking feminist short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892), was afraid to keep a journal—and therefore find an emotional outlet through words—because there was no safe place to hide it and she was always under surveillance. Conversely, during her time as a mental patient, Harris became accustomed to words being used against her, words written on her chart by psychiatrists and mental health workers who made no effort to understand or empathise with her as a human being: ‘Words were weapons used to diagnose and to pathologize me without my consent’ (2007a, 75). At eighteen, upon leaving her final institution, she made a decision to reject their drugs and diagnoses and to strike out on her own, ‘a noncompliant crazy girl’ (75). Words, hers this time, eventually helped her heal her spirit and cope with her grief. Over the years, she moved beyond the exploration of the self in the hope that those words might connect with others, and thus began to perform her work publicly: ‘The exhilaration of that experience kept me going. I had found a healthy outlet for all the years of pent-up rage. My vehicle of expression would be spoken word: loud, angry, in-your-face, unapologetic spoken word transformed my rage into self-empowerment combining art and activism’ (76). Like Harris, Andrea Gibson, in ‘The Madness Vase’ (2012), rejects the advice of nutritionists, psychotherapists, yogis, pharmacists, and doctors who recommend drastic and ineffective treatments as a cure to their anxiety, and decides to wilfully rely on writing instead: The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones’. ........................... My bones said, ‘Write the poems’. (17)

132  E. Álvarez López Gibson has acknowledged that they have felt shame about their illness. Similarly, Leah Harris remained underground about her past and her mental health history, ashamed of it and living out the legacy of self-stigma until she finally granted herself permission to talk back to the system that had oppressed her. In You Sad Feminist, Megan Beech also admits that she has had to battle against feelings of shame and the stigma of depressive illness, but in the preface to the book she declares that she has refused to let that stop her from sharing her experience of it. All three have ultimately resorted to writing and to the performance of poems as an escape valve for their grief and as a strategy to reach out to others who might be living through similarly traumatic, devastating experiences. Their poems are a kind of pedagogy that reimagines ‘solitary suffering as “accumulated history”’ (Ahmed 2017a, 202). Leah Harris illustrates this idea in ‘Revenge of the Crazy Wimmin’ (2007b), where she feels that she has ‘channeled the fierce love, hope, and strength of all of the generations of women who had been locked away, murdered, raped, and driven insane for being different or defiant, or disillusioned with the status quo’ (77). The performance poem focuses on a feminist genealogy in an accumulated herstory of female wilful strangers, victims of the chronic inequality of a patriarchal system attempting to slow women down in their life journeys and lower the volume of their voices (80). From the Middle Ages, when they were burned at the stake for being unruly, and Victorian times, when they were diagnosed with hysteria, to the present, women have suffered the consequences of the labels imposed on them by a stifling male-dominated system that has controlled their bodies, undermined their spirits, and curtailed their rights under the pretext that it all was for their own good. Hence, according to Harris, what men call ‘paranoia’, women call ‘reality’, when we name the forces all around conspiring to keep us down when we deny the diagnoses of our masters when we refuse to be sick, defective, diseased, disordered, disturbed when we dare proclaim our humanity when we accuse them of insanity. (81; emphasis in original) The poet claims that these women’s unruliness, ‘hysteria’, and willing not are just but evidence of the soundness of their judgment, their unabashed dissent a manifestation of their lucidity against an insane heteropatriarchal society intent on obliterating them. Through an allegedly defective mental condition, these ultimate strangers objectively dissect the world around, proving to be more clear-minded and sane than those who, judging from their irrational, inhumane deeds, have for long subjugated women on the grounds of their wilfulness and

Strangers, Persisters, and Killjoys 133 strange(r)ness, construed in both instances as a threat to the male status quo and the heteronormative system. Their performance poems are profound indictments of this system that renders women’s voices and lives irrelevant—feminist snaps that connect women over time and space in moments of mutual recognition, visibilising a long history of accumulated gestures of wilfulness, alienation, and disaffection.

Conclusions Feminist performance artists have employed the spoken word genre as an instrument to interrogate not only the multiple manifestations of gender inequality in the genre itself, but also in society at large, as well as to contest the (hetero)normativity of the sociocultural system. Following Georg Simmel’s and Sara Ahmed’s theorisations of the stranger, this chapter has shown how in their paradoxical relation of nearness and remoteness to the group, these poets embody the figure of the familiar stranger, who, in their non-normativity, is recognised as not belonging, as being out of place. However, their condition of strange(r)ness, freed from prejudices and biases, enables them to have a more objective perspective on the world around and therefore to identify and contest the entrenched sexism that dominates all areas of women’s life experiences. In pointing out moments of sexism, they become feminist killjoys, both estranged by happiness and killing other people’s fantasy of happiness. The poets embody the concept of the wilful subject who seeks to bring what already exists into consciousness and hence transform it. In performing their wilful acts of defiance and the trespassing of normativity, performance poets ultimately become unwilling strangers in patriarchal terms. Wilfulness becomes for them a source of empowerment, despite the oftentimes negative consequences that refusal to adjust to or comply with the norm may imply. By being wilful, these feminist performance poets are not only making things move, reorient, but through their affective encounter with the audience, they open up future possibilities for creating more positive, egalitarian, and inclusive lifeworlds.

Notes 1. I am indebted to Andrea Rodríguez Álvarez (2019), whose approach to wilfulness and strange(r)ness in her study of Scottish women’s urban crime fiction partly inspired my own reading of spoken word artists and their poetry. 2. Megan Beech was the winner of the Poetry Society SLAMbassadors national youth slam 2011, and the Poetry Rivals UK under 18s slam 2011. She was featured in The Guardian’s lists of inspiring young feminists in 2014 and must-read books of the year 2014, as well as in the Evening Standard’s list of ten twenty-first-century feminist icons. She made a film with the BBC for the iPlayer series Women Who Spit. Her work has been featured in publications including the New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Grazia magazine, and the Evening Standard, which heralded her as ‘a modern-day feminist icon’.

134  E. Álvarez López 3. This limitation of women’s participation in competitions led to the creation in 2008 of the Women of the World Poetry Slam (WOWPS), a yearly performance poetry tournament in which only female assigned or identified individuals (i.e., poets who live their lives as women) can compete. Andrea Gibson was the WOWPS champion in the first festival, held in Detroit, Michigan. 4. For more information on Vox Feminista, check their Facebook page: https:// www.facebook.com/pg/voxfeminista/about/?ref=page_internal. 5. Simmel’s essay was part of his Soziologie. Untershuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, published in 1908 in Berlin. All the quotations from Simmel’s work in this chapter refer to Ramona Mosse’s English translation, accessed at https://thebaffler.com/ancestors/stranger. 6. ‘Got 99 problems and a bitch ain’t one’ is a refrain repeated in several stanzas in Ice-T’s song, where the Ice-T persona is a pimp and where the word ‘bitch’ recurs in almost every single line; apparently, Ice-T was heavily influenced by Iceberg Slim, a real-life pimp (between 1937 and 1961) and author of Pimp: The Story of My Life (1967) (https://genius.com/Ice-t-99-problems-lyrics#about). 7. According to the Free Dictionary, in Telecommunications ‘to frape’, from Facebook+rape, means to alter information in a person’s profile on a social networking website without his or her permission (https://www.thefreedictionary.com/frape). 8. ‘A Rapist in Your Path’ was performed for the first time on November 18, 2019. On November 25, as part of International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, this defiant feminist anthem was interpreted by 2,000 Chilean women, recorded on video, and shown on social media, immediately going viral. Since then, scores of countries all over the world have adopted, translated, and replicated the performance for their protests and local demands for a cease to femicides, rape, and sexual violence. The song puts the blame on the perpetrators, and not on the victims, who are usually held responsible by society and a patriarchal institutional system for the violence exerted upon them: ‘And the fault wasn’t mine, not where I was, not how I dressed’; ‘the rapist is you. . . it’s the cops / the judges / the state / the president. / The oppressive state is a rapist’. Time included this feminist collective as one of the 100 most influential people of 2020.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London and New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203349700 . 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham and London: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822388074 . 2010a. ‘Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35, no. 3: 571–94. https://doi. org/10.1086/648513 . 2010b. The Promise of Happiness. Durham and London: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392781 . 2014. Willful Subjects. Durham and London: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376101 . 2017a. Living a Feminist Life. Durham and London: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373377 . 2017b. ‘Snap!’. feministkilljoys (blog). May 21, 2017. https://feministkilljoys.com/2017/05/21/snap/

Strangers, Persisters, and Killjoys 135 Anderson, Sini. 2007. ‘In Other Words’. In Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, edited by Alix Olson, 277–80. Emeryville, CA: Seal. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2007. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. London and New York: Penguin. Autry, Turiya, and Walidah Inarisha. 2007. ‘Good Sista/Bad Sista’. In Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, edited by Alix Olson, 331–39. Emeryville, CA: Seal. Beech, Megan. 2013. When I Grow Up I Want to Be Mary Beard. Portishead, UK: Burning Eye. . 2017. You Sad Feminist. Portishead, UK: Burning Eye. Bernstein, Charles, ed. 1998. Introduction to Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10. 7208/9780226044866-041 Cunniff Gilson, Erinn. 2016. ‘Vulnerability and Victimization: Rethinking Key Concepts in Feminist Discourses on Sexual Violence’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42, no. 1: 71–98. https://doi.org/10.1086/686753 Dolan, Jill. 2001. ‘Performance, Utopia, and the Utopian Performative’. Theatre Journal 53, no. 3: 455–79. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25068953 . 2005. Utopia in Performance. Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883307002854 Durán-Almarza, Emilia María. 2015. ‘Enacting Dissent: Towards a Cartography of Dissenting Performatics in the Greater Caribbean’. E-Misférica 12, no. 1. http://hemi.nyu.edu/hemi/en/emisferica-121-caribbean-rasanblaj/duranalmarza Gibson, Andrea. 2007. ‘Shaking It Off’. In Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, edited by Alix Olson, 215–18. Emeryville, CA: Seal. . 2012. ‘The Madness Vase’. The Madness Vase, 17. Long Beach, CA: Write Bloody. Harris, Leah. 2007a. ‘A Mad Poet’s Manifesto’. In Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, edited by Alix Olson, 73–79. Emeryville, CA: Seal. . 2007b. ‘Revenge of the Crazy Wimmin’. In Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, edited by Alix Olson, 80–83. Emeryville, CA: Seal. Koppelman, Justin. 2016. ‘Poetry: Writing a Space for Democratic Engagement’. NASPA, October 13. https://www.naspa.org/constituent-groups/posts/poetrywriting-a-space-for-democratic-engagement Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217300014050 Middleton, Peter. 1998. ‘The Contemporary Poetry Reading’. In Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, edited by Charles Bersntein, 262–99. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226044866-041 Olson, Alix. 2007a. ‘Subtle Sister’. In Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, edited by Alix Olson, 169–71. Emeryville, CA: Seal. . ed. 2007b. Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution. Emeryville, CA: Seal.

136  E. Álvarez López Prendergast, Monica. 2011. ‘Utopian Performatives and the Social Imaginary: Toward a New Philosophy of Drama/Theater Education’. The Journal of Aesthetic Education 45, no. 1: 58–73. https://doi.org/10.5406/jaesteduc. 45.1.0058 Rodríguez Álvarez, Andrea. 2019. ‘Emotional Geographies, Strangers and Mobilities in the Urban Crime Fiction of Denise Mina and Louise Welsh’. PhD diss., University of Oviedo. Simmel, Georg. [1908] 2016. ‘The Stranger’. Translated by Ramona Mosse. The Baffle 30. Georg Simmel. https://thebaffler.com/ancestors/stranger Somers-Willett, Susan B.A. 2012. The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.322627 Tea, Michelle. 2007. ‘On Sister Spit’. In Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, edited by Alix Olson 13–20. Emeryville, CA: Seal. Turner, Victor. 1974. Drama, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. . 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.

9

IMPERIALISM’S PERFORMATIVE TECHNOLOGIES RACE, GENDER, AND WEARABLE DEVICES IN ALIETTE DE BODARD’S ‘IMMERSION’ Eleanor Drage

Science Fiction and Technology Works of science fiction (SF) have for centuries influenced the way in which technology is understood as a sociocultural phenomenon. The genre’s facility for cognitive estrangement makes it a unique tool with which to interrogate modern society, as demonstrated by notable works including Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), which critiques the foundational texts of early modern science; and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), which documents the effects of technology during the first Industrial Revolution. SF and fantasy sales have doubled since 2010,1 demonstrating that speculative fiction continues to be the modality through which the public are choosing to think through issues faced by humanity, including the burgeoning power of technology to shape and transform humanity’s future. 2 SF, therefore, is an important critical apparatus through which to clarify, elaborate, and radicalise theories of performativity in relation to technology. ‘Immersion’ (2012b), a short story by French-Vietnamese writer and software engineer Aliette de Bodard, typifies SF’s ability to demonstrate how performative theories and methodologies can contribute to an understanding of technology as a series of variable, relational, and performative materialisations. De Bodard has explained that the story concerns ‘the more subtle and insidious version of cultural colonisation that’s currently going on in the world’: from the diffusion of Western media and other retail products to the coloniser attitudes and practices still at large in the museum and tourist industries (2012a). The story takes place on a space station called Longevity, a newly independent territory which used to be a colony governed by the powerful, pale-skinned Galactics, and now hosts Galactics as tourists. Longevity is a floating, futuristic Vietnam; the world-building process through which its universe was born was inspired by de Bodard’s experiences of travelling in Vietnam, from where her mother’s family emigrated. Three young women inhabit the tale: Tam and Quy, whose family owns a tourist-friendly restaurant on Longevity; and Agnes, a Longevity woman married to a Galactic man, who will go to any length to DOI: 10.4324/9781003162759-12

138  E. Drage look and feel like a Galactic woman. Tam and Quy are suspicious of a piece of Galactic technology called an ‘Immerser’ that is popular on the space station and ultimately attempt to dismantle and reconfigure it. An Immerser is a wearable device with ‘optical parts’ and a thin metal mesh that syncs with the user’s brain (de Bodard 2012b). While the narrative does not specify the other materials from which it is made, the next wave of innovation in ultra-malleable ‘second-skin’ epidermal electronics points towards silicon nanomembranes and embedded microchannels made of silicone rubber layers with channel patters as materials that can potentially turn the upper epidermis into an artificial sensor or console (Chen, Park, and Wood 2012, 1; Chen, Senthil Kumar, and Ren 2019). Indeed, optical manufacturers such as Chinese Yejia Technology are currently developing liquid silicone optical parts for smart wearables. Potentially similar technologies assist the Immerser in intimately calibrating itself with the user to produce an avatar which mediates the wearers’ interaction with their environs. This means that the Immerser both facilitates communication between Longevity tourist professionals and their Galactic clients, and directs Galactics towards tourist attractions which, using augmented reality, are overlaid with visualised information. Ominously, the Immerser is more powerful when operating on the bodies of Longevity citizens, for whom the avatar is able to cover their skin with a Galactic-looking phantom body: paler-skinned, slimmer-hipped, and tall. Galactic sociocultural ideology is therefore not only visually projected but made replicable and easily distributable in the thousands of ‘wearables’ that are sold on the mass market. This commodification of Galactic culture helps them maintain their influence in Longevity, even though their troops have been long withdrawn. De Bodard’s narrativisation of the complicity of technology in ideological governance is indebted to her career as a systems architect for the French transportation multinational Alstom, for whom she works on the development of image-processing software and automatic driving algorithms for new generations of signalling systems. De Bodard’s writing explores the human-technological interactions which make technology operable: from the ‘Mindships’ which populate her Xuya Universe series—complex assemblages of human, animal, family spirit, and machinic elements—to the ‘expendable’ avatars piloted by valuable human operators in ‘In the Lands of the Spill’ (2020). These technologies complicate rather than secure the sovereignty of the human subject through intimate imbrications of human flesh, holographic projections, resurrected ancestors, and responsive technological materials. In each case, the device functions very differently, as de Bodard contends in her notes on the story: The story is also very obviously based on our trip in Vietnam and my rants at the guidebooks which distil a culture in an outsider, monolithic (and many times wildly inaccurate) version: the Immersers from Galactic to Rong are guidebooks V2.0. I also imagined their

Imperialism’s Performative Technologies 139 counterpart from Rong to Galactic, something that would make it clear that unbalanced cultural exchanges could lead to severe cultural distortion, as well as rejection of one’s home culture—a phenomenon that’s not always harmful, but is taken to its extreme in Agnes. I also tried to tackle how damaging the imposition of languages and standards of beauty could become, though through lack of space I had to go for a fairly caricatural version of it. (2012a) While de Bodard discusses the conceptual elements of the technology— how its power is oriented towards the suppression of Longevity culture or how its beauty standards enforce the gendered racialisation of its users—she does not detail how it is made or what it is made from. The descriptions that the story does provide evoke elements of existing virtual communication technologies, such as Neural Machine Translation (NMT), conversational AI, avatars created using 3D modelling tools, Deep Brain Simulation (DBS), Distributed Human-Machine Systems (DHMS), and live speech translation devices. In particular, the Immerser is suggestive of future technologies which might combine advancements in gaming technologies such as BodyAvatar with Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tools, for example the NMT, powered by the European Patent Office, and Google and live speech translation devices such as Google’s Pixel Buds, Waverly Labs’s Pilot, and Bragi. BodyAvatar is an interface developed by Microsoft using the Microsoft HoloLens 2 headset’s combination of artificial intelligence and augmented reality. The interface allows computer gamers to create avatars using their own bodies which, if the user is dexterous enough, can take any form they wish, from superheroes to dragons. Like BodyAvatar, the Immerser also forms an avatar hologram around the user’s body. However, unlike any existing avatar technology, the Immerser functions by synchronising with the user’s brain and controlling its activity in a process akin to DBS’s invasive brain stimulation, a technology to which Elon Musk has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars through his latest venture, Neuralink. Because the Immerser must bi-directionally sync with the user to operate and intervenes in the users’ navigation of their environs, it can be read as a combination of component parts which are human, machinic, and spatial. I argue that this assemblage issues its users with performative injunctions which contribute to their embodiment of racist and sexist imperialist ideologies. ‘Immersion’ invites readers to attend to these practices more carefully and to imagine human-technological configurations which surpass systems of race and gender altogether.

Is Technology Performative? Theories of Performativity from Butler to Barad Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity has left its mark on disciplines across and beyond the humanities. Recent contributions to the philosophy of technology are no exception: negotiating the relationships

140  E. Drage between social subjects and structures, referents and representation, materialisations and repetition, performativity comes into full force when applied to the critical interrogation of the norms that govern the operation of technical systems and processes. This analysis of theories of performativity and technology is grounded in contemporary work from philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler and cultural theorist and software engineer Federica Frabetti. Stiegler and Frabetti both acknowledge the mutual making and unmaking of technology and the human, thus combatting the myth of technology’s monodirectional ‘impact’ on science and culture.3 Of the extensive body of literature which has been produced this century by the philosophy of technology, I focus on these two scholars because their work on how technology makes societies and informs culture draws on Derrida’s treatment of Austinian performativity, as Butler did when she proposed the question ‘To what extent does discourse gain the authority to bring about what it names through citing the conventions of authority?’ (1993, xxi). In thinking the materiality of gendered flesh together with discursive practices of ideological governance, Butler radicalised conceptualisations of the relationship between nature and culture. The work of Stiegler and of Frabetti can be read as an extension and refinement of Butler’s claims in that they argue that technological objects and processes are imbricated in performative practices of mattering. This is manifested in their work through the emphasis which they place on materiality (of technical systems), on repetition (in coding language), and on the shaping of the social subject (through technology which performs the ambitions and intentions of social structures). When analysing how discursive practices come to bear on the material, I also turn to the work of theoretical physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad, whose theory of agential realism elaborates on Butler’s work on performativity to demonstrate how iterative practices stabilise as matter, in what she terms ‘spacetimemattering’ (2003, 315). I will draw on the work of these three theorists to expose the complexity of the performative technological practices which naturalise gender and racial norms. I read the Immerser as a figuration of Butler’s theory of gender performativity and its applications in Stiegler’s and Frabetti’s work on the performative nature of technology. My aim in reading Butler alongside Stiegler and Frabetti is to make explicit the way in which the advanced technologies which the Immerser evokes, and the future technologies which it prefigures, can be performative in the sense that they prompt a series of transformative acts. In the case of the Immerser, these acts intimately infect and affect bodies with racial and gender ideology. The user and the Immerser are therefore embroiled in a socio-techno-cultural process which produces and reifies systems of race and gender. I term this phenomenon a ‘performative assemblage’ because the Immerser’s performative functionality depends on the collection of human and machinic, material and discursive components through which it operates.

Imperialism’s Performative Technologies 141

(Post)colonial Technologies: The Re/Production of Racialised and Patriarchal Worlds ‘Immersion’, which won the prestigious Nebula Award and a Locus Award in the Best Short Story category, examines how information processing systems can be inflected with ideological force. Like Vietnam, its real-world referent, Longevity is vulnerable to ongoing colonial activity. Its economy is centred around tourism, and its client-base largely consists of its excolonisers, the Galactics. Pale-skinned Galactic tourists bear an uncanny resemblance to present-day Vietnam’s white European visitors: sunburned, demanding tourist menus that are free from spicy food and only willing to interact with locals when they need to purchase a product or a service. At the start of the story, the bright and vivacious Quy narrates a scene heralding the arrival of yet another load of Galactic tourists, dumped from a constant stream of spaceships onto Longevity’s shores: Most ships those days were Galactic—you’d have thought Longevity’s ex-masters would have been unhappy about the station’s independence, but now that the war was over Longevity was a tidy source of profit. The ships came; and disgorged a steady stream of tourists—their eyes too round and straight, their jaws too square; their faces an unhealthy shade of pink, like undercooked meat left too long in the sun. They walked with the easy confidence of people with Immersers: pausing to admire the suggested highlights for a second or so before moving on to the transport station, where they haggled in schoolbook Rong for a ride to their recommended hotels—a sickeningly familiar ballet Quy had been seeing most of her life, a unison of foreigners descending on the station like a plague of centipedes or leeches. (de Bodard 2012b) The meat-pink crowd who pass through the station is a barely disguised critique of the Galactics’s real-world European counterparts, the French. The scene corresponds to the documented torrents of French tourists who have disembarked in Vietnam since the late 1980s. In Hanoi: Biography of a City, William Stewart Logan describes how late twentieth-century French tourists came to Hanoi ‘chasing after myths, lured by family histories, perhaps by childhood memories, or by novels and films’ (2000, 143). For Logan, these tourists projected cultural references and family histories onto a cityscape which interacted with the French cultural imaginary. He notes that in order to entice further tourism, the Vietnamese local government remodelled aspects of the city to correspond with French visitors’ expectations of comfort. Further, to prevent the city’s scars of colonial rule from disturbing European sensibilities, the Vietnamese local government attempted to draw attention to monuments which suggested that French occupation had benefitted Hanoi:

142  E. Drage The Vietnamese, for their part, sought to focus the tourists’ attention on the old core around Hoan Kiem Lake and the more monumental French buildings. . . . The joint venture investments in tourist hotels often exploited the historic character of buildings, remodelling them to suit Western levels of comfort. This meant that the heritage that was presented tended to be sanitised and the historic memories falsified. (143) De Bodard’s description of Galactics who come to Longevity as post-independence tourists is the science-fictional recreation of the situation Logan describes in Hanoi, where ‘joint venture investments in tourist hotels’ provide French businesses with a source of long-term profit by binding France to the burgeoning Vietnamese tourist economy. In post-war Longevity, the station becomes again ‘a tidy source of profit’ for the Galactics, who occupy the station economically even during peace time. Therefore, while Longevity no longer officially belongs to the Galactics, it is clear that the Galactics have not entirely relinquished their colonial claim to the space station. The arbitrary lines between ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ become increasingly difficult to distinguish as the reader discovers the extent to which the Galactics still exploit the country economically through tourism, while also occupying its synthetic terrain with Immerser-mediated visions of a transformed cityscape. This means that the delegation of Galactic holidaymakers ‘disgorged’ from spaceships onto Longevity’s synthetic shores no longer require ammunition to take control of the space station: instead, a high-tech guidebook, 3D avatar, and live translation device packaged into one piece of wearable technology—the Immerser—allows the Galactics to maintain indirect control. The Immerser is primarily used to facilitate Galactic tourists’ communication with the Longevity populace. The narrative depicts Galactics haggling with Longevity’s transport workers in the local dialect, Rong, and ‘pausing to admire the suggested highlights for a second or so before moving on’ (de Bodard 2012b) when the device signals a building or a space as an attraction. Mediated by an apparatus which has been created and controlled by the Galactics, its wearers can only engage in a superficial interaction with carefully curated real-imaginary spaces. I read these spaces as figurations of the ‘sanitised’ and ‘falsified’ cityscape of Hanoi, as described by Logan, a highly controlled ideological space wherein ideas of nationhood and cultural supremacy are mapped, stabilised, and reproduced. In de Bodard’s story, this process of remodelling or world-building, in which real and imaginary space converge, relies on the performative power of the Immerser. The material form of this seemingly benign piece of technology disguises the Galactics’s ongoing colonial endeavours beneath a veneer of scientific neutrality. The avatars which enrobe the Immerser’s users do not merely mediate their interactions with the world, but in fact transform their embodied experience of the spaces around them. If for Stiegler the technical

Imperialism’s Performative Technologies 143 object is ‘the interface through which the human qua living matter enters into relation with the milieu’ (1998, 49), then it is the performative nature of the Immerser that prompts a particular experience of the materiality of the urban environment. When worn by Galactics in the capacity of a hightech audio guide, the wearer becomes responsive to particular elements of the Longevity cityscape with which they can subsequently interact as part of a predetermined routine. In a scene redolent of immersive theatre, the Galactics ‘pause’ to admire cultural hotspots before performing a satisfying haggle with local traders who are well acquainted with this daily charade. Avoiding any meaningful engagement with local custom, the day visitors take an abridged route through Longevity’s infrastructure, communicating only with selected citizens and eating at predetermined restaurants with adapted tourist menus. Quy reads the scene which unfolds before her as demonstrative of the commodification of the landscape into a compact and carefully arranged collection of ‘visit-able’ artefacts, an idealised and augmented representation of what the station has to offer. She also notes that the museumification of Longevity has resulted in the extraction of the country’s key monuments from their socio-historical context in order for them to be remodelled into artefacts fit for tourist consumption. The passage subsequently attests to the performative role of the Immerser in distorting Longevity’s cultural heritage, a phenomenon which corroborates historical readings of how real-world Vietnam had its cultural heritage falsified in a series of tourist-friendly modifications.4 ‘Immersion’ expresses this phenomenon in its descriptions of how the Immerser flags particular artefacts to users as noteworthy, a process which also contributes to the production of racial difference. The Immerser asks the Galactic tourist to navigate a series of ‘curious’ Longevity customs and encounters. These objects and experiences materialise through the assemblage of human, machine, and local environment configured by the Immerser, which marks and transforms both the user’s person and the world they inhabit. The Immerser’s performative capacity therefore derives from its ability to create the racialised bodies and spaces that it names. In doing so, it simultaneously actualises a damaging ideological reality and forecloses practices and modes of being which might weaken Galactic hegemony. The triptych of machine, human, and environment succeeds in constructing a strategic cartography of race and Empire in what is purportedly a postcolonial epoch. Through a series of commands inscribed into the code through which the device operates, the local topography enters into a field of intelligibility within which it is perceived by the tourist as quaintly archaic. Longevity’s rich and complex history is obscured as it disappears behind the Immerser’s contorted cityscape. The user’s interaction with their environs via the Immerser fashions a cosmeticised, simplified version of the space station. In this redaction of Longevity, the user’s attention is drawn away from spaces which might expose negative aspects of the recent colonial past and oriented instead

144  E. Drage towards monuments which express nostalgia for Galactic rule. Complicit in the iterative routine of Longevity tourism, the Immerser performatively reproduces Longevity as a colonial playground of resources and recreational activities. The mediated spaces it produces also sustain notions of Galactic sociocultural superiority: by signalling that tourist hotels are more comfortable and modern than local inns, the Immerser configures Galactics as an elite class with superior expectations of comfort. Galactic culture, therefore, remains the standard to which Longevity must conform. By the same logic, Galactic users need not modify themselves to enjoy their time on Longevity. A low-intensity setting is sufficient to meet the needs of Galactic holidaymakers: conversing with the locals in imperfect Rong while retaining their own Galactic gestures and appearance. However, the Immerser’s highest setting and the medium intensity ‘factory setting’ are targeted at Longevity users who want to assume—and are encouraged to imitate—the behavioural characteristics and appearance of Galactics. That Longevity people who use the device to communicate with Galactics must operate it on a higher setting, suggests that, firstly, Longevity people experience greater difficulty in conforming to Galactic norms than Galactics do in making themselves understood to Longevity people, and, secondly, that they must make more effort to emulate Galactics than Galactics should make to conform to Longevity norms and traditions. Additionally, the implication that Galactics can appropriately and adequately communicate with Longevity people with relatively little input from the Immerser, which only need operate at a low intensity, also suggests that Galactics have fashioned themselves as the invisible universal standard bearers who can assume any face, voice, and role. This phenomenon evokes what has historically been the dominant presumption that ‘white’ actors can play ‘Black’ roles, while the opposite is not possible on the basis that it would deny the performance verisimilitude. Amanda Penlington has examined this fabrication in the context of productions of Shakespeare’s works, in which she adduces that, as a general rule, ‘productions present the dominant discourse of middle-class white English experience (as typified in the predominance of RP accents) as universal’ (2013, 183). By this logic, an actor whose profile differs from the universalised white subject would not produce a plausible or historically accurate portrayal. History, with a capital ‘H’, allows white faces to masquerade as other nationalities, while preventing the inverse, a position that has been staunchly defended by the European philosophical tradition. In his analysis of Hegel’s conception of the relationship between History and universality, Lewis R. Gordon notes that ‘white people are universal, it is said, and Black people are not’ (1999, 34). In the universe of de Bodard’s displaced ex-colony, the Galactic body represents the universal, while the Longevity body is the particular, that which cannot pretend universality. Operated in this capacity, the Immerser is visible as a network of powerful discursive citational forces which concretise and reify racial assumptions that approve and uphold the Galactics’s privileged ontological position.

Imperialism’s Performative Technologies 145 Mediated by the Immerser, both the Galactic and the Longevity people’s being-in-the world is thus informed by a complex configuration of Galactic ideology, software, wearable technology, and human flesh.5 This performative assemblage forms an interoperable system with a more-than-human materiality. Never a mere tool, the Immerser surpasses instrumentality to actually create the world its users inhabit through a series of performative interventions. This vivifies Stiegler’s contention in Technics and Time 3 that the technical object limits and shapes reality: Contrary to the ideal of pure, classical scientific constativity, the essence of technology as the producer of technoscience and whose purpose is invention, is in fact always performative. Far from describing what is, i.e., the real, technoscientific invention (whose adoption is called ‘invention’ insofar as it brings to light a novelty that transforms being) is the inscription of a possible that always remains excessive to being. (2010, 203–4; emphasis in original) For Stiegler, technology is therefore performative because it transforms the way in which we exist: it is not merely the technical object which is ‘invented’ but the user’s way of being in relation to the object in question. The ontological framework invented by new technology can also limit the user’s agency through a pre-ordained schema of possible ways of being. That technology has a ‘performative structure’ is, for Stiegler, an expression of how the user’s existence is constrained by the citational force of ideology, which informs the operation of technological systems and processes. Two important elements of the above citation from Stiegler’s work denoting technological performativity, ‘the discovery of being’ and the ‘inscription of the possible’, can be elucidated through an analysis of the Immerser’s functionality. In the passage below, Tam and Quy are sitting together in the communal room of the lower floor of the building that contains their family’s restaurant. In this room, where the younger generation of the family gather, Tam attempts to deconstruct and reverse engineer an Immerser. Tam appeals to her sister for help in bringing the device’s reign to an end. She does this by explaining that it operates in synchrony with ideological systems to reify Galactic norms and traditions, surmising that ‘[it] takes existing cultural norms, and puts them into a cohesive, satisfying narrative’ (de Bodard 2012b). Quy, sceptical of the possibility of extracting Galactic hegemony from a technical object, picks up the Immerser and takes a closer look: ‘I’m still not sure what you want to do with it’. Quy put on her Immerser, adjusting the thin metal mesh around her head until it fitted. She winced as the interface synced with her brain. She moved her hands, adjusting some settings lower than the factory ones—darn thing always reset itself to factory, which she suspected was no accident. A shimmering

146  E. Drage lattice surrounded her: her avatar, slowly taking shape around her. She could still see the room—the lattice was only faintly opaque—but ancestors, how she hated the feeling of not quite being there. ‘How do I look?’. (2012b) When attached to its human host, the Immerser facilitates an internalisation and embodiment of social cues. The Longevity user must be obscured, manipulated, and remodelled in order to regain access to social space. It is not race as such which is foregrounded here, but racism, a set of prejudices which have material consequences. Dedicated Longevity users who are physically marked by the device are literally made to embody racist Galactic norms. In this sense, as Christen A. Smith argues in the context of Brazilian racial apartheid, ‘racism is performative; it literally enacts the very conditions it articulates’ (2016, 79). Indeed, the salient process of negative racialisation writes race onto the body, as demonstrated by the material effects of the Immerser’s avatar on Agnes’s flesh. The Immerser therefore makes visible what in reality can only be inferred: that gendered racialisation is performatively produced and materially expressed as a consequence of racist ontologies. If, as Stiegler suggests, the performative capacity of technology lies in its ‘inscription of the possible’, then the Immerser’s performative force also limits the scope of agentic action. The ‘possible’ is inscribed across its system architecture, its script, its servers, and its hardware. This is the ‘cohesive, satisfying narrative’ of which Tam speaks, one which both ‘invents’ the subject’s being-in-the-world and shapes their capacity to make choices in relation to how they want the machine to affect their bodies and how they intend to interact with social space. The Immerser’s performative power, which makes imperialist fantasies a reality, therefore derives from an assemblage of program code, executed by hardware, and a responsive human body. This depiction of the transmission of dominant ideology de-naturalises the comparatively higher social valuation of a particular language, culture, and body. Possible worlds and modes of being as a Longevity subject are not only limited but foreclosed by the influence of dominant Galactic culture. ‘Immersion’ therefore recognises how dominant ideology expressed in technology continues to limit the modes of agentic action available to Longevity peoples, even in an independent ‘postcolonial’ space station. But in its invitation to reflect on which modes of existence are possible and which are inhibited by ideological governance, the Immerser also de-naturalises the value attributed to whiter bodies and to Galactic language and behavioural traits. The Immerser demonstrates that the Galactics’s privileged ontological status is not innate but historically contingent through its framing of this value system within the context of Galactic colonial rule. The Immerser, therefore, offers a way of not only conceptualising how the possible is inscribed into Longevity spaces and bodies, but also of objecting to and re-constellating world-building

Imperialism’s Performative Technologies 147 processes which have crystalised into the situation in Longevity. In this way, the short story’s depiction of the device can help readers make sense of how technological invention, as Stiegler argues, is actively transformative, creating and shaping humanity’s being-in-the-world. The Immerser is performative in the sense that the human and the machine are transformed through one another as they develop new ontological thresholds. Its capacity to create the world, which is also evocative of SF’s world-building capabilities, is the product of a series of performative inscriptions marked by the device onto both the user’s body and the Longevity urbanity. The Immerser’s ability to slimline all aspects of a culture within the system architecture attests to the way in which software development processes foster a particular relationship between exclusion, control, and replicability in order to abridge and unify discrete components and subcomponents of a system. Frabetti has explored this aspect of software development—that is, how software must be ‘controlled’ in order to make any given system as predictable and therefore reliable as possible, in her analysis of ‘linearisation’ or stabilisation processes (2015, xxv). She details how software is only able to effectively replicate or ‘iterate’ when code can be ‘linearised’, by developing the notion of ‘linearisation’ proposed by André Leroi-Gourhan and elaborated in the work of Jacques Derrida. As a system engineer, de Bodard would be familiar with how product designers and engineers decide at what point a system should be stabilised, and therefore what constitutes correct functionality, so that it can be replicated and reproduced. In the case of the Immerser, the device must not be changed from factory settings if it is to function properly: the user cannot introduce new features or make the software deviate from the product description, otherwise it will no longer be reproducing Galactic norms. Indeed, deviations made by the user to the software in the form of modifications and customisations are repeatedly eradicated when the Immerser ‘restore[s] itself to factory [settings]’ (de Bodard 2012b). Tam’s insight into the functionality of the device demonstrates that the Immerser is programmed to make the user conform to its own operational standards by continuously directing the device’s use back to its intended performative function: the transmission and facilitation of Galactic ideological governance. This performative capability literally ‘restores’ the user to the original system state in accordance with the manufacturer’s settings by erasing the user’s personalisation of the way in which the device operates. If the manufacturer’s settings are programmed according to a set of performatives which correspond to Galactic principles, then the Immerser’s unflinching maintenance of factory settings will likely result in the incremental destruction of Longevity customs, mannerisms, and language. The technological performatives issued by the Immerser as it changes the physical aspect, mannerisms, and language of its users therefore provide a useful fictional image with which to narrate how racial and gender norms materialise in bodies. Longevity users are not

148  E. Drage merely surfaces upon which racist assumptions are projected: the Immerser physically marks them, as it directs their interactions with the social space. So far, I have attempted to delineate the racial context within which the Immerser’s performative processes take place. I will now extend my analysis of both the materiality of the software’s performative injunctions and the sexist and racist material effects it produces by turning back to Agnes, who wears the Immerser as a permanent prosthesis rather than as an occasional guide. The reader discovers Agnes’s dependency on the device during one of her interior monologues, which is partially overwritten by the instructions programmed into the Immerser’s source code: It’s people like you who have to work the hardest to adjust, because so much about you draws attention to itself—the stretched eyes that crinkle in the shape of moths, the darker skin, the smaller, squatter shape more reminiscent of jackfruits than swaying fronds. But no matter: you can be made perfect; you can put on the Immerser and become someone else, someone pale-skinned and tall and beautiful. (de Bodard 2012b) The immense translucent avatar around Agnes’s body has not only effaced her natural skin but ‘enfolded’ it within ‘a thick layer of avatar, so dense and so complex that she couldn’t even guess at the body hidden within’ (2012b). Bound to her Immerser, Agnes epitomises technology’s performative functionality in how she responds to the device’s commands as if reading from a script. In doing so, she allows the device to materially inscribe Galactic perceptions of race and gender onto her body. It tells her that she can transform herself to meet Galactic standards, that it is possible to modify her gestures, actions, and behaviour in order to appear more Galactic. Agnes submits to the device’s performative injunctions to become ‘paleskinned and tall and beautiful’, the expression of idealised Galactic racial and gender phenotypes. Agnes’s skin lightens, her body narrows, and her eyes thicken. When she syncs with the Immerser, she takes on the features attributed to Galactic beauty. This process evokes contemporary datadriven facial beauty modelling, as detailed by David Zhang, Fangmei Chen, and Yong Xu in Computer Models for Facial Beauty Analysis (2016), for example, in the way in which machine learning algorithms can be applied to facial beauty analysis to create computational models of facial beauty. These models correspond to rules of beauty defined in ratio form according to traditional Western models—such as the golden ratio, the perfectly symmetrical geometrical form first studied in Ancient Greece and later described by seventeenth-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler as ‘a precious jewel’—which then produce data sets that are used to score the beauty of individual faces (Boyer 1968, 55; Zhang, Chen, and Xu 2016, 8–9). If this application of machine learning becomes compatible with avatar technology and DBS, devices like the Immerser may soon become a

Imperialism’s Performative Technologies 149 reality—that is, technology embedded in human flesh which transforms the bodies of its users through a series of performative injunctions. These technologies would violently and tangibly enact Judith Butler’s suggestion that the body is not merely a site or surface that pre-exists sociocultural norms and values, but rather that power structures are formative of the body’s own materiality. Elaborating on Foucault’s prison analogy through her analysis of how the body is articulated through performative processes, Butler argues in Bodies that Matter that ‘its materialization is therefore coextensive with its investiture with power relations’ (1993, 34). The Immerser constitutes an important figuration with which to think Butler’s diagnosis of the relationship between gender, power, and the body and intercede in technologies which might exacerbate gender and racial discrimination in the future. Reading de Bodard through Butler provides a way of pre-empting, and subsequently providing, the framework with which to resist advanced technology’s aggravation of the processes by which the racialised body materialises through—and is ‘coextensive’ with—power relations. Agnes’s appearance and behaviour are only legible, both to herself and to those who perceive her through the avatar, by way of the racist ontology through which her body comes to matter representationally and materially. We perceive this racism through the marks it applies to Agnes’s body as she takes on the appearance of an idealised Galactic woman. This clarifies an additional contention: the racial body is a product of racist ideologies. As a ‘natural cultural’ phenomenon, to use Donna Haraway’s characterisation, race is constructed through the Immerser by way of racism, which makes Longevity bodies signify as ‘squatter and in every way diminished’ (de Bodard 2012b).6 Racism is therefore encoded into Agnes’s materiality and gives it substance, a substance that is concretised and expressed as ‘race’. The text therefore positions the device as a sociocultural phenomenon that structures the racist Galactic ideology which invests in the production of negatively racialised and gendered Longevity bodies. Its performative force derives from the configuration of human bodies, cultural imperatives, and software code through which it operates: as new media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun notes in the context of systems design, ‘if code is performative, its effectiveness relies on human and machinic rituals’ (2011, 51). Indeed, the Immerser demonstrates that the performative capacity of technology is triggered by a culturally authorised relationship between Galactic ideological governance and technological processes. The ritualised forms of interaction it prompts between itself and the user perpetrate Galactic racial paradigms through a narrow interpretation of race and of femininised beauty. Importantly, the directions issued by the code have a direct impact on the materiality of Agnes’s embodiment. Discussing N. Katherine Hayles’s work on software, performativity, and materiality, Frabetti notes that ‘while performative language causes changes “only” in the mind and behavior of people, code always has a very particular involvement with

150  E. Drage materiality, since “it causes things to happen, which requires that it be executed as commands the machine can run”’ (Hayles in Frabetti 2015, 45). In other words, for Hayles, the materiality of code is more straightforward than the materiality of performative utterances. What Frabetti surmises from Hayles’s analysis of how code is performative—that the material effects that software code has on the functionality of a device are perceptibly ‘material’—is acutely apparent in how Agnes’s body responds to its contact with the Immerser. As I have argued above, the performative language of the software script directs the Immerser’s hardware to perform in a certain way, prompting a dramatic transformation of Agnes’s physical form and intellectual capacity. The discursive coding of software both develops and regulates, or in Barad’s terms ‘constrains and enables’ (2003, 819), what Agnes can do and say. It is the performative interrelation of software, machinery, and human that triggers Agnes’s transformation into a Galactic-looking and sounding person which offers such a vivid expression of the body as a performative process. The iterative practices by which Agnes changes her appearance and mindset are revealed to the reader in broken narrative fragments. In one section, Agnes recalls the first time she turned up the Immerser to maximum settings following a social event with her husband and his Galactic friends which left her feeling both physically and intellectually inferior. She remembers the days that followed, ‘And then. . . and then you walked with it and slept with it, and showed the world nothing but the avatar it had designed—saw nothing it hadn’t tagged and labelled for you’ (de Bodard 2012b). From the moment when the device became her permanent prosthesis, the Immerser began to curate and signpost her world. With a blinkered view of reality, Agnes sees only what the Immerser intends for her to see, speaks only on cue, and moves only as directed. She follows a predefined script stripped of all spontaneity and openness, which reduces what it means to be Galactic to a set of technologised norms. The imperatives issued by the Immerser can be read as performative processes of social mattering that are made operable through the algorithmic codification of social values into an organised and replicable software script. These instructions are then enacted through the synthesis of ‘metals and optical parts’, flesh, and human synapses (de Bodard 2012b). Not merely prompted by but existing synchronously with the Immerser’s carefully strategised engineering, Agnes is at one with a technical object which constantly recalibrates her behaviour. For Agnes, this means that her body, gestures, and expression now bend to the will of Galactic ideology.

De-Colonising Technology: Dissection and Dissension By the same logic that states that the technical object is the nexus of institutional and social processes, exposing how the Immerser functions by emphasising the inextricability of society and technology can also be an

Imperialism’s Performative Technologies 151 act of dissension. To explore this in further detail, I return to the scene where Tam and Quy dissect an Immerser in order to better understand how the device supports ongoing Galactic colonial activity in Longevity. In deconstructing and reconfiguring the wearable, they aim to better understand how race, culture, and technology are engineered into a device that contributes to Galactic imperialistic enterprises. This would be the first step to overcoming Longevity people’s dependence on and trust in Galactic technology. I will close this chapter by providing an account of how this scene evokes Karen Barad’s ‘posthumanist account of performativity’ in its exposal of the specific entanglements of matter that make certain technologies performative (2003, 818). Barad’s work can elucidate why the Immerser’s assemblage of technical, human, and discursive components lends it an unparalleled power to bring racialised and gendered bodies into being, and how this knowledge can contribute to its demise and disuse. At the end of the story, Agnes discovers the two sisters dismembering the Immerser in order to better understand how it functions: In that one moment—staring at each other, suspended in time—you see the guts of Galactic machines spread on the table. You see the mass of tools; the dismantled machines; and the Immerser, half spread-out before them, its two halves open like a cracked egg. And you understand that they’ve been trying to open them and reverse-engineer them; and you know that they’ll never, ever succeed. Not because of the safeguards, of the Galactic encryptions to preserve their fabled intellectual property; but rather, because of something far more fundamental. . . . It takes a Galactic to believe that you can take a whole culture and reduce it to algorithms; that language and customs can be boiled to just a simple set of rules. (de Bodard 2012b) Agnes notes how technology overwrites the expansiveness and heterogeneity of culture, with its reductive package of rules that encapsulate the desires of the Galactic elite. These prerogatives are then embedded and performatively produced through the Immerser’s specific configuration of hardware, algorithm, and flesh. It is this entanglement with Galactic culture that makes it impossible to disable the device or change the way in which it operates without also negotiating the cultural norms inscribed into the design of its hardware and software. Barad’s formulation of a theory of performativity that accounts for the agency of human and non-human matter can elucidate the problem of the inextricability of culture, technology, and humanity of which the Immerser is comprised. Barad, who aims to ‘sharpen the theoretical tool of performativity for science studies and feminist and queer theory endeavors alike’, argues that a ‘specifically Posthumanist account of performativity . . . incorporates important material and discursive, social and scientific, human and nonhuman and natural and cultural

152  E. Drage factors’ (2003, 88). For her, theories of performativity which stem from the work of philosophers of language such as JL Austin pay insufficient attention to the materiality of discursive practices. In the passage above, the dismantled machine’s brute materiality—the personified ‘guts’ of its hardware, splayed open on the sisters’ worktable—pays homage to the intimacy of the relationship between humanity and a purportedly inanimate tool.7 These systems are not comprised of mere software—safeguards and encryptions—but of interacting elements that attest to the interdependence of code and culture. Dominant ideology is the fundamental element of the Immerser’s functionality, as identified by Agnes, and it is concealed within the assembled component parts. Ideology is developed and maintained through Agnes’s body, which ultimately materialises as a racist and sexist phenomenon arising from a specific set of material-discursive interactions and performative practices between the ‘human’ and the ‘non-human’. These complex processes are acutely apparent in advanced technologies which, in creating new forms of racialised and gendered embodiment, take applications of theories of performativity to their logical extreme. Tam and Quy’s careful deconstruction of the Immerser’s almost impenetrable hold on Longevity users can be a lesson for technology innovators, developers, and researchers today: technology carries information about how the world should be and how its users should behave, and this information is the subjective formulation of its creators. The narrative teaches us to be wary of which values and cultures are communicated and created through the texts we build and source. Further, the Immerser demonstrates how a single technology can be designed to be operated and deployed differently depending on the user group, potentially supporting the dominance of one demographic while putting another at a disadvantage. Technologies like the Immerser are more than mere tools: their performative injunctions are both world-building and world-shattering. De Bodard’s critique of France’s cultural and economic hold over postindependence Vietnam offers an astutely nuanced depiction of the way in which race and gender are performed through state-funded technological apparatuses. Technology which operates on racist and sexist assumptions physically marks its users as racialised and gendered subjects. The Immerser directs Agnes’s thoughts, coordinates her physical movements, and re-forms her physical features so that she presents herself as a Galactic woman. Ultimately, Agnes is absorbed by the pervasive whiteness to which she feels pressure to conform. The Immerser exposes the complexity of the performative practices which enact gender and racial categories and effectively demonstrates how these processes can be exacerbated by advanced technology. In this tale of technology and colonial power, the iteration and concretisation of norms through the widespread use of a wearable tech device clearly results in the production of racialised and gendered bodies that are physically marked as inferior to their Galactic counterparts. Read alongside ‘Immersion’, the work of Stiegler, Frabetti, and Barad makes

Imperialism’s Performative Technologies 153 Butler’s formulation of the performative construction of gendered subjectivity a useful tool with which to identify performative practices which create and sediment race and gender via technological systems. Science fictional narrativisations of performative technological artefacts like the Immerser, therefore, re-constellate our understanding of how the colonial lexical field, in particular, might interact with future technologies in order to intimately infect and affect bodies with racial and gender ideology. As the fictional offspring of nascent technology, from DBS to 3D avatars, the Immerser locates race and gender as ideological processes exacerbated by technology. It makes visible the often-imperceptible processes which transform racist ideology into negatively racialised techno-human assemblages. The story subsequently emphasises that making racial and gender performatives visible is an essential pre-requisite for the resistance of race and gender norms. Understanding how the Immerser is performative is the first step in Tam and Quy’s efforts to thwart its seemingly immutable control: by taking the Immerser apart, they are able to make the device legible as a series of variable, relational, and performative materialisations. Like Tam and Quy’s anarchic reverse engineering, the analysis of technology as a performative medium through which race and gender materialise as bodies elucidates how sexism and racism are sustained in nascent technologies. In order to intervene in the development of racist and sexist technology, it is crucial to intercept the performatives which construct technology users according to the assumptions of dominant ideology. In their deconstruction of the Immerser, Tam and Quy invite fellow engineers and activists to consider how the performative power of imperialist wearable technology makes it a particularly potent colonial tool. We must not only track and trace the development of new technologies which contribute to the embodiment of racist and sexist values, but also invest in commercially viable alternatives which imaginatively reconfigure and completely upend hegemonic and imperialist systems of race and gender.

Notes 1. See Rowe (2018). 2. See, for example, Luokkala (2013) and Idema (2018). 3. See, for example, Stiegler’s theorisation of the mutual co-constitution of humanity and technology through his analysis of the concepts of ‘epiphylogenesis’—the externalisation of memory in technical objects—and ‘original technicity’, humanity as a fundamentally technical life form (Stiegler 1998). For an elaboration of these concepts in relation to the work of Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, and more detail on technical processes, see Frabetti (2015). 4. For further analysis of the falsification of Vietnamese cultural heritage and historical environment through tourism-related modifications and additions to social spaces, see Logan (2000, 143, 232). 5. Stiegler draws from Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘Dasein’ or ‘being-in-theworld’, as introduced in Being and Time (1927/1962).

154  E. Drage 6. For critical race theorists who also propose that race is a product of racism, and not vice versa, see for example Ruth Benedict (1940), Robert Miles (1982), Henry Louis Gates (1994), and Paul Gilroy (2000). 7. See Jane Bennett (2009) for an analysis of how posthumanist theory conceptualises the agency of purportedly ‘inanimate’ matter and its processes.

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Imperialism’s Performative Technologies 155 Heidegger, Martin. [1927] 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Norwich: S.C.M. Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/ CBO9780511808036 Idema, Tom. 2018. Stages of Transmutation: Science Fiction, Biology and Environmental Posthumanism. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge. https://doi. org/10.4324/9781315225470 Logan, William Stewart. 2000. Hanoi: Biography of a City. Randwick: UNSW Press. Luokkala, Barry B. 2013. Exploring Science through Science Fiction. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7891-1 Miles, Robert. 1982. Racism and Migrant Labour: A Critical Text. London: Routledge. Penlington, Amanda. 2013. ‘“Not a Man from England”: Assimilating the Exotic “Other” through Performance, from Henry IV to Henry VI’. In This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard, edited by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton and Willy Maley, 165–83. Farnham: Ashgate. https://doi. org/10.4324/9781315551081 Rowe, Adam. 2018. ‘Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Sales Have Doubled since 2010’. Forbes, June 19. https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamrowe1/2018/06/19/ science-fiction-and-fantasy-book-sales-have-doubled-since-2010/?sh= 4d0b04a52edf Stiegler, Bernard. [1994] 1998. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford UP. . 2010. Technics and Time 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford: Stanford UP. Smith, Christen A. 2016. Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil. Champaign: Illinois UP. Zhang, David, Fangmei Chen, and Yong Xu. 2016. Computer Models for Facial Beauty Analysis. Berlin: Springer.

10 FIGURES OF A GENDER NOW UPON US THE TRANSFEMININE IN CONTEMPORARY QUEER FICTION FROM THE PHILIPPINES Jaya Jacobo Introduction In this chapter, I study how the transfeminine emerges in Filipinx fiction at the intersections of the vernacular, the colonial, the modern, and the contemporary.1 In order to do so, I focus on the binabayi (‘the transfeminine’), tracing her emergence in language, from vernacular thought to colonial lexicography to contemporary fiction. First, I articulate her subjectivity in three moments: (a) a phenomenology of Filipinx vernacular consciousness through the concept of loób (‘inside’); (b) the choreography of performance that makes embodiment possible and proceeds from it through the concept of palabás (‘orientation outward’); and (c) and the critique that trans discourse can offer through a deconstruction of the inside and the outside. Second, I consider the situatedness of femininity in Filipinx language through a decolonial reading of the grammar of imperial gender that haunts the post-colony as instantiated in its vocabulary of identities. I argue that this is where the binabayi becomes the transfeminine. Finally, I close read an assemblage of contemporary Filipinx fiction: Vincent Empimano’s ‘Utoy’ (‘Little Boy’), Joe Henry B. Teñido’s ‘Taya’ (‘It’), Andrew Estacio’s ‘Dibuhong Martir’ (‘Portrait Martyr’), and Carlo Paulo Pacolor’s ‘Ang Natatanging Lamyos ng mga Bakla’ (‘The Incredible Tenderness of Faggots’). These short stories were written for, discussed, and revised within two queer workshops across two years: a national workshop in the University of the Philippines Diliman and a community workshop in YMCA San Pablo, in Laguna, a province south of the national capital.2 Together, in these four narratives young queer and nonbinary writers imagine not only the modern self, but also the modes in which the transfeminine becomes contemporary— that is, one with time itself, and even ahead of it.

From Phenomenology to Performance: The Emergence of Transness We may begin a foray into Filipinx phenomenology through an understanding of the vernacular modes which render the inside and the outside visible. These notions of space illumine the complex binarism between the DOI: 10.4324/9781003162759-13

Figures of a Gender Now upon Us 157 body and the spirit which is at the heart of the trans conundrum and propose a grounded approach to addressing misalignment and affirmation. In Filipino language, interiority and exteriority are signified by the terms loób and labás. Philosopher Albert E. Alejo describes interiority through a tropology of the loób:3 The word loób instantaneously echoes an image of a kind of space that has one part concealed and another exposed. Our forebears might have first used the said category in their economic exchanges. They uttered loób in order to name the interior of a piece of earth that their hands were moulding into a jar, while the thumb was in the exposed part and the other fingers were in front of that which was pressing from the inside. And slowly, the inside and the outside of the jar were formed at the same time. (1990, 69) Alejo instructs us on an understanding of the loób that encloses the figure within a worldly arrangement where an object is crafted from things within nature or made from one’s surroundings. This enables us to describe the object concretising itself from anyó (‘form’), immanent and yet still unvariegated, into hugís (‘shape’), indexed alongside senses of symmetry, and yarî (‘make’), gathered in an array of material. This world transfigures the interior into an infinity—the loób, enclosure, into kaloóban, interiority. Furthermore, a container is conjured, and yet it is not only containment that is created in the extension of metaphor. What is generated is a procedure that delineates an act of making: a poetics. It is in the trope of loób where the architecture of interiority is built upon and what emanates from hereon is an infinitesimal possibility towards the labás, a space of externity, where further phases of autogenesis can originate. In order to comprehend that turn from inside to outside, the Filipino art historian and curator Patrick D. Flores proposes that we look at palabás: It speaks of an outward thrust from an interior, and so is both inclination and intimation (saloóbin). There is a deliberate agency at work in a gesture of performance or the process of making something appear and making it appear in a particular way (papalabásin or pinapalabás . . . It is theatre and it involves acting, diversion, pedagogy. It is (dis)guise and it is manifestation. It is a matter of conjuring, tricking the eye, catching the feeling, concealing the device of drama. And because it is tactical, it is also corruptive: semblance is always elusive. (2008, 8) Note that it is not labás, the outside that is referred to, but an action towards it, palabás. The choreography begins with action intuited from within an edifice; the ‘outward thrust’ is a momentous gesture indicating a disposition at the cusp between repose and motion. One decides to take leave from a chamber where one has introspected the exit. Since the gesture

158  J. Jacobo is motivated from an inner sanctum, the intent clarifies its direction as only the outside. From here, one is entitled to an account of the visible and offered the conditions to perceiving it. The visible exceeds itself either to intimate the real or disavow theatre altogether. This is where one gives spectacle an opportunity to scintillate from both possibilities and where palabás sheds light on the other vernacular terms for performance: dulâ (theatre itself); tanghál (‘to perform’, but also ‘to raise’); and daós (‘to make an event happen’, as well as ‘to feel a release from it’). If loób conjures a place where the self may be incepted and from where they can perceive the world, palabás demonstrates the gesture where thought intends to proceed into the field and participate in its mess. And yet one should not confine oneself to treating the loób as intentionality and palabás as activity, for both concepts refer to more complex gradations of consciousness; they constitute the instructive coordinates where origination and dissemination meld as they are delineated, while the artifice behind the structure and the movement are made immanent. Alejo conceptualises structure from sculpture—that is, from the perspective of a crafted object; Flores imagines movement from architecture, which delineates between places around a built environment. Upon this conjuncture, one may emerge as confident as they can be, orienting themself from one point to another in a non-self-same manner. Their trajectory is not from loób to labás, from the inside to the outside, or from paloób to palabás, from an orientation inward to an orientation outward, but from loób to palabás, from inside to outward. Not between two locations, nor two intentionalities, but between one location and an act of leave-taking from it. In dialogue with Sarah Ahmed’s queer phenomenology that positions the relation between the subject and the object between orientation and disorientation and the possibilities of encounter that may emerge in this dynamic (2006), the pedagogy of performance that is enacted from this phenomenology can only be trans in its movement towards objects out of place rather than well situated and through a thinking that does not follow linear mentalities and the cis attitudes which proceed from them. This relation between loób and palabás disrupts the binary discourse between the inside and the outside, and ultimately between consciousness and embodiment. Rather than situate its emergence as a recognition of misalignment between mind and flesh, the trans personhood that may be premised from this choreography articulates itself through a route of freedom and a method of affirmation. The inside and the outside may seem incoherent, but this shift from source or site to the repertoire of performative possibilities entitles the emergent figure to engender themself as transfeminine, in a procedure that unfolds and articulates her becoming woman. The incongruence between phenomenon and perception is not denied, but one is not fixated on the interruptions that such a disjuncture can cause. Rather, what is allowed is a recognition of contiguity. The community may

Figures of a Gender Now upon Us 159 react to this emergence violently, effecting in the transfeminine, who is merely dismissed as an enfant terrible, what Susan Stryker articulates as ‘transgender rage’, an affect that ‘originates in recognition of the fact that the “outsideness” of a materiality that perpetually violates the foreclosure of subjective space within a symbolic order is also necessarily “inside” the subject as grounds for the materialization of its body and the formation of its bodily ego’ (2006, 253), but the transfemininity that emerges from this performance of a pride from within instructs us on the possibilities within language where the feminine herself can speak beyond the binary.

Binabayi, the Gender Now upon Us In this section, I cite chronicles and close read dictionaries from three centuries of the Spanish colonial period as well as the first decade of the American empire in the Philippines, in order to trace how signifiers of woman and womanhood have structured modes of becoming female and feminine, as well as their interdictions. Reading against the grain of what can be called the grammar of imperial gender, one derived from its vocabulary of identities, I approach these sources from the framework of feminist philology. Between vernacular and Spanish words, my Anglophone analytic can only emphasise the role of translation in recuperating a postcolonial feminist narrative through contemporary critique. Pedro Serrano-Laktaw’s (1914) Diccionario Tagalog Hispano identifies babayi with mujer (‘woman’) and hembra (‘female’), but then defines ang tanang babayi (‘womanhood’), as el bello sexo and sexo femenino (‘the fair and feminine sex’). The entry classifies things related to woman as náuuukol sa babayi as mujeriego (‘womaniser’) and mujeril (‘womanly’). Womanhood, pagkababayi, however is attached to an essence, virginidad or pudor (‘virginity or modesty’). One is exhorted: Ingatan mo ang iyong pagkababayi, guarda tu virginidad ó pudor (‘Protect your chasteness’). With this focus on being pure, a woman can be beata (‘blessed’), if her heart is with the Lord, and when her life is offered in prayer, May loób sa Dios ó marásalin. If she does not enter the convent, she is expected to become an asawa (‘wife’), fulfil the duties of the woman of the house, as señora (‘wife’) or matrona (‘matriarch’), and run it well, masínop at marúnong mamáhay, as mujer hacendosa (‘industrious woman’). Her youth can only be precarious as doncella (‘virgin’), because she hasn’t known a man yet, hindi pa nakákikilalang lalaki. Once a man woos her, liníligawan, she moves on into being a novia (‘a fiancée or a bride’). A woman can only be fulfilled in marriage, one is told. Babayi can be maliksí at matalino (‘swift and smart’) or be buhay ang loób at maliksí (‘vibrant and swift’). As babayisot, she can be a woman larger than life, mujerota (‘big woman’) or mujeraza (‘shrew’), but whenever a woman asserts her singularity, such gesture is seen as capalalóan (‘excess’). She is typified as coqueta, one who insists on seducing various

160  J. Jacobo men, nagpipilit makahalina ang maraming lalaki, and who is not content with one love, di mapaisa ang pagibig. Her erotic potency is only seen as sexual licence. The woman is wayward, talipandás, when she is eloquent, masalitâ, and acting as if she’s a genius, mapagdunongdunongan. It is reiterated: her sex is weak, sexo débil, and she cannot defy its limits. The gaze is fixed upon her body. She is a mujerona, if she is not petite, malaki ang pangangatawán at mataas. And if her stature is too much—that is, resembling a man’s, tila lalaki, she is called a marimacho, a pejorative term still used in the present to refer to lesbians. Without a sense of hygiene or style, she is abject, compared to a female pig, a lechona, because there is a comportment that women must take, sakay babayi, when riding a horse or a carriage: sentadillas, á sentadillas, á mujeriegas. When an assigned male at birth embodies such comportment, however, and acts like a woman, parang babayi, he is a coward and his heart is weak like a woman, duag o mahinang loób na parang babayi. He is a marica or a maricón, a binabayi. Furthermore, the term includes those whose form is feminine but exhibiting masculine attitude (babaying anyó at ugaling lalaki) and intersex people (hermafrodita). The binabayi is also called babayinín: possessing the habits, form, and countenance of a woman, may asal, anyó at pagmumukhang babayi. They are called effeminate: adamado, afeminado, amujerado. We can analyse the kind of violence that the colonial lexicon does to the feminine, particularly to what emerges as trans from within its discourse, in terms of what Alex Alvina Chamberland calls ‘femi-negativity’ and ‘trans-misogyny’ (2016, 109), optics of discrimination which target transfeminine bodies stemming from the inherent misogyny of cisheteropatriarchal language. Because women are relegated to the spaces of the home and the convent, any form of nonconformity or deviance from this set of gender expectations are seen as femi-negative. This includes hyperfeminine assertions of knowledge and desire, performances of masculinity within womanhood, feminine behaviours and intersex conditions among maleassigned bodies. Paradoxically, this femi-negative condescension on woman produces the binabayi as a form of waywardness within Filipinx femininity itself. The binabayi is not only as feminine as babayi, but also as objectionable as her deployments of femininity itself. Her autonomy from colonial gender roles is seen as inauspicious, just like womanhood outside the family and religion. What cisheteropatriarchal discourse misses here is that it is along this path of waywardness that the female discovers herself becoming more feminine: the babayi finding herself in solidarity with the binabayi. With the binabayi as a form of wayward womanhood, I would like to present a counterpoint through the bakla,4 in order to propose a genealogy of how transfemininity has been constituted as dangerous in Tagalog discourse. In contemporary terms, the bakla represents an assigned male at birth who identifies as female and presents herself as feminine;5 although not always synchronous with global GTQ language, the term may also

Figures of a Gender Now upon Us 161 embrace homosexual male, transgender female, queer and nonbinary identities across the Philippine archipelago. In a sense, bakla serves as a vernacular for gender diversity inasmuch as it also becomes a crux of genderbased violence precisely at its presentation of femininity. The ensuing discussion concentrates on the transfeminine imbrications of the bakla. In Pedro de San Buenaventura’s 1613 Vocabulario, bacla is a word expressed in confidence to someone to persuade them to do something.6 Nagbabacla is a rhetorical act that translates into ‘persuader’ (‘to convince’); binabacla is language wielding its sleight of hand to change one’s mind, to convince, but through an act of deceit, perhaps a form of magic akin to engañar (‘to trick’). Domingo de los Santos’s 1794 Vocabulario follows through on the risks of enchantment as the bakla in this century is recorded as inquietud (‘a restlessness of spirit’). The lexicographer cites the following sentences to teach us how bacla operates grammatically: ‘Anong iqynababaclamo?’ (‘Why are you restless?’); ‘Houag mo siyang babaclahin!’ (‘Do not make the other restless’). In these instances, bacla indexes a feeling of uncertainty or a moment of weakness. At the same time, bacla in the same text refers to a scratch, a wound, or a sense of hurt (desolladura). Once inviolate, the person is now vulnerable. With soul and body pried open, they are exposed to danger, to further seduction. In contemporary Spanish, desolladura refers to a deep wound felt by the body or the spirit, as well as to the act of removing one’s skin, the latter prefiguring in profound terms the sense of exposure transgender discourse plots out to affirm the person freeing oneself from the wound of misassignment. Juan de Noceda and Pedro de Sanlucar’s 1860 Vocabulario offers us a set of concepts which bring the bakla to embody a range of sentiments for the turn of the century in colonial Philippines.7 Enlabiar (‘to seduce’) signifies the bakla entering discourse, and her tactic is coupled with engañar (‘to deceive’), through lustre (‘prominence’) or hermosura (‘beauty’). A notion of bakla as device of persuasion is elaborated further as moverse por algún interés o provecho (‘to be inspired according to a motive or a sense of benefit’). At the same time, the bakla signifies trauma anew, through desollarse (‘to wound, or to make one vulnerable’). Now the persuaded person is moved to action, but they also hesitate: to be nababacla is ‘to be fearful of a new thing’, espanto de cosa nueva. The lexicon is most significant in marking out the emergence of alteración (‘change’) in the matrix of possibilities that the bakla can enable; consequently, such instance might as well be our overture to the binabayi in her transgender turn. The figure is able to change, in spite of a fear towards her, and because of her capacity to enchant, deceive, inspire, and even subject one to trouble. She is an index of perplexity and restlessness precisely at the moment of performing transformation. We must note, however, that in these instances, the bakla, as a methodology of seduction, trauma, and change, is paradoxically assembled to construct a contiguity of the cisheterosexual male consciousness that engenders her as such, not as an identity

162  J. Jacobo that is able to dictate in the terms of recognition, but as a set of feelings that must be dictated upon. Such a consciousness does not allow itself to be changed, to be overcome, like when one is involved in a dynamic exchange. In circumscribing itself in discourse through bakla affect, the male gaze commands the binabayi not to queer him, warning her that he cannot be seduced by her transfeminine emergence. Historically, one may ground these figures of the transfeminine in binabayi and the queer in bakla through the asog or bayog, terms referring to a trans priestress. According to historian Zeus Salazar (1999), the indigenous world in the Philippines viewed persons through the roles they performed in the community. In other words, being a woman or a man was a matter of occupation. Communities were run by the datu (‘chieftain’), the panday (‘swordsmith’), and the babaylan (‘priestess’). The babaylan (in some accounts baylan, katalonan, daetan, anitera) was associated with babayi, but because gender was seen in terms of social function and a role that is not necessarily fixed on birth sex, male-assigned but female-presenting people were allowed to perform priestess duties and were considered women as they conducted themselves as such.8 In Carolyn Brewer’s account (1999), the babaylan were also called asog or bayog (sometimes, bayoguin), primarily because of their transfemininity. One remarkable feature of this feminine status is that gender-crossing is signified and indeed occurs with the donning of women’s clothes. The transvestic act accorded one with the kind of life associated with and expected of a woman. This does not necessarily cohere with contemporary cross-dressing, we must note, where identity may not change with the expression. For the friars who narrated their appearance, the asog or bayog were considered distinct because of their anatomical ‘deviance’ (undeveloped sexual organs and, hence, nonreproductive status) and sexual orientation (they had sexual intercourse with men). Their bodies were rumoured to possess a different set of genitalia, and men engaged with them as they would an assigned female at birth. These chronicles demonised the babaylan as part of a programme that aimed to institute priesthood as a domain for cis men of the colonial order and marriage as a ceremony between persons of opposite anatomical sex assignments. Crucial to this regime was the disempowerment of autochthonous female priests and the circumscription of transfeminine bodies performing the same divine duty into the crime of sodomy. Alongside the queer affects of the bakla and the divine transvestism of the asog or bayog, the transfeminine binabayi instructs us on the postcolonial feminist prospects of gender. Returning to art historian and curator Patrick Flores, such a process of becoming points to a ‘valiant hope against reification and the temptation of mimicry’, particularly as palabás, the choreography of performance, ‘enunciates at once the melodrama of sentiment and the radicality of disclosure’, when the binabayi becomes proud enough to announce their ‘passage into the moment of revelation’ (2008, 8). This instance is marked by the ‘shedding’ of ‘inhibition’ (8), a confidence that

Figures of a Gender Now upon Us 163 only the queer and the nonbinary can coordinate for a woman finally making sense of the world through her transgender circumstance.

Confessions of Contemporary Transfemininity Making Life Lovable is the title of the Philippine research team within the GlobalGRACE Project. According to its website, the aim of the work package is to ‘explore the ways that digital literacies and creative writing can be used to disclose forms of discrimination and stigma that LGBTQ young people face in the Philippines’ (www.pinoylgbtq.com).9 The project is based in two sites: (1) the University of the Philippines (UP), where a national workshop for young LGBTQ writers from all over the country has been held annually through the GlobalGRACE project since 2018; and (2) local YMCA-supported NGOs based in San Pablo City, in Laguna, a province south of Manila, where another workshop for the local queer community is hosted each year of the duration of the project. Vincent Empimano and Joe Henry Teñido are both from Laguna and were fellows in the first community workshop in San Pablo. Andrew Estacio and Carlo Paulo Pacolor participated in the second national workshop in UP. Empimano and Teñido wrote their pieces during a session of the 2018 community writing workshop in San Pablo, while Estacio and Pacolor submitted their pieces for the 2019 national writers’ workshop in Diliman. All four revised their stories after discussions and consultations with colleagues and mentors. In this section, I close read short fiction pieces written by these four queer-identifying writers to narrate a genealogy of transfeminine emergence, particularly in writing. I would like to mark out these enunciations of the binabayi as contemporary, because not only does she fulfil the emergence of the transfeminine, but also, and more important, because she delivers them through a figure that enables the modern to reconcile itself and coincide with femininity. The transfeminine making this concurrence possible can only be a contemporary moment, appearing in the here and the now; nonetheless, as we will learn from the ensuing, the binabayi traverses such an encounter with time in an unpredictable rhythm, that by turns she falls short of the pace she needs in order to move forward and supersedes the time of the confrontation itself. Vincent Empimano’s ‘Utoy’ (‘Little Boy’, a diminutive for young boys in the family) (2019) was first featured in my curated texts for Periferias 3. Its eponymous protagonist, Utoy, wakes up early finding his father prepare for work. On the latter’s way out, he asks Utoy to help his mother in the chores of the household. As soon as the father leaves, Utoy goes to the corner store to see his friends, who are playing ‘10-20’, a game in which two teams toss coins. The team that bets on the side of the coin that turns towards the sky is given the first turn to jump through the rubber band rope tied to the thighs of two members of the opposing team. Each member of the team jumps with a count based on ten and may do so until 100, as long as no part

164  J. Jacobo of one’s body touches the rope. If that happens, the whole team becomes the ‘It’, statuary to their opponent’s dance against the ground. Utoy and his friends enjoy the game, with feminine song and dance to boot, until his friends suddenly fall silent; only then does Utoy realise his father has been looking at him acting like a girl. As soon as his father leaves, Utoy dashes outside to join his friends Marco, Rap-Rap, and Bukol for their daily meeting in front of the village convenience store.10 Upon seeing his friends with other children, he invites his gang to play. What follows is a description of their performance: They all huddled together in a corner. Eula and Leslie tied the rubber band rope to their thighs then maintained a certain distance. We also folded the hems of our shorts and positioned ourselves to each take a shot. ‘Oh! Game!’, yelled Rap-Rap. I gathered my energy and then jumped: ‘10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, One hundred!’ And there it went, our jolly ten-twenty game. Of course I didn’t allow Eula and the girls to beat us, so we did everything not to become the ‘It’. I had to save Bukol because his feet were too short. The queers were so gleeful that the girls didn’t have a chance at all. We were swaying our hips vigorously, as if taunting them. ‘Sway your hips, sway your hips’, shouted Marco, Rap-Rap, and Bukol before my turn. (9–10) The game is an opportunity for the transfeminine child to perform outside, where she acts like a girl and becomes one among a community of girls, babayi and binabayi. And while there is a subtle sense of competition between cis and trans girls in the game, diverse femininities converge in an even playing field, a palabás exceeding a mere performance of girlhood, a role that is expected to be fulfilled in the enclosures of home, under the watch of a matriarch subjected to the expectations of the man of the house. This space, however, is one that the girls who are in the game have already escaped at the time of play. The tenor of the fun suddenly changes when a new character makes his appearance: And yet they all halted to sing. ‘Sway your hips, sway your hips’, I was hearing a faint song at the back. ‘Why did the song turn way too soft?’, I responded mockingly. ‘I want it louder, sway your hips, sway’, I screamed. And the young bading could not continue her song when she saw the man behind: her Father!11 (10) The cisheteropatriarch not only halts the emergence of the transfeminine kid, but also sabotages the feminine solidarity that has already solidified

Figures of a Gender Now upon Us 165 from their state of play. This father silences the community of girls, policing the gendered distinctions between bodies; boys who act like girls are effeminates who must be disciplined. Such patriarchal authority, turns into a malevolent figure in Joe Henry Teñido’s unpublished story, ‘Taya’ (‘It’) (2020), represented in this case by a police officer.12 The narrator is walking home when he is taken by a policeman to a remote part of town. He thinks the policeman is just being friendly, but in truth the officer has chosen the kid as a perfect object of his power tripping: It is my dream to be a brave policeman. I respect the police, they are sacrificing their lives for the people so that society will have peace. I’m not sure if I can finish a degree because we are poor . . . I saw his badge! Police Officer 1 dela Cruz. Whoah, he’s really a police officer! I felt his grip around my arms getting tighter. (3) The policeman entices the kid to participate in a game of hide and seek, a rehearsal of a chase between authority and criminal: ‘Now, this is what will happen’, he started talking. It seemed as if he meant each word he said. ‘You should put this in your pocket’, he gave me the powder packed in a thin sheet of plastic, ‘then I will give you this gun and after that I will count from one to three. You should have hidden yourself by then. I bet you know how to play hide and seek, right? I will be the It’. ‘Why, Sir?’ I asked him. ‘You want to be a policeman someday, don’t you? How can you be a policeman if you are going to be lame? Hurry!’ I agreed. I got the gun and heard him counting. ‘One!’ I was struggling to find a place to hide when I heard something. A gunshot. (4) At the end of the game, the boy finds himself laying on the ground and tasting his own blood. If the first narrative organises dread between the binabayi and patriarchy, this one allows for the emergence of the transfeminine as replete with fear and trembling, teaching the binabayi what kind of gender can survive state violence. There is no space for the feminine in this scene. Andrew Estacio’s ‘Dibuhong Martir’ (‘Portrait Martyr’) (2020) revolves around Marivic, a young transfeminine folk in a central Tagalog province.13 Her father was wrongfully accused of murder and was found dead at the town plaza, with a placard on his chest. Marivic’s mother raises her as a girl and nurtures her talent for painting. She wins contests, gains popularity as an art prodigy, and is given the task of painting the mural for the town’s centenary. Her high school instructor, called Arnold or Noly, becomes Marivic’s mentor in her painting of a mural to celebrate the quadricentennial of their parish, which is dedicated to Saint James the Apostle. While

166  J. Jacobo finishing her work, she falls in love with her teacher and retreats into a period of depression after remembering her father. Noly writes her a letter, whose affirming content persuades her to finish the mural. At the launch of the painting, she discovers Noly is getting married. The piece provides us with a back story of Marivic’s transfemininity, through a dialogue between Marivic and her mom: ‘When I was giving birth to you, I asked God for an Eve. But he gave me Adan. So, I decided to change your name from Mario Cedric to Maria Cedric, and of course, giving you a good supply of headbands and blouses. I didn’t want you to become like your father, a womaniser!’ Marivic answers back, ‘Nay, thank you for taking care of me… during my first bloody period… or my circumcision, rather. But how I wish you could have removed Cedric from my name. Or, Maria Cedrica could be better, that rhymes like a real woman’s name’. (9) This conversation between female mother and transfeminine child hearkens back to the sorority of girls in ‘Utoy’, buttressing in transfeminist terms what Adrienne Rich has proposed as the ‘lesbian continuum’ (1980) that women share in their encounters. If in ‘Utoy’, we are instructed on the possibilities of feminine sisterhood, what ‘Dibuhong Martir’ demonstrates is the ineluctable bond between mother and daughter that disavows divine providence on the one hand and patrilineal affinity on the other, rewriting the rites of manhood (circumcision) as passages into female embodiment (menstruation) to resist the script of gender imposed on an assigned-atbirth male offspring. Maviric’s mural depicts the historic church of Barasoain, where the first Philippine Republic was inaugurated. She, however, does not just paint a landscape. In the frame, she portrays a tableau: a group of people surrounding a dead man in the church patio. The townspeople believe this is an allegory of her father’s cruel death. Noly and Marivic discuss her idea behind the mural: One morning in September, during the revolution, the troop of General Gregorio del Pilar, who came all the way from Biak-na-Bato, went clandestinely to the pueblo . . . And Marivic got to imagine the general and his comrades, covered in baro’t saya, dressed as church women wearing veils and pendants. They were the first transvestites who planned a Trojan attack in the history of uprising. Other comrades were said to carry their own make-believe babies which were guns and rifles cloaked in thick sheets. It was such a cunning event. When they entered the church, their babies turned to firing guns, crying out bullets to the unmindful troops of Spanish cazadores during the mass. Bang! Bang! Piw! Piw! The female Goyo and her queer revolutionaries were able to wage war, crushing the balls of these white soldiers within just three

Figures of a Gender Now upon Us 167 minutes. The defeated men actually suffered a hangover that morning because some townspeople indulged them into a drinking spree the night before, putting their weapons to rest, and plotting their weakness for the attack. The feminine revolutionaries massacred the ignorant drunkards, and they gathered their arms to Biak-na-Bato. (11) Similar to the appearance of her father’s tragedy in the republican tableau hailed by her town, the idea weaves the personal with the political and the domestic with the national, but does something more; here, she enfolds herself within a radical transfeminine genealogy. With this procedure, Marivic not only rehearses her allegorical imagination of national history, but also queers it altogether, in trans terms. Inspired by the Battle of Balangiga of 1901, where cross-dressing and gender-blending played a crucial role in securing a historic Filipino victory during the Philippine-American-War, this scene transposes the tactic to an earlier time, the Philippine Revolution of 1896.14 What this time-travel does is to bring the gender subversion closer to the violence imposed by Spanish architectonics upon the transfeminine herstory of the binabayi, the bakla, and the asog or bayog. In a sense, Estacio enables a dialogue between anti-colonial resistance and trans politics, connecting guerrilla warfare and gender-nonconformity, thereby supplementing a transfeminist agenda to a canonical model of radicality premised on fraternal organising.15 When Marivic and Noly speak to the parish priest, the latter suggests that the face of the apostle James be depicted in the mural. After a couple of months, when Noly asks about Marivic’s progress, she tells him how, remembering her father, she does not want to paint blood anymore, asserting further how the image of a Saint James slaying Muslims does not cohere with the revolution she had in mind. A year later, Marivic still has not finished the mural, until her mother hands her out a package: a painting of her in traditional Filipina clothes, with a note from Noly accompanying the delivery: Marivic, do you remember this look? We were role-playing as pageant contestants in the gallery during breaks. We wore those costumes from the stock room, that had been used for the Binibini and Ginoong Paombong. When you weren’t working, you were sashaying. You are so talented, Marivic. I felt my childhood coming back. I had never been happy and gay until our bonding. Marivic, I could feel how we relate in many ways, from our talents, struggles, breakdowns, and the greatness that we had become. I hope you don’t change who you are. Be the greatest version of yourself, okay? And I also want to apologize if my expectations had been too much for you. I too was dealing with a lot of pressure in life and from the church. But still, you’re beautiful. And if you’re still grieving about your father, be brave! Use art to seek for justice. I know you can do it. Remember to challenge yourself. You

168  J. Jacobo can always change people’s mind through you and your art. I believe in you, Marivic! Your mentor and best friend, Sir Noly. (14) Believing this letter is a message of romantic love, Marivic runs to the gallery and finishes her artwork. When the painting is unveiled as the new mural on the altar during the town feast, everyone admires her allegory of the saint resembling the young general and her troop in drag vanquishing the Spanish soldiers. Once again, Marivic is declared a genius of the town. She sees Noly and his wife among the crowd. The gaze that a cisheterosexual man had given her may have inspired her to fulfil her art, but it also taught her about the immense solitude that transfeminist artistic autonomy can bring. In the end, Estacio brings us back to the opening scene, where Marivic is still painting her imagined matrimonial picture with Noly: Maria Cedric Lindayag was busy doing something in her room. Her eyes were drawn closely to her painting she was working on an ambitious portrait of her dream. . . . her supposed wedding with Sir Arnold San Juan, her partner for almost a year, well, only in her mind. (9) Marivic already knows at this point that cisheteropatriarchal romance has excluded her in its imaginary, but at this stage she must adhere to its centrifuge of fantasies. It is in this gesture that Marivic betrays the transfeminist herstory she has meticulously assembled through her queer method of art. Carlo Paulo Pacolor’s ‘Ang Natatanging Lamyos ng mga Bakla’ (‘The Incredible Tenderness of Faggots’) (2020) consists of vignettes concatenating the tenderness among a group of young gender nonconforming people living in petit-bourgeois and lumpen conditions in Metro Manila as they traverse various aspects of queer life in the city.16 The vignettes describe relations among all members of the group, between best friends and couples within it and other filial and erotic arrangements possible across quotidian scenes covering their daily lives. The first vignette introduces the group made up by Herman, Sen, Petra, Rex, and Oliber during a languorous late morning. The eros of the group coheres into one queer body: Petra struggled to break loose, but also roiling indecisive if they’re supposed to be enjoying or actually getting pissed that now, both they and Rex’s semi-hard-ons are in a froth, and slipping in between, Rex puttered his lips next to Petra’s one ear studded gold, versions of gold, melted and meld from grandmother brujas . . . . Petra bit him on the neck, teeth marks next to two lacquered hickeys; and when they dug in some more, Rex bolted with a knee to their balls, turning cuffs to fists, an embrace, meat smashing on bones, Petras here and Rexes there, their blue groins cross-hatching lilac, purple, violet, mauve, indigo. (10)

Figures of a Gender Now upon Us 169 The trope that governs the queer tone of the vignettes is that of lamyos, a term both tactile and vocal, referring to soft movements or a gentle voice in speech or in song. What Pacolor does with this tenderness is to foreground skin and sound as organs of gendered sensations, as a way to rescue the body from genital fetish. Furthermore, with deft narrative description in the overture above, lamyos also separates divisions from body to body and conjoins one to another, until the sensorium is magnified as some sort of a queer assemblage that has finally broken down boundaries of affect formerly set up by the binaries imposed by sex and gender, especially as premised on hard and tough narrations of masculinity. Lastly, with the emphasis on colours painted over the bodies of Petra, Rex, Herman, Sen and Oliber, lamyos also becomes a visual source of pleasure. Suddenly, they all appear as one tender body. In another vignette, Sen and Herman engage in a tactile moment: ‘Sen then took Herman’s hand, and then placed it where her breast wasn’t there, and then the other. Herman met Sen on Tinder. Left stroke, right stroke, if you’re into them, right, if not, left, if simply irresistible, up that mother’ (15). Breastlessness becomes breastfulness, transforming Sen into a feminine body. The tenderness turns her into woman. However, Sen returns to what isn’t there prior to touch: ‘If I wanted to grow boobs, Herman, would you still like me?’ (15) Herman goes through his response in the mind: But will he still like Sen if she ever did choose to become? He likes guys. And Sen is still a kind of a guy somewhat, just that, Sen is Sen, Sen in a flowy dress, with a pubescent boy’s body, sure, but still it was Sen in a dress, soft-spoken, long fingers trimmed with mushroom rings, and a head of wavy hair, colors he can never seem to guess as it was always changing, or mismatched. Boy-girl. Girl-boy. Not handsome but exactly beautiful. Handsiful beautisome. All and the same. (15) Pacolor transposes the tenderness into language, arguing that whenever lamyos is already in place, a nonbinary feeling takes over and vanquishes previously entrenched predispositions in sexual orientation and selfpresentation. What emerges is beauty itself and the love that must be accorded to its apparition. The binabayi is ever affirmed in her transfeminine passage, although her love himself remains caught up in the genres of the body. Like other guys, he interrogates Sen on the transsexual status of her womanhood: But Herman asked anyway, ‘Your cock, it’s going inside of you?’ Sen doesn’t know. ‘I don’t know’. But not because she doesn’t know, she knows: to be enough. ‘You’re enough for me, Sen. Even if you don’t choose either. I think we’ll have a better chance, hurt ourselves less if we say, we are enough’. And just like that, Sen kissed him. Sen kisses him anyway, even if he doesn’t say anything. (16)

170  J. Jacobo The open-endedness of Sen’s reply elicits in Herman a self-assuring statement on sufficiency. This is where the transfeminine figure encounters a break from other gender-diverse possibilities within its range, and the divergence is made clear with the crossings that transsexual somatechnics may offer to the woman who returns to her body as a terrain not of limit or boundary but of autonomy. While Pacolor proposes that queer bodies move as one tender body, they also respect the difficult motions transsexuals go through when the body ‘isn’t there’ yet. The final vignette gathers everyone again outside a testing centre where Rex is awaiting the results of his HIV test. The group debates on the autobiographical content of Petra’s erotic novel recently uploaded on an online platform. The councillor calls out for Rex to explain the results. While waiting for Rex to return, they share random things they have seen or learned: Herman spotting a butterfly when they were riding the Ferris wheel, her wings pointed towards the ocean; Petra getting depressed when reading about languages becoming extinct; Oliber learning the Tarot the night before; Sen watching a prank on YouTube, a dog dressed a spider. When Rex comes out of the clinic, They went on telling stories, and out the clinic they went, and they loitered the streets, and had their fill at some carinderia, until they got tired at being full, and when the night swelled they pounced like alley cats down unnamed streets, and they never stopped, never tired, on they went telling their stories. (19) The material condition that grounds queer, nonbinary and trans bodies is a seropositive reality that guides them as they are increasingly surveilled as biopolitical subjects of the nation-state. And yet they do that let it threaten their existence; they only surrender themselves to narrative, proof of tender life in a tough world. The transfeminine must emerge, and there is no question that narrative is a place for such an emergence. The pieces discussed above have shown us that short fiction allows her to explore play among a community of sisters, locate herself in the masculine police state, envision a radical transfeminine genealogy and disappear into one queer tender body, while allowing herself to distinguish her femininity from other girls, inhabit a tactical cisgenderity, realise her vulnerability to male amorousness, and decide on transsexual affirmation. Whatever the mode, the binabayi tells us about her time in the world, with others who may either violate her or keep her safe.

Conclusion This chapter has traced a transfeminine narrative within Filipino discourse through a trans reading of vernacular phenomenology and choreography, enabling us to deconstruct the binarism between interiority and externity

Figures of a Gender Now upon Us 171 that haunts transgender phenomenona and the cisheteropatriarchal language that relegates transfemininity to effeminacy. Reading against the grain of the colonial archive, one makes audible the binabayi from rumours of wayward womanhood that imperial grammars seek to repress, alongside queer affects and shamanistic practices all supporting the herstorical presence of the transfeminine. From this genealogy that traverses both reactionary and radical responses to transness, we are given confidence to locate trans emergence in contemporary queer fiction produced by young writers in the Philippines. We are reminded that in language, nonbinary imaginings of the feminine can only be incarnated, and that writing fulfils the remembrances and aspirations trans women may explore, in all their fabulous waywardness. The binabayi is a gender that has always been there, but this genealogy of transfeminine knowledge tells us she is also now upon us.

Notes 1. I use ‘Filipinx’ to signify a more gender-neutral identity that also includes nonbinary lives not usually embraced by ‘Filipino’ or ‘Filipina’. 2. For further information, see www.globalgrace.net and www.pinoylgbtq. com. 3. Throughout the book chapter, unless indicated, I quote Tagalog and Filipino texts through my own translations into English of significant passages. 4. On the bakla, see Ryen Paul Sumayao and Jaya Jacobo (2019); J. Neil C. García (2009); Martin Manalansan (2003); or Fenella Cannell (1999). On the bantut, see Mark Johnson (1997). García and Manalansan compare the bakla with the homosexual, which tends to displace the bakla’s relation with transness. Cannell’s monograph is part of a longer ethnography on the Bikolanos of southern Luzon. Johnson’s study is particularly instructive as his is the first that explicitly describes the femininity of assigned male at birth persons in the Philippines in ‘transgender’ terms. 5. Bakla is the contemporary spelling. 6. Bakla was spelled as bacla during the Spanish colonial period. 7. I would like to thank Ian Harvey Claros for his invaluable research assistance in this segment. A discussion of the bakla has appeared in my curated array of texts with Vincent Empimano, Macky Magbanua Torrechilla, and Christian Tablazon. See ‘https://revistaperiferias.org/en/materia/ the-bakla-the-agi-our-genders-which-are-not-one/#_ftn3’. 8. This is similar to Oyérónké Oyěwùmí’s description of Yorùbá communities in which ‘social hierarchy was determined by social relations’ instead of gender, which organises people into bodies in Western societies (1997, 3). I would like to thank the editors of the SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies, especially Tre Wentling, for giving me an earlier opportunity to write an abridged version of this trans herstory. See Jaya Jacobo (2021, 613–16). 9. See also the main website of the GlobalGRACE project, www.globalgrace. net. 10. In Tagalog, bukol means an inflammation. I quote from my translation of Empimano’s story featured in ‘The Bakla, The Agi’. See Endnote 7. 11. Bading is a more contemporary term for bakla or binabayi. 12. I quote from Teñido’s translation of his own story.

172  J. Jacobo 13. I quote from Estacio’s translation of their own short story embedded on the Philippine GlobalGRACE website. See ‘Dibuhong Martir’ (https://www. pinoylgbtq.com/fictionist-andrew-estacio). 14. The story of the Balangiga massacre revolves around the victorious guerilla tactic of male Filipino soldiers dressed as women who suddenly attacked American soldiers who had thought the band of women passing through were merely going to mass. See Teodoro Agoncillo (1990, 228) and Rolando Borrinaga (2002). 15. I am referring here to the Katipunan, the revolutionary collective led by Andres Bonifacio and Emilio Jacinto. See Reynaldo Ileto (1979). 16. I quote from Pacolor’s translation of their own short story embedded on the Philippine GlobalGRACE website. See ‘Ang Natatanging Lamyos ng mga Bakla’. https://www.pinoylgbtq.com/fictionist-carlo-pacolor.

Works Cited Agoncillo, Teodoro A. 1990. History of the Filipino People. Quezon City: Garotech Publishing. Ahmed, Sara. 2006. ‘Orientations: Towards a Queer Phenomenology’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4: 543–74. https://doi.org/ 10.1215/10642684-2006-002 Alejo, Albert E. S. J. 1990. Tao pô! Tulóy! Isang Landas ng Pag-unawa sa Loób ng Tao. Quezon City: Office of Research and Publications, Ateneo de Manila University. Borrinaga, Rolando O. 2002. ‘The Balangiga Conflict Revisited’. PhD diss., Leyte Normal University, Philippines. Brewer, Carolyn. 1999. ‘Baylan, Asog, Transvestism, Sodomy: Gender, Sexuality and the Sacred in Early Colonial Philippines’. Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, 2. http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue2/carolyn2.html Cannell, Fenella. 1999. Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Chamberland, Alex Alvina. 2016. ‘Femininity in Transgender Studies: Reflections from an Interview Study in New York City’. lambda nordica 21, no. 1–2: 107–33. De Los Santos, Fray Domingo. 1794. Vocabulario de la lengua tagala: primera y segunda parte. Manila: Imprenta de Nuestra Señora de Loreto. De Noceda, Juan José, and Pedro de Sanlucar. 1860. Vocabulario de la lengua tagala. Manila: Ramirez y Giraudier. De San Buenaventura, Pedro. 1613. Vocabulario de la lengua tagala. Valencia: París-Valencia Empimano, Vincent. 2019. ‘Utoy’. Periferias 3. https://revistaperiferias.org/en/ materia/the-bakla-the-agi-our-genders-which-are-not-one/#_ftn3 Estacio, Andrew. 2020. ‘Dibuhong Martir’. Project GRACE-UP National LGBTQ+ Writers Workshop. https://www.pinoylgbtq.com/fictionist-andrew-estacio Flores, Patrick D. 2008. ‘Palabas’. Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art 11: 8–9. Garcia, J. Neil C. 2009. Philippine Gay Culture: Binabae to Bakla, Silahis to MSM. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP. GlobalGRACE. n.d. ‘Making Life Lovable: Digital and Literary Productions of Cultures of Equality among LGBTQ Young People in the Philippines’. Accessed September 25, 2021. https://www.pinoylgbtq.com/

Figures of a Gender Now upon Us 173 Ileto, Reynaldo C. 1979. Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University. Jacobo, Jaya. 2021. ‘Philippines, Gender Categories’. In SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies, edited by Abby Goldberg and Genny Beemyn, 613–16. New York: Sage Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781544393858 Jacobo, Jaya, Vincent Empimano, Macky Torrechilla, and Christian Tablazon. 2019. ‘The Bakla, the Agi: Our Genders Which Are Not One’. Periferias 3. Accessed February 27, 2021. https://revistaperiferias.org/en/materia/the-bakla-the-agiour-genders-which-are-not-one/#_ftn3 Johnson, Mark. 1997. Beauty and Power: Transgendering and Cultural Trans­ formation in the Southern Philippines. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10. 4324/9781003084778 Manalansan, Martin F. 2003. Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora. Durham and London: Duke UP. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822385172 Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ.́ 1997. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Discourse. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Pacolor, Carlo Paulo. 2020. ‘Ang Natatanging Lamyos ng mga Bakla’. Project GRACE-UP National LGBTQ+ Writers Workshop. https://www.pinoylgbtq. com/fictionist-carlo-pacolor Rich, Adrienne. 1980. ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 4: 631–60. Salazar, Zeus A. 1999. Ang Babaylan sa Kasaysayan ng Pilipinas. Diriman: Palimbagan ng Lahi. Serrano-Laktaw, Pedro. 1914. Diccionario Tagalog-Hispano. Manila: Manila Islas Filipinas. Stryker, Susan. 2006. ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage’. In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 237–54. New York and London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1-3-237 Sumayao, Ryen Paul, and Jaya Jacobo. 2019. BKL/Bikol Bakla: Anthology of Bikolnon Gay Trans Queer Writing. Naga City: Goldprint. Teñido, Joe Henry B. 2018. ‘Taya’ (unpublished manuscript).

Index

Abrahams, Roger 67, 69 Adebayo, Mojisola 30–41 aesthetic encounter 50; with ethics 50; with Guests 55; nature of 49, 53–54; violence 50–51 affective publics 87 Afghan refugees 46 Agbaje, Bola 30–41, 41n2 Ahmed, Sara 87, 89, 96, 102, 104, 106, 107–108, 119, 120, 123–124, 128, 158 Alejo, Albert E. 157–158 Alexander, Claire 34 Alexander, Jacqui 27 Álvarez López, Esther 119–132, 133n1 Ammaturo, Franscesca 71 anger and violence: male 105–108; of marginalised masculinity 108–113 ‘Ang Natatanging Lamyos ng mga Bakla’ (Pacolor) 168–170 anti-gender movement 83 Anzaldua, Gloria 27 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 121 Aragay, Mireia 31 Arendt, Hannah 85, 98n1 Art: definition of 47–48; Guests (Wodiczko) 44–45; materiality of 47–48; micropolitical scope of 49; performative quality 48; political 45–47, 123; political potential of 50; violence 51–57; work of 47–51 artivism 119 Art of Being Black, The (Alexander) 34 Artwork see work of art audience 120–123 Austinian performativity 140 Austin, JL 102, 152 authorisation 88 Autry, Turiya 122

avatars: creation of 139; expendable 138; hologram 139; immense translucent 148; Ayón, Belkis 17 Baker, Catherine 72 Baker, Gilbert 72 Bakhtin, Mikhail 78n2 Balibar, Étienne 56 Barad, Karen 151 Barnes, Sherri L. 27 Beech, Megan 125, 129–131, 133n2 Benford, Robert D. 84, 87 Bennett, Andy 71 Bennett, Jill 59n7 Bennett, Lance 86 Beswick, Katie 31 binabayi 159–163 binary systems 17 Black feminist praxis 13–27 Black feminist theory 15 Black Protest 82 Black women: and Black community 14; collective quality of life and community care 14; creative collectives 14; quality of life performance 26; representational possibilities for 26; space for 26 Black youth masculinity: council-estate plays 30–33; progressive masculinities, turn to 39–40; staging hegemonic Black masculinities 35–39; young Black masculinities in UK 34–35 Blazing World, The (Margaret) 137 Blocker, Jane 13, 53, 59nn7 blues 21 Bodies that Matter (Butler) 70, 149 BodyAvatar 139

Index 175 Bolt, Barbara 10, 48, 59nn7 Boyd, Jade 69, 79n4 Braidotti, Rosi 57 Brewer, Carolyn 162 Browne, Kath 66, 71 Bruzzi, Stella 102, 103 Butler, Judith 4, 51, 69–70, 82, 84–85, 102, 103, 139–140, 149 Butler, Samuel 137 Cabossart, Olivier 71 Calais Jungle 45, 47 Calais problem 58n3 Calais refugee camp 45, 58n3 Calderón Sandoval, Orianna 100–104 Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (2008) 2 Cavendish, Margaret 137 Challenge Hull 73 Chamberland, Alex Alvina 160 Charlotte, Bell 31, 35 Chen, Fangmei 148 Chicago Black Social Culture Map (CBSCM) 13, 19–23; act of creating and sharing 22; features live programming 22; public events 22 Chinese Yejia Technology 138 choreography of assembly 85–86 Christian, Barbara 27 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong 149 Clisby, Suzanne 1–9 collective and connective action 87–89 Collins, Patricia Hill 27 colonialism, legacies of 35 colonial technologies 141–150; ‘Immersion’ 141; post 141–150 colours, committing to 72–75 Combahee River Collective 14, 15 Common European Asylum System 45 communitas, feeling of 122 complicit masculinity 102 Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) 139 Computer Models for Facial Beauty Analysis (2016) 148 connective action: collective and 87–89; logic of 86 Connell, Raewyn 101 Conquergood, Dwight 5 contemporary queer fiction, transfeminine in: binabayi 159–163; emergence of transness 156–159; phenomenology of performance 156–159

contemporary transfemininity, confessions of 163–170 conversational AI 139 Cooper, Danielle 71 Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Appiah) 121 council-estateness 31 council-estate plays 30–33 counter-visualities 75–77 COVID-19 global pandemic 13 Coyle, Tasmin 65 Critical Event Studies and Anthropology of the Festive 67 Cultural Politics of Emotion, The (Ahmed) 89, 104 culture of equality: concept of 1; enacting 2–5; gender 1–2; of gender equality 113–114; GRACE and 1–2; reasons for performing 2–5 Cumper, Patricia 31 Cunniff Gilson, Erinn 121 Davis, Tracy C. 2 De Bodard, Aliette 137–153 de-colonising technology 150–153 Decrop, Alain 71 Dee, Asia 18 Deep Brain Simulation (DBS) 139 De-Lahay, Rachel 30 Deleuze, Gilles 47, 50, 59n11 de los Santos, Domingo 161 de Noceda, Juan 161 denunciation, process of 109 de Ocampo, Isabel 101, 109–110, 111, 112 Derbaix, Christian 71 Derrida, Jacques 147 de San Buenaventura, Pedro 161 de Sanlucar, Pedro 161 Desert Boy 32–33, 36 De Vries, Ansems 58n3 diagnostic framing: choreographing and 87; in Non una di meno’s communiqué 89–92 ‘Dibuhong Martir’ (Estacio) 165–168 Diccionario Tagalog Hispano (Serrano-Laktaw) 159 disco 21 discursive performativity 70 dissensual spaces 120 Distributed Human-Machine Systems (DHMS) 139 divination/divining: Africanist concept and practice of 17; binary systems and 16–17; instruments 16

176  Index DJ booth spinning 21 Djigo, Sophie 45–46 documentary cinema: gender-based violence and masculinity in 100–104; Ma l’amore c’entra 105–108; performing cultures of gender equality with 113–114; Serás hombre 108–113 Dolan, Jill 122 Dolores, Allegra 18 dominant ideology 152; assumptions of 153; transmission of 146 Donna, Haraway 57 Doyle, Stephen 72 Drage, Eleanor 137–153 Durán-Almarza, Emilia María, 1–9 8M Strike 82 Elmira’s Kitchen (Kwei-Armah) 30 embodiments of collaboration and collectivity: Black feminist praxis, Honey Pot Performance’s 13–27; Chicago Black Social Culture Map 19–23; If/Then Project 16–19; Ladies Ring Shout 2022 26–27; We Will Chicago 23–26 Emile (Rousseau) 107 emotionality 100–104 Empimano, Vincent 163 endriago subjects 102, 111, 114n4 enfant terrible 159 Erewhon (Butler) 137 Estacio, Andrew 163, 165–168 Eurovision Song Contest 74 Evelyn (2012) 108, 111 Falassi, Alessandro 67, 69 Fallout (Williams) 30 femi-negativity 160 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan) 107 Feminist and Gender Studies 4 feminist assemblies: collective and connective action 87–89; collective self into being, performing 97–98; new global cycle of feminist protests, choreographed assemblies in 82–84; Non una di meno’s communiqué, diagnostic and prognostic framing in 89–92; political visibility, occupying spaces of 97–98; social media reverberations of 82–98; users re-interpret frames of communiqué 92–97; Verona transfemminista, choreography and affect at 84–87

feminist killjoy 106 Feminist Plan Against Male and Gender Violence 100 festive decorations, LGBT-themed events and 65–67; colours, committing to 72–75; counter-visualities 75–77; events, performances, and liminality 67–68; performing events 68–72 Fifth City model 24 Filipinx fiction, transfeminine emerges in see transfeminine in contemporary queer fiction Finkel, Rebecca 67, 69, 70 Flores, Patrick D. 157–158, 162 Fortress Europe, concept of 46 Foundation for Art and Creative Technology 44, 58n1 Frabetti, Federica 140, 147 Fragkou, Marissia 40 France: cultural and economic hold over post-independence Vietnam 152; maritime border with UK 45; presence of the refugees/migrants in 46; source of long-term profit 142 Freedman, Jane 46, 58n4 Friedan, Betty 107 From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (Turner) 68 Galactics 137–138, 143; commodification of culture 138; critique of 141; delegation of 142; description of 142; narrative depicts 142; rule 144; tourists 141–143 gallery space: arrangement of 52; narratives of outsiders work in ‘present’ of 54; safe dark space 55 Galofre, Pol 110 gender-based violence: anger of marginalised masculinity and violence in gore capitalism 108–113; cultures of gender equality with documentary cinema 113–114; Ma l’amore c’entra 105–108; male anger and violence in promise of happiness 105–108; performativity and emotionality 100–104; Serás hombre 108–113 gender equalities and inequalities: confronting through performance poetry 119–133; dimensions of 4–5; enactment of cultures of 1–3; intersectional 1; performance of

Index 177 4; performance poetry, utopian performative, and audience 120–123; performing cultures of 113–114; small gestures of 2; wilful killjoys 127–133; wilfulness, strange(r)ness, and poe(li) tics of persistence 123–127 gender, figures of 156; binabayi 159–163; contemporary transfemininity, confessions of 163–170; emergence of transness 156–159; phenomenology to performance 156–159 gender identity 84 gender performativity theory 103, 139–140 Gender, Queer and Feminist Studies 2 generative disorientation, moments of 123 Gerbaudo, Paolo 85–86 Ghee, Phylicia 19 ghetto plays 31 Giangrande, Alessia 96 Gibson, Andrea 126, 131–132 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 131 Giovanni, Nikki 27 GirlTrek 23 GlobalGRACE Project 16, 163, 172nn13 Goddard, Lynette 30, 31 God’s Property (2013) 30 Golańska, Dorota 44–58 Gone Too Far! (2007) 31–32, 35–36 Gordon, Lewis R. 144 gore capitalism 108–113 gospel 21 Grabher, Barbara 65–78 GRACE Conference 1 GRACE feminist Quotidian app 1 ‘GRACE’; Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe 1 Great Migration 20 Grizelda, Pollock 57–58 Grosz, Elizabeth 48, 59n7 Guattari, Félix 47 Guests (Wodiczko) 44–45, 47, 50; aesthetic encounter with 55; aesthetic experience of 53; complexity of 54; emergence of 53; in macropolitical context 53; within micropolitical performance 53; violence 51 Hanoi: Biography of a City, (Logan) 141 happiness: concept of 128; promise of 105–108 Haraway, Donna 149

Harris, Leah 131–132 Hayles, N. Katherine 149–150 hegemonic black masculinities: performance of 34; staging 35–39 hegemonic masculinity 101–102 heteronormative and patriarchal family 90 homosexuality 171n4; partial decriminalisation of 65; prisoners 72 Honey Pot Performance (HPP); Black feminist praxis 13–27; bricolage methods 14; Chicago Black Social Culture Map 19–23; core elements of 20; core ensemble 18; framework of approach 24; If/Then Project 16–19; at intersection of critical performance and public humanities 14–15; Ladies Ring Shout 2022 26–27; primary performance vocabulary 18; projects and 15; We Will Chicago 23–26 Hongisto, Ilona 102, 103 hoodie, use of 35–36 hooks, bell 34 Househedz (2006) 20 house music culture and community 18–23 House of Kings and Queens (Price) 65 Hull 2017 Ltd 65–77, 78n1 hypermasculinity, women and 37 ideology of gender 83 If/Then Project 16–19; 9 prompt/3 movement structure for 27n2; goals for Honey Pot Performance 17–18; Phase One 16; Phase Three 16; Phase Two 16; process of 16–17 Immerser 138–140; Galactic and Longevity and 142–143, 145; internalisation and embodiment of social cues 146; performative assemblage and 140; performative capacity 143; racial context within 148; technologies assisting 138 ‘Immersion’: (post)colonial technologies 141–150; de-colonising technology 150–153; dissection and dissension 150–153; race, gender, and wearable devices in 137–153; re/ production of racialised and patriarchal worlds 141–150; science fiction and technology 137–139; theories of performativity 139–140

178  Index imperial gender, grammar of 159 imperialism’s performative technologies: (post)colonial technologies 141–150; de-colonising technology 150–153; dissection and dissension 150–153; re/production of racialised and patriarchal worlds 141–150; science fiction and technology 137–139; theories of performativity 139–140 Inarisha, Walidah 122 Independent Weekly, The (magazine) 127 Instagram: corpus of images on 83; user-generated memes on 87–88 installation: engaging 53; immersive, workings of 53; large-scale 44; material-semiotic mode of performative engagement and 45; recordings for 54; temporal ambivalence of 54; and visitor, creative encounter between 51; Wodiczko’s 47, 56 International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women 84, 91, 100, 134n8 International Women’s Day 1, 84 intersubjective network 121 Jacobo, Jaya 156–171 Jay Z 129 jazz innovation 20, 21 Jim Crow laws and policies 20 Johnson, Mark 4 Jones, Amelia 44, 49–50, 54, 58n2, 59n7 Jucan, Ioana B. 59n7 Juke Cry Hand Clap (2014) 18, 20, 22 Kates, Steven 66 Kene, Arinze 30 Kepler, Johannes 148 Kress, Gunther 88, 93 Kunst, Bojana 49, 51 Kwei-Armah, Kwame 30 Ladies Ring Shout, The: 2021 18; 2022 26–27 Lads and Lasses (ApposArt) 65 La Lega 92, 96 Lamond, Ian 70 LasTesis 130 Lawrence, Stephen 30 Legitimacy: expelled from circle of 102; source of 96 (de)legitimisation study of 88 Leroi-Gourhan, André 147 lesbian continuum 166

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT); movement 65; symbol of 72; see also LGBT50 celebrations: LGBT50 event series Lewis, John 25 LGBT50 celebrations 65; celebratory settings of 67; claiming of space 70; colours, committing to 72–75; counter-visualities 75–77; cultures of equality in 72; decorative-visual-markers of 67; events, performances, and liminality 67–68; interpretations of equalities in 66; opening event of 72; ‘party’ and ‘politics’ of 66; performing events 68–72; with producers and artists 75 LGBT50 event series 65; colours, committing to 72–75; counter-visualities 75–77; events, performances, and liminality 67–68; gender and sexuality as references 66; performing equalities through festive decorations in 65–77; performing events 68–72; producers and artists of and visitors to 66; visual input in 72; visual spectrum of 67 LGBT Pride events 66, 75 Liberiamoci dalla violenza Centre 105 liminality 67–68; concept of 68; critique of 70; examples 70–71; performative 69; spatial discussions of 71 linearisation process 147 Liverpool European Capital of Culture 2008 69 Livingston, Jennie 103 Lodoli, Elisabetta 101, 105 Logan, William Stewart 141 Longevity 137–138, 141–142; iterative routine of tourism 144; redaction of 143 Long, Norman W 18 loób 157–158 Lorde, Audre 27, 109 Lorente Acosta, Miguel 110 Lost Property 65 Macpherson Report 30 Making Life Lovable 163 Ma l’amore c’entra (film) 104; editing of 106; Elisabetta Lodoli as director of 105–108; Giorgio, testimony 106–107; Luca, testimony 107; male anger and violence in promise of happiness 105–108; performing cultures of gender equality with 113–114

Index 179 marginalised masculinity 102 Masculinities (1995) 101 Masculinity: Black youth 30–40; complicit 102; gender-based violence and 100–104; hegemonic 101–102; marginalised 102; subordinate 102 Massumi, Brian 50 Matt Henson, North Star 32 McKenzie, Jon 69 McNeal, Meida Teresa 13–27 Melich, Joan 110 Mercer, Kobena 34 MeToo movement 82 Miente (2008) 108 Minh-ha, Trinh T. 105 Moj of the Antarctic 32 moments of affection 103–104, 106 Monforte, Eric 31 Moraga, Cherrie 27 Moral legitimisation 88 Moss, Jonathan 70 Movement: 9 prompt/3 movement structure for 27n2; 8M Strike 82; anti-gender 83; Black Protest 82; feminist 82; LGBT 65; MeToo movement 82; Ni una menos 82; Non una di meno 82; rainbow as international symbol of LGBTQ rights 72–75; Women’s March 82 Movimento 5 Stelle 96 Muhammed Ali and Me 32 Muñoz, Jose Esteban 115n16 Musk, Elon 139 Mutua, Athena 34 mythopoesis 88 ‘natural cultural’ phenomenon 149 Neuralink 139 Neural Machine Translation (NMT) 139 new wave 21 Ninja, Willi 103 Ni una menos 82, 114n2 Nkame 17, 27n3 Non una di meno 82–83, 89–92; activities of 91; choreography of assembly 97; diagnostic framing in 89–92; prognostic framing in 89–92; self-definition 89; users re-interpret frames of 92–97 normative performativity 69 nostalgia festivals 71 Octavia’s Parables 23 Off The Endz 35 Olson, Alix 124–126

Organic Law for Measures on Integral Protection against Gender Violence 101 O’Sullivan, Simon 59n7 Oyěwùmí, Oyeronke 171n8 Pacolor, Carlo Paulo 163, 168–170 palabás 157–158 Paolo, Paolo di 108 Papacharissi, Zizi 87 Parable of the Sower (1993) 23 Paris Is Burning (1991) 103 patriarchal and heteronormative family 90 patriarchal masculinity 35; model of 36; rejection of performance of 39; representation of 37 Peacock, D. Keith 31 Pearce, Michael 40 Penuti, Giorgio 107–108 performance poetry 120–123 Performance Studies methods and methodologies 3–4 performative assemblage 140 performative liminality 69 performative technologies, imperialism and:(post)colonial technologies 141–150; conceptual elements of 139; de-colonising technology 150–153; dissection and dissension 150–153; narrativisation of the complicity of 138; re/production of racialised and patriarchal worlds 141–150; science fiction and technology 137–139; theories of performativity 139–140 performative theory of assembly 84–85 performative turn 2–3 performativity 4, 100–104; and 100–104; Austin concept of 102–103; Austinian 140; discursive 70; gender performativity theory 103; normative 69; posthumanist account of 151; theories of 34–35, 139–140 performing equalities, LGBT-themed events and 65–67; colours, committing to 72–75; counter-visualities 75–77; events, performances, and liminality 67–68; performing events 68–72 Philippines, transfeminine in contemporary queer fiction from 156–170 Platt, Louise 65, 69, 70 poe(li)tics of persistence 123–127 political art 123 political grammar 123

180  Index political labor, form of 123 political potential, of gender/ed performances 4 political visibility, occupying spaces of 97–98 politics, art and 45–47 Pollock, Grizelda 50 posthumanist account of performativity 151 precarity: arbitrary violence of 84–85; defined 84 Prendergast, Monica 122 Pride in Hull Film Festival 65 Prieto López, Paola 30–41 prognostic framing: choreographing and 87; in Non una di meno’s communiqué 89–92 Progressive Black Masculinities (Mutua) 34 progressive masculinities, turn to 39–40 protests: banner 88, 92–95; creator of 94; feminist 82–84; navigating 92–97; protest against ultraconservative XIII World Congress of Families 83, 92 Proust and Signs (2008) 59n11 punk 21 queer appropriation 71 queer fiction, contemporary: binabayi 159–163; contemporary transfemininity, confessions of 163–170; emergence of transness 156–159; phenomenology to performance 156–159 Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, (Ahmed) 123 racialisation, negative 146 racism 149 rainbow: aesthetics 75; decorations and counter-visualities 75–77; flags as symbols of gay liberation 71; as international symbol of LGBTQ rights movement 72–75; observations of trends of 75; presence of 74; relevance of colours 73; tendencies of brand-like strategies of 75 Ramblin’ Roadshow 127 Random (2008) 30 rationalisation 88 reality, performance of 110 Recalcati, Massimo 108 re-enactment of equalities 4

refugee: Afghan 46; Calais refugee camp 45; crisis 45–47; in temporary camps 47 relationality 4 Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell 125 Rich, Adrienne 166 Roberson, Kimeco 18 Rodríguez González, Carla 1–9 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 107 Royal Court Theatre 31, 41n1 Różalska, Aleksandra M. 44–58 Salazar, Zeus 162 Salvini, Matteo 92, 95–96 Sánchez Espinosa, Adelina 100–104 Sapphire and Crystals 14 Schechner, Richard 4, 68, 70, 78–79n3 Schneider, Rebecca 48–49, 59n7 science fiction (SF) 137–139 security, concept of 55 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 123 Segerberg, Alexandra 86 self-conscious performance of identity 121 Serás hombre (film) 108–113; focus group and at the private screening of 112–113; Isabel de Ocampo 108–113; models of masculinity 112; performative element in 110 Serrano-Laktaw, Pedro 159 Sexual Offences Act 1967 65 Shange, Ntozake 27 Sikán, Princess 17 Simmel, Georg 120, 127–128, 134n5 Sisterhood, The 14 Sister Spit 126–127 Sistren Theatre Collective 14 Smelik, Anneke 102, 104 Smith, Christen A. 146 Snow, David A. 84, 87 social drama: concept of 68; notion of 78–79n3 social media: collective and connective action 87–89; collective self into being, performing 97–98; commercial, advent of 86; images posted to 83; new global cycle of feminist protests, choreographed assemblies in 82–84; Non una di meno’s communiqué, diagnostic and prognostic framing in 89–92; political visibility, occupying spaces of 97–98; process of gathering bodies together 85;

Index 181 reverberations of feminist assemblies 82–98; users re-interpret frames of communiqué 92–97; Verona transfemminista, choreography and affect at 84–87 social mobilisation: connective action and 86; partially re-shaped 86; participation in 87 social movement leadership 86–87 Somers-Willett, Susan B.A. 121–122 Spanish colonial period, dictionaries of 159–163 spatial perspective of liminal event experiences 71 stabilisation process 147 Stiegler, Bernard 5, 140, 145, 146, 153nn3 Stolica (film) 105 strangers, persisters, and killjoys 119–120; performance poetry, utopian performative, and audience 120–123; wilful killjoys 127–133; wilfulness, strange(r)ness, and poe(li) tics of persistence 123–127 Stryker, Susan 159 subordinate masculinity 102 Subtle Sister Production 124–125, 127 Summer Tea Party 72; aesthetics and 76; event series ended with 65; producers o 75 Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) 105 Sweet Goddess (2011) 20 symbols of gay liberation 71–72 Talamantes, Gloria 16, 18 Tam and Quy 137–138, 145 Taylor, Jody 71 Teñido, Joe Henry 163, 165 theoretical rationalization 95 Theorising Cultures of Equality (2020) 3 Tippett, Krista 25 total image complex 120 transfeminine in contemporary queer fiction: binabayi 159–163; contemporary transfemininity, confessions of 163–170; emergence of transness 156–159; phenomenology to performance 156–159 transfemininity, contemporary 163–170 transfeminist city 83 transgender rage 159 trans-misogyny 160 transness, emergence of 156–159

Trillò, Tomasso 82–98 Turner, Victor 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 78n2 Tweets and the Streets (Gerbaudo) 85 UK City of Culture 2017 65–77 UK Pride Parade and Party 72–74 ultraconservative XIII World Congress of Families 83, 90, 92 UNESCO 27n4 United Kingdom, young Black masculinities in 34–35 user-generated memes 87–88 utopian performative 120–123 utopographers 122 Valencia, Sayak 102, 110–111 Van Leeuwen, Theo 88, 93 Vaughan-Williams, Nick 58n5 Venice Biennale 44 Verona transfemminista 83; and anti-gender movement 84; case of 97; choreography and affect at 84–87; collective body of 98; overview and interpretation of 87; as social movement organisations 97; ultraconservative XIII World Congress of Families and 84 Vietnamese cultural heritage 153n4 violence 51–57; kind of 160; at LGBT festivals 70; see also gender-based violence VoxFeminista 126, 134n4 Warmth of Other Suns, The 21 Warren, Elizabeth 125 WCF see ultraconservative XIII World Congress of Families We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (hooks) 34 Westbridge, The (2011) 30 We Will Chicago 23–26 When I Grow Up I Want To Be Mary Beard (Beech) 129 wilfulness 123–127; killjoys 127–133; as style of politics 123 Wilkerson, Isabel 21 Williams, Roy 30 Wintersun festival 71 Wodiczko, Krzysztof 44 woman and womanhood, signifiers of 159–163 Women of the World Poetry Slam (WOWPS) 134n3

182  Index Women’s March 82 Woodward, Ian 71 work of art 47–51 see also Guests (Wodiczko) Xu, Yong 148

Young Black masculinities in UK 34–35 You Sad Feminist (Beech) 129, 132 Zenobia, Sojourner 18 Zhang, David 148