Queer Art: A Freak Theory [1. Aufl.] 9783839416853

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
An introduction
Freak/y epistemology (prependix)
I. Radical drag
A a body/bundle (shinique smith)
B drag work (ron vawter)
C doubling embodiment/pain and pain (bob flanagan and sheree rose)
II. Transtemporal drag
A the chronopolitics of becoming salome
B speaking backwards (henrik olesen)
C the beauty of the form of time displayed (jack smith)
III. Abstract drag
A an activity in absence (zoe leonard)
B the topography of desire (felix gonzalez-torres)
C respeaking (sharon hayes)
An end
Appendix (methodology)
Literature
List of illustrations

Citation preview

Renate Lorenz Queer Art

Queer Studies | Band 2

Renate Lorenz (PhD) works as an artist and as an independent author, mostly in the fields of queer, gender, and art theory. She is professor of art and research at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

Renate Lorenz

Queer Art A Freak Theory Amanda Baggs Pauline Boudry Bob Flanagan Felix Gonzalez-Torres Sharon Hayes Zoe Leonard Henrik Olesen Jack Smith Shinique Smith Wu Ingrid Tsang Ron Vawter

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2012 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized 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 publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Proofread by Jess Dorrance Translated by Daniel Hendrickson Typeset by Renate Lorenz Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 978-3-8376-1685-9 Global distribution outside Germany, Austria and Switzerland:

Transaction Publishers Rutgers University 35 Berrue Circle Piscataway, NJ 08854

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Contents

preface an introduction freak/y epistemology (prependix) I. radical drag A a body/bundle (shinique smith) B drag work (ron vawter) C doubling embodiment/pain and pain (bob flanagan and sheree rose)

7 15 35

53 57 78

II. transtemporal drag A the chronopolitics of becoming salome B speaking backwards (henrik olesen) C the beauty of the form of time displayed (jack smith)

93 110 118

III. abstract drag A an activity in absence (zoe leonard) B the topography of desire (felix gonzalez-torres) C respeaking (sharon hayes)

131 136 145

an end appendix (methodology)

155 161

literature list of illustrations

173 179

Preface This book is based in many aspects on two collaborative practices: a conference and my artistic work with Pauline Boudry. In the summer of 2009, as a project of the Collaborative Research Group SFB Kulturen des Performatives (Freie Universität Berlin) I organized the conference Freaky–Queer Art Conference at Berlin’s Ballhaus Naunynstrasse. The conference was aimed at opening up a space to collectively develop and work on queer-theoretical perspectives on contemporary art practice. It was not only the objects at the conference (the artistic works) as well as the methods for analyzing them that were meant to be experimental. We also attempted to generate different and innovative formats in which to approach these works. The lecture hall was thus at the same time a meeting point: the place for meals and drinks as well as an exhibition. The four artistic works shown – by Nao Bustamante, Ines Doujak, Latifa Echakhch, and Rashawn Griffin – in turn became the objects of the lectures in this very space. And the invited guests, art and queer theorists Catherine Lord, Elisabeth Lebovici, Kobena Mercer, and Robert McRuer, each dealt with two of these works. A workshop with input from other artists and art theorists extended these readings. On two evenings, Karin Michalski curated a film program with guests (Werner Hirsch, Zoe Leonard, and Line Skywalker Karlström) that provided further perspectives and additional artistic material for discussion (www.freaktheory.de). Both the conference and the workshop tied in with the observation that images are increasingly appearing in the field of queer art that undermine the established categories of racialized or gender categories, or that show no bodies at all. In order to get closer to this art practice, the adjective “freaky,” and a possibly artificial figure of the “freak,” were brought into discussion. The idea was that such a figure could be in the position to represent a wide variety of difference without producing a category or identity – without defining a norm from which it deviates. It could be incompatible with social and economic demands. It could produce an event – freaking – and furthermore have capabilities that appear peculiar and that do not always contain recognition, but which nonetheless are ascribed with a certain value and that pay off in the end. It would be non-normal, “freaky,” and at the same time would point to the history of constraints, violence, and self-assertion that is already tied to the historical freak shows. 7

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This discussion about the figure of the freak inspired the methodological reflections for this book. In place of possibly personifying the “freak,” which always runs the risk of excluding or devaluing, the question came to the fore of what a “freak theory of contemporary art” might look like. Indeed, a “freaky” theory does not stand outside social power relations. It produces inventions and images that offer alternatives to social power relations that are more than and different from a critique or subversion of social norms. Instead of further working out the term “freak” in relation to social and fictional bodies, I use the term “drag” to designate various artistic practices of embodiment that additionally make it possible to draw relations to the history of queer subculture. First and foremost, I would like to thank all of those who actively participated in the Freaky conference, especially my colleagues Volker Woltersdorff, Jule Jakob Hesseler, and Paula Alamillo; the speakers; Antke Engel for moderating; the participating artists and filmmakers; Karin Michalski for the collaborative work in the film program and for organizing the film evenings; as well as the participants at the conference and the workshop who contributed greatly in their spirited discussions to honing my initial reflections. Since 2007, I have been working with Pauline Boudry producing film installations. Our collective research, collective discussions, events, and text production, but also the film installations themselves are the starting point of the reflections published here on a queer analysis of contemporary art. We also view the production of the films themselves, including the many aspects that result from working on the material and with the performers and the camerawoman, as a form of producing knowledge that intervenes in and pushes forward the formation of theory, academic, and cultural knowledge, and hopefully also social relations. For this reason, in the book as well, I work explicitly with three of these collective productions: N.O. Body (2008), Salomania (2009), and Contagious! (2010) (www.boudry-lorenz.de). I would especially like to thank Antke Engel for her support and for discussing every part of this book, as well as Daniel Hendrickson for his great work on the translation and Jess Dorrance for checking and refining the text. A number of colleagues and friends were very helpful too over the course of the book: Zoe Leonard and Ulrike Müller who presented and discussed their reflections and their own artistic works on the figure of the “freak” at a joint event at the Swiss Institute in New York, as well as Sharon Hayes who with Pauline Boudry took up the topic of “tempo8

ral drag” at the New York New Museum. And finally, Henrik Olesen, who proposed and presented extensively for me the first version of the work Some Faggy Gestures (analyzed in chapter 2 of this book) for my exhibition Normal Love (2007, Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin) (www. normallove.de). I am also very grateful to Jack Smith as a “friend from the past” who might or might not be happy with the friendship, but whose work, which I discuss in chapters 1 and 2, contributed greatly to the reflections in this book. Furthermore, I draw inspiration for the title, Queer Art, from the title of Stefan Brecht’s book Queer Theatre (published in 1978), which does not, for instance, provide an overview of the history of queer theater but instead denormalizes the genre of writing such a history in the first place. I would also like to formally thank the Collaborative Research Center “Kulturen des Performativen” at the Freie Universität Berlin for making this project possible and for having supported it – not least financially – throughout its entire course.

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, Ah, freak out / Le freak, c est chic / Freak out / Ah, freak out / Le freak , c est chic / Freak out. All that pressure got you down / Has your head spinning all around . , Ah, freak out / Le freak, c est chic / Freak out / Now freak / I said freak Now freak. (Chic, Le Freak, 1978)

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, N.O.Body, 2008

An Introduction N.O.Body, nobody The gaze follows the camera slowly from above, across rows of dark wooden benches up to a door at the end of a lecture hall, through which somebody is entering the room. Or is it nobody, as the title of the film N.O.Body 1 would suggest? N.O.Body is wearing a long, light blue dress with puffy sleeves and a tightly belted bodice, which emphasizes the breasts. S_he has a long black beard, you can see hair on her_his chest and arms, and long black hair reaching down to the knees. The performer in this film installation bears the name Werner Hirsch. Slowly, Werner Hirsch/N.O.Body strides down the stairs, where a little later – after s_he has prepared the blackboard for the professorial presentation – s_he gets up on the large wooden table of the 19th-century lecture hall, where usually the objects of study are presented to the interested or bored students. The slide lecture, which might serve as a certain kind of evidence for the presentation, begins with an image showing an obviously early photograph from the 19th century that seems to resemble her_him. It is, as we can read in a brochure, the photograph of the bearded lady Annie Jones, who appeared in freak shows at the end of the 19th century and who the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld cited in 1933 as an example of gender deviance (fig. 728, Hirschfeld 1933). With tender 15

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or desiring gestures, the performer gauges the outline of the figure in the photograph. The performance, generally theorized as “unmediated” and “anchored in the here and now” (Phelan 1993: 146; critical: Adorf 2007), in fact produces a series of temporal references (cf. Danbolt 2011: 1985). The lecture hall with its aged wooden benches is reminiscent of the time of its construction, but also invokes the succession of various formats of knowledge production, which since then have become common – including Hirschfeld’s slide show, a practice of legitimizing topics through visualization, which he introduced into sexology – and which raises the question of how the lecture hall is used today. The performer’s clothing plays off the Victorian dress of the historical photograph, but a series of other objects seem to come from the present or the recent past: a remote- control device, a black SM rubber mask, and a yellow plastic cube radio, which not only plays a laugh track, but also a contemporary pop song. Nonetheless, the performance is not necessarily an example of a contemporary usage. It appears – in the dimly lit hall – as an “uncanny” work, a work that perhaps takes place at night, and possibly for a long time already. Something is updated that otherwise merely adheres to the empty lecture room as a trace, as a memory, or as one possibility of usage against the grain. It is not any kind of practice that can be achieved with a single sequence. The film, a loop, shows this performance over and over again. In this setting, the possible positions of knowledge production are arranged spatially: the central position of the “professor,” the large, heavy table that exhibits the object of interest, and the blackboard, on which the findings can be recorded and on which s_he projects a whole series of other photographs. In Hirschfeld’s books, these pictures are classified and identified: the woman in men’s clothing, who ran a bar in Hamburg during the 1920s and was found dead one morning in front of her bar; the uniform fetishist blowing a hunting horn; the tutu fetishist in white tulle; the leader of the Chinese women’s movement; the birds on which intersexual characteristics were discovered; the patrons of a lesbian bar in the 1920s; the inhabitants of a Japanese province with tattooed moustaches; the giant; the intersex butterflies. The audience, facing this scene on rising seats, is obviously missing from the film. They are replaced by an empty auditorium (in which only the shining eye of a slide projector can be seen in the reverse shot) and by those of us who are watching the film, who are thus intended as a part of the film but who are not visualized in it. The “object of knowledge” is appropriated by the position of the producer of knowledge. But this produ16

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cer, while watching the slide, begins not to speak or to lecture, but instead to laugh softly. Soon Werner Hirsch/N.O.Body is laughing more and more. There are pauses, but the laughing goes on. The laughing seems to be designed. It is following a score that remains invisible. contagion What occurs between the performer and the historical photograph, as well as between the film and the film’s viewer – relations of desire or contagion, rather than the “imitation” of a historical figure – will be the topic of this book. Unlike representation and reception, the mode of contagion seeks to entangle the viewer as a participant in denormalizing practices. But how exactly does this occur, and what elements or practices allow for an artistic work to carry out or initiate denorma lizing practices – that is, to be able to trace a queer politics? This book will seek to examine this question with thorough, descriptive readings of artistic practice, not so much interpreting in the classical sense as possibly infecting. How can queer art be taken up in a way that does not classify, level, and understand, but continues, by other means, the denormalization that it incites, the desire for being-other, being-elsewhere, and change? Current political discourses do not, as Rosi Braidotti has noted (2006: 1), necessarily exclude change, but they do tend to overemphasize the risk that could be associated with it. In this way, conservative politics and hierarchical economies are privileged. In contrast, a radical queer politics requires us not only to propose images and living strategies for alternative sexualities and genders, but also to promote all kinds of economic, political, epistemological, and cultural experiments that seek to produce difference and equality at the same time. At the very least, according to Claire Colebrook (2009: 20), this means going back into the past and bringing up problem spots again that might seem to have already been resolved. Is then the decisive element of the film N.O.Body looking into the past and reposing the question of how knowledge about bodies is produced? Or is it the dignifying presentation of a body that so far has been considered non-intelligible (Schaffer 2009)? Why should viewers feel addressed by such an updating, and why should they want to join in with it? Could it possibly be a quick gaze into the camera or an inconspicuous gesture (one that does not belong to the repertoire of gender stereotypes) that engages us for the performance, the body presented, and the event? Is it perhaps the laughter’s joy or uncontrollability that takes the place 17

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of speech? Is it the material of the mask – black rubber cut into thin stripes, simultaneously veiling and presenting? Or is it the view onto an old lecture hall, which seems old and serious but also shabby and worn out, perhaps ripe for a new use, a kind of squatting? Elements such as these transform, as Elspeth Probyn suggests (1996: 9), specificities (knowledge, a lecture hall, a bearded lady) into singularities. They allow or prohibit intensity and transport desire that brings objects, people, practices, and ideas into contact with one another. According to Probyn, it makes no sense to read these singularities in a relation of signifier and signified (ibid: 59) or to assign them an inherent (queer) meaning. They shift meaning or postpone it; they undermine, as Nicole Brossard writes, “the solid matter of our ideas without our knowledge” (quoted in Probyn 1996: 59). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari illustrate this in A Thousand Plateaus (1987: 9) using the example of the pianist Glenn Gould: “When Glen Gould speeds up the performance of a piece, he is not just displaying virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the whole piece proliferate.” As Probyn claims (1996: 59), the “lines of flight” are also responsible for initiating changed and different relations within a matrix of class, race, and ethnicity, as well as sexuality. But how does this happen? a deferral and a gap Considering the processes of subjectification and the possibility of understanding them not as determined but as open to change, I have argued that photographs (or other cultural products) can also work as interpellations, thus interfering in processes of subjectification (Lorenz 2009a: 113ff.). If I now characterize the queer-artistic practice that interests me here, I would like to take up a contrary perspective, even if both viewpoints possibly complement each other. My thesis is that these artistic works are precisely in the position to break off interpellations, producing a temporal and spatial distance – a deferral and a gap – between an experience and any possible effect on the process of subjectification. These works thematize embodied categories such as gender, tracing their history and making them non-self-evident, but they do not offer them up to identification. Instead, they make material beyond gender available for reflection and experimentation. In this book, I would like to consider how exactly the deferrals and gaps come into being in queer-artistic works. Rosi Braidotti describes the subject as a “spatio-temporal compound which frames the boundaries of processes of becoming” (2006: 2). She 18

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proposes an ethics that is concerned with the capacity of being affected and of affecting, with the capacity for a “desire to become” (ibid), but also with the boundaries of this capacity. For the desire for change has boundaries or thresholds (which Michel Foucault would most likely have analyzed as power relations). These boundaries, which constitute the subjects, simultaneously restrict their possibilities and determine “how intensely they run [...] how far they can go [...] how much bodies are capable of” (ibid: 4). Braidotti thus examines what exactly these boundaries look like and how they are fixed. I would like to argue that the queer-artistic practices that I will be considering here break off or shift these boundaries. That they organize a distance to the subject and its compounds, a distance to heteronormativity, to being-white, to being-able, and moreover, that they facilitate the possibility of abandoning the confinements of subjectivity (the boundaries that set the norms that engender us). Queer politics is often concerned with the body – the individual or the social body – since this is where regulations or exclusions have been applied. The materiality of the body seems to restrict the possibilities of experimentation in a particular way. Foucault wrote very impressively about how the body functions as a “pitiless place” that prohibits movement, if only because one cannot move without it (2006: 229): “I can go to the other end of the world; I can hide in the morning under the covers, make myself as small as possible. I can even let myself melt under the sun at the beach – it will always be there. Where I am.” For Foucault, the prison of the body is so depressing that it immediately seems to suggest the unreachable utopia of a “bodiless body”: “Still, every morning: same presence, same wounds. In front of my eyes the same unavoidable images are drawn, imposed by the mirror: thin face, slouching shoulders, myopic gaze, no more hair – not handsome at all. And it is in this ugly shell of my head, in this cage I do not like, that I will have to reveal myself and walk around; through this grill I must speak, look and be looked at; under this skin I will have to rot.” (ibid) If artistic practice does indeed thematize the body in its inevitability, at the same time facilitating a deferral and a gap in relation to the body as a restriction for fantasy and experiment, then it would produce what Foucault, in the course of his text, sees as a “utopian body”: a body that is always elsewhere, that “small utopian kernel from which I dream, I speak, I proceed, I imagine, I perceive things in their place, and I negate them also by the indefinite power of the utopias I imagine” (ibid: 223). But isn’t such a model of queer art paradoxical, since on the 19

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one hand it affects or infects, that is, it also approaches unbidden, and on the other hand it allows a distance to be created? Or is this paradox of distance and proximity precisely one of the characteristics of queer art? Recently, in an exhibition about London subculture and political art in the 1970s, I saw a photograph that documented a gay-lesbian housing project from the time. It shows five people, all positioned frontally in relation to the camera. Three of them are looking more or less defiantly directly into the camera. Two of them are looking at each other, although their gaze hardly expresses tenderness or belonging. Instead, one of them is raising her eyebrow appraisingly, while the other looks back in challenge. All the figures are wearing various kinds of neckties, as well as vests, jackets (some leather, others not), and trousers. What caused me to look twice, and more carefully, at this image was not (or not only) the fact that it seems to be about a household of lesbians in the 1970s. Instead, I was drawn to the particular quality of the gazes; the casual but still somehow unfashionable way that this or that necktie is tied; the low-contrast, black-and-white photo paper; and that this group presents themselves less as housemates than as a band. While here it is less lesbian identity than singularities that “infect” and that infect in a way that partially evades my knowledge, at the same time it is these singularities that facilitate the openness to this form of housing and living, the readiness to see them as attractive, and perhaps a feeling of connectedness or the wish to be there. Such an image does not govern, for instance by providing norms or guides to action to which I am subjected: it does not compel me to immediately move into such a housing project, putting a tie on, and critically checking myself out in the mirror to see if the popular 1970s hairstyle known as the “mullet” suits me (even if all of this isn’t ruled out). Instead, everyone participating in artistic practices gets their own possibilities of agency, precisely because a space – a deferral and a gap – is opened up to experiment with what this wish for belonging might mean for their lives, and what material and discursive conditions in their lives must be changed in order to accomplish this. “What a subject can take” and “how far a subject can run” gets enlarged. Various embodiments and fantasies can be experimented with that are neither restricted by norms nor do they become imprinted into the body as new norms. Connections can be created or entered into that initiate processes of self-transformation and self-fashioning. Even those elements and processes that are not intelligible, that do not promise any recognition can become contagious. 20

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Contagion thus takes the place of recognition, which is a central element of normalization, by making norms and regulations acceptable for subjects. Contagion instead of recognition then also allows for speaking when one is not authorized to speak, for instance when one is not taken as someone who would have something to say about concepts of gender or as someone who even has a voice in society at all. Queer-artistic practice in this way also speaks without authorization, even when it speaks publicly and to others. I would like to use the term “drag” to name the methods of queerartistic works that makes such distance possible: radical drag, transtemporal drag, and abstract drag. drag – radical, transtemporal, abstract How can artworks pick out bodies, gender, and sexuality as their topics without providing a body for identification, disidentification, or counter-identification? How can a body be “there” if distance from the body is simultaneously suggested? How can the boundaries of what seems conceivable in terms of change – for instance with respect to knowledge about bodies and possible bodily practices – be extended? I am bringing in the term “drag” here to try to get at what queer-artistic works (at least the ones discussed here) produce. In the context of a queer art theory, drag may refer to the productive connections of natural and artificial, animate and inanimate, to clothes, radios, hair, legs, all that which tends more to produce connections to others and other things than to represent them. What becomes visible in this drag is not people, individuals, subjects, or identities, but rather assemblages; indeed those that do not work at any “doing gender/sexuality/race,” but instead at an “undoing.” If “I,” as Judith Butler has written (2004: 15), am always constituted through norms that I myself have not produced, then drag is a way to understand how this constitution occurs, and to reconstruct it on one’s own body. But at the same time, drag is a way to organize a set of effective, laborious, partially friendly, and partially aggressive methods to produce distance to these norms, for instance to the two-gender system, to being-white, to being-able, and to heteronormativity. In so (un) doing, drag proposes images in which the future can be lived.2 Drag, then, is fabricated by sets of bodily characteristics and actions. While it may indeed take on and thematize norms, it is nonetheless not restricted by them. The combination of fiction and documentary, of lies and claims, of reenactments and inventive experiments, and of conspicuously different bodily characteristics and artistic parts produces 21

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bodies that do not match up any dichotomies between “true” or “false” and “normal” and “other.” I would like to understand drag as an artistic work that, as Kathrin Sieg writes (2002: 2), “denounces that which dominant ideology presents as natural, normal, and inescapable, without always offering another truth.” The work of taking up distance is thus also a kind of sexual labor3 of desubjectification – a process that I see as central to practices of denormalization, and thus to queer politics. The elements of drag also make it possible to go back into the history of a production of knowledge about bodies and their emotions, affects, and desires – to pursue traces of history and to work out alternatives at the same time – precisely because drag means retracing processes of construction on one’s own body. Costumes, wigs, makeup, props, posed photographs and film scenes, stagings, and (possibly) fraudulent narrations connected to “appearances” take up expectations, evidence, stereotypes, and violent histories without facilitating their repetition. The relations produced also encompass those of the viewers. In the film N.O.Body, there is a brief moment in which the performer looks at the camera, making it clear that the body that s_he presents in the film – and that is similar to the one in the historical photograph shown in the film – is part of a communication. The connection with the material from the past occurs in order to produce and sustain another connection: that with the viewers as participants in the artistic process. The cinematic depiction does not provide access to the body of another (of the one depicted by the photograph or of the performer). Instead, an exchange takes place – a negotiation about the depiction, about seeing and “reading” bodies (including the body of the viewer). The name “drag” is meant to address the fact that the photographs, films, and installations being discussed here do not represent “deviant bodies,” but instead they show or refer to bodies that are always “other” (not “other than normal” but “beyond”) – in “another time” and “elsewhere.” Drag, then, is a set of queer-artistic methods and practices and, at the same time, a mode of making public and of negotiation. In this sense, I draw not only on performance but also on various artistic formats, even if the term drag originates in the context of (subcultural) performance. I am concerned here with a (queer) theory of (queer) contemporary art. Drag, nevertheless, facilitates the production of a particular reference to the practices of shows, of freak shows, of male and female impersonators, of cakewalks, of epileptic dances, as well as crossdressing (to name only a few formats that drive and have driven gender, sexual, and anti-racist activism and which have tested out and 22

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reproduced practices of estrangement and practices of distantiation from norms and normality). Analytically, I distinguish three modes of drag in this book, modes that do not mutually exclude one another, and which can appear together. The first is “radical drag,” a term that has been introduced in recent years to characterize drag appearances that do more or do something different than staging a transformation from “man” to “woman” or “woman” to “man”; that, for instance, work with contradictory gender markers or bring elements into embodiment that disrupt any interpretation within the two-gender system. I use this term for certain visualizations of bodies that may indeed thematize the dichotomies of man/woman or able/non-able, as well as other categorizations, but at the same time do not endorse these dichotomies and instead propose corporal images that cannot be made addressable, accessible, or intelligible within these criteria. “Transtemporal drag,” the second mode, designates embodiments with a focus on chronopolitics, which represent an intervention in existing concepts of time and establish temporalities that counter, interrupt, or shift an advanced economic or scientific development or a heteronormative course of life. Finally, I use the term “abstract drag” for visualizations of bodies that show no human body at all and which instead use objects, situations, or traces to refer to bodies. freak theory If I call the theory to be developed here “freak theory,” it is not my interest in identifying, for instance, the protagonist of the film N.O.Body or her photographic model as a “freak.” Rather, I would like to reinforce the possibilities for agency that are built upon the knowledge of the dual history of the historical freak shows and of being-freak: on the one hand, of the violent history of staring at and exhibiting people, which produces an ethical challenge, and on the other, the practices already mentioned of “being other” and “acting differently,” which cannot be captured within the logic of norm and deviation. Freak theory should not (only) be concerned with the history “of the freaks,” but should “be” freaky – acting and analyzing freakily. Freaky would thus need to change the status of knowledge and negotiation. This practice, if we let ourselves get infected by N.O.Body, would mean to laugh instead of argue, so to speak. But we mustn’t forget that it remains unclear who in the film is laughing about whom. Who is this N.O.Body? And is it s_he who is laughing about us the viewers, who s_he seems to examine over and over again? Or does s_he think that those appearing in the project23

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ed slides are ridiculous? Is s_he laughing about the historical process of producing knowledge, in which they become objects of knowledge, or about her_himself? Is she delighted about all of this, amused to the point of falling over? Does laughing take the place of explanatory or enlightening speech? There are conventions that regulate laughing and make it comprehensible. The laughter in N.O.Body, in fact, follows a score – that is, a series of signs that are reproducible. Nonetheless, we as viewers are confronted with the inability to translate the scene of seeing, understanding, and acting before us into knowledge. The scene gives us no indication as to how we might act in ways that are more appropriate, or less exclusionary or derogatory in view of the photographs. The relation of the historical materials to the performers or that of the performer to the film’s viewers is not so much one of understanding or learning as it is one of “contagion,” one that gets altered by the practices that it repeats or combines with other practices. In this way, what is conveyed is not a different kind of knowing, but instead the scene of producing knowledge is opened up. Who produces knowledge in it and who this knowledge is about (perhaps the viewers here are unwittingly the objects of knowledge?) remains unclear – a freaky theory and art will upset the relations between author, reader, and object, or at the very least destabilize it. What seems certain is that active connections are produced here between the protagonist, the slides, the spatial situation, and the viewers, and that affects or feelings are part of the production of knowledge: shame, joy, happiness, and fear turn up as affective moments that create connections or cut them short. They focus on an object or another person, bringing it closer or holding it at a distance. In this way, the distinction between serious and non-serious, sense and nonsense, which scholarship has more or less depended on since the Enlightenment and which gave it its status of objectivity, here becomes obsolete. How can a theory be freaky and still produce awareness or possibilities for action? What are the political gains of this? And how can it treat its object, in this case works from the field of the visual arts, in a way that makes them “usable” and accessible? In examining this question, theoretical and artistic practice should not be put on the same level. Nonetheless, they do go “hand in hand,” so to speak. While artistic methods can be based on theoretical ones, theoretical figures arise – even unexpectedly – from artistic work and can or must in turn be made accessible through reflection. A theory that is closely tied to artistic methods owes 24

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its distance from objectivity, from linear narration, from generalization, and from unambiguousness to visual and literary works. A freak theory produces meanings that cannot initially be distinguished through “exactness” but that need the “work” of the recipients; that are fictional as well as documenting; and that refer to other theories as much as they do to activism or aesthetic operations. So all the parts of this book are meant to be a dialogue between theoretical reflections and the intervention of artistic works (the work of artists that I discuss in this book, as well as my own work in film and installations – I am referring here to the three film installations, N.O.Body, Salomania and Contagious!, that I made in collaboration with Pauline Boudry), which hook up to these reflections, continue them, and incite further reflection. freak histories The protagonist of N.O.Body aspires to adjust him_herself to a historic photograph showing the “bearded lady” Annie Jones. Jones lived in the US between 1865 and 1902, and was one of the most famous bearded ladies of her time. When she was only nine months old, her face was already covered in hair, as they said. She was later contracted by the Barnum Circus and initially presented as a “freak” in a museum. For her family and, when she grew up, for herself, this exhibition was associated with a not insubstantial income – which was in no way the case for all freak performers (Bogdan 1996: 35). Jones toured with the Barnum Circus and later also with her own show in the US and throughout Europe. Freak shows had their high point in the 19th century, specifically in the period between 1840 and 1940. In the US, P. T. Barnum was one of their most prominent agents and profiteers. Along with the famous Barnum Circus, he also ran the American Museum in New York. Freak shows put people on display, specifically those who in some particularly distinctive way did not correspond to what was considered “normal.” These human exhibits were referred to as “human wonders” or “monstrosities.” Exhibiting and staring at people in the restricted spaces and times of the freak show ran parallel not only to the racist segregation and persecution of African Americans in nearly all public institutions and modes of transportation, but also to the so-called “ugly laws.” These laws prohibited people whose appearance was perceived as “different” from appearing in public and also, for instance, from making a living by begging. Many of these laws remained on the books until the 1970s, for one in Chicago: “No person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object or 25

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improper person to be allowed in or on the public ways or other public places in this city, or shall therein or thereon expose himself to public view, under a penalty of not less than one dollar nor more than fifty dollars for each offense” (Chicago Municipal Code, sec. 36034; repealed 1974; cf. also Schweik 2009). In using the figure of the “freak” as the foundation for a theory, I do so in reference to these violent histories of exclusion, exposure, staring, and differentiating. In order to develop an alternative discourse of difference, it seems necessary to me to claim the historical treatment of difference as the starting point for reworking it today, rather than understanding the histories of exclusion and violence as past and overwriting them with images of happy self-empowerment or with discourses of integration, tolerance, and “gay pride.” It is a matter of taking up moments of queer practice which, according to Douglas Crimp (2002), counter current movements of homogenizing, normalizing, and desexualizing. This reference to a history of exposure is nonetheless a risky kind of politics, for it means summoning up this history once again and giving it a new presence. At the same time, such a politics demands viewing this history from another perspective, proposing it as “other” in a way that seems to make possible a utopian approach to difference: one that tackles the problem of perhaps not being able to come to terms with the experience of violence and exclusion made historically in the context of the freak show. The historical freak show and the exhibition of people in a show might initially not seem so useful as a model that could contain potential for change. From the side of disability studies, it has also been formulated as such: that an appropriation of the term “freak” as a selfdescription or positive attribution from outside might not be all that empowering, since historically the associated practices of devaluation, disempowerment, and confinement are too violent. Eli Clare (1999: 70), in his book Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, claimed this for instance.4 It is therefore important to maintain that the recourse to the freak show and its methods that I will propose in the appendix in no way pursues the goal of suggesting “freak” as a term of identification – as an attribution by others or the self. Instead, the goal is to propose “queering” that also rewrites the past, as Verena Andermatt Conley formulates for the history of sexuality (2009: 28): “One has to go back through a deeper and broader history of homosexuality to give it back all the otherness it contains and of which it had been stripped. This cannot be found in an unconscious elaborated by repressive, official 26

an introduction

psychoanalysis but only through the progression of a sexual becoming that is always to come.” The fact that the staged photograph of the bearded lady Annie Jones was transported from the context of the show-business “freak show” into another discourse of difference – turning up again in 1933 in a book by the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld as “objective,” that is, visually comprehensible evidence of gender deviation – draws our attention to the fact that the discourses of difference are indeed historically transformable. But this transformation can in no way be tied to any narrative of progress, since the historically later operation of categorizing and pathologizing in the medical context can hardly be considered less exclusionary or violent. Any recourse to the past thus also makes it possible to reconstruct the various institutions, discourses, and material foundations of difference and to counter a narrative of progress that would declare the present time in the West as practically “liberated.” Despite the recognition that there are historically transformable cultural practices and logics that subdivide bodily variation and embodied practices into “normal” and “deviant,” and in no way are natural qualities of bodies and subjects, we all continue to be confronted everyday with interpellations having to do with tolerable appearance and conduct. Disregarding them has (voluntary or compulsory) consequences, ranging from the loss of friendships, desires, recognition, jobs – or the fear that this could happen – up to violence, which affects the body in various forms (cf. Butler 2004: 214). This includes the violent medical and psychic interventions that are still practiced to adjust infants and children that have been categorized as “intersex” (Klöppel 2010). What interests me in the term freak, however, are not only the echoes of the history of degradation and revilement that we hear in it – which are often not associated with the term “queer” (anymore) – but that it has also gone through a history of coolness, anti-racist self-empowerment, refusal of efficiency, and finally disco. Examples can be found not only in the hippie movement, where “freak” became a self-designation, but also, for instance, in a song by the band Chic, which was on everybody’s lips which ran: “Le freak, c’est chic.” Rumor has it that the song was produced shortly after the band members were denied entry to the famous disco Studio 54 due to racist door policies. The term “freak” thus historically refers not only to bodies, but also to denormalizing social practices: loafers, being productive but differently, being queer/left/feminist –various practices that for whatever reason did not really lend themselves to any kind of integration into a 27

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neoliberal capitalist economy that completely cherished difference (Engel 2009: 13). I am redeploying this term to emphasize difference and at the same time to speak from the non-position of difference. “Freak” does not mark any position in the aside, but instead marks a movement of distantiation, of keeping distance from ideals of being-white, beingheterosexual, being-normal, being-efficient. Freak theory is then to be understood as “work,” as working on the history of attributions and exclusions, and as an approach to difference that refuses to abandon differentiation. the practice of differentiation The title of the film N.O.Body is a citation from the title of the first intersex biography: Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren (or, Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years) by N.O.Body (1907), in which an intersex person presents how he initially grew up and was raised as a girl and then changed his sex. In the biography, we can see how such a sex change was already possible at the beginning of the 20th century. At the same time, the book treats the constraints and the misaligned possibilities for living such a life. The sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld wrote an epilogue to the book in which he advocates – an improbable task even today – for the idea that each person should be free to choose his or her own gender, and also that these people should be treated as such by the law. While the social practice of sex change, and Hirschfeld’s demand for it, is still based on and promulgates the identities of “man” and “woman,” even if it does not impose them, the pseudonym N.O.Body produces an artistic strategy that I would like to call “queer,” precisely because it maintains the tension between the histories of identitarian attributions and the possibility of organizing distance from them. N.O.Body represents an address: two first names – which because they are only initials do not disclose any gender though they refer to the question of gender – as well as a last name that refers to a “body.” But at the same time, “nobody” is brought up, and any address, any body that would be defined in terms of gender and identity, is thus refused. Perhaps a person is addressed who does not even achieve the status of person, to whom any legitimation for speaking is refused, but who nonetheless manages to transform the “non-addressed” into an address. Does this mean that it speaks to a history of exclusion, in which the status “somebody” is not permitted, since this body does not meet the demands of the two-gender system? Or has this body already eluded such categories? Is it not a clever strategy of presenting oneself, of claiming the space to act “differently,” and at the 28

an introduction

same time of depriving the powerful gaze by contriving an attractive name that is presented to others? While Deleuze and Guattari use the term “becoming imperceptible” to refer to the possibility of finding strategies that let life pass one by without intervening (1987: 320; Braidotti 2006; cf. also Papadopoulos et al. 2008: 71ff.), David Halperin uses the obviously related term of “becoming impersonal” to speak of the paradoxical strategy of being a person while at the same time removing oneself from this status (quoted in Munoz 1999: 178). He writes, “[to] cultivate that part of oneself that leads beyond oneself, that transcends oneself: it is to elaborate the strategic possibilities of what is the most impersonal dimension of personal life – namely the capacity to “realize oneself” by becoming other than what one is” (ibid). Drag can represent such a possibility of becoming (im)personal, of visualizing and fictionalizing bodies in a way that on the one hand refers to people, gender, abilities, and appearance while at the same time makes it clear that this is not a matter of a “person,” but rather of visualizing the possibilities of “becoming other than what one is,” as Halperin noted. Figures like Donna Haraway’s cyborg (1991) – a non-gendered mixture of human, machine, object, and animal – which in her words represent a “useful fiction” and in no way a social fact, or Gloria Anzaldúa’s figure of the “mestiza” (1999), represent a similar fictionalization and visualization of bodies that do indeed refer to possible bodies, but at the same time cannot be fixed to particular social bodies. These terms are not descriptive in a way that would stave off their usage for knowledges about particular social beings. The figure of the mestiza is a multiple one, a figure between two cultures, through which the irresolvable conjunction of different voices creates an ambivalence and leads to a psychic restlessness (Anzaldúa 1999: 100). The mestiza has to do with incompatible references that collide with one another. She would have to remain flexible; she would have to work through contradictions, refusing rigidity and clearly defined borders. This is why the future belongs to the mestiza (ibid: 102). What can be characterized as forming the violence here is not necessarily (only) a fixation, but also the compulsion to remain in motion and to simultaneously cope with multiple demands. In another text, I have characterized this as “laborious crossing,” as a new dispositif of power (Lorenz 2009a). Speaking of an “irresolvable conjunction” or of interfaces in the texts of Anzaldúa and other representatives of “radical black women” does, however, point to the fact that the practice of differentiating is at the same time a practice of connecting – one 29

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that not only produces new meanings, but also new materializations and embodiments.

1 A: Get out of town! Film installation by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz (15 min., 2008). The installation includes 47 photographs. Performer: Werner Hirsch. Camera: Bernadette Paassen. www.boudry-lorenz.de 2 For a proposal on “queer futurity,” cf. Muñoz 2009. 3 The term “sexual labor” brings concepts of a performative, repeated production of gender and sexuality together with post-Marxist and sociological concepts of work and precarity. Sexual labor is “doubly productive,” as it produces embodied, engendered, and sexual subjectivity and products at the same time (Boudry, Kuster, and Lorenz 1999). Since the formulation of a doubled productivity cannot sufficiently address the arbitrariness of the subject and technologies of the self, I have been less concerned in my later work with the products of sexual labor than with the performative process of their production. I have thus shifted the focus of my attention away from the production of engendered and sexual products/subjects and toward the continual effort that is associated with sexual labor (Lorenz 2009a). 4 This argument was proposed by Robert McRuer in his lecture “Enfreakment; or, Aliens of Extraordinary Disability” at the conference “freaky – queer art conference,” which I organized in Berlin in August 2009 (for more about the conference, see www.freaktheory.de).

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Wu Ingrid Tsang, The Shape of A Right Statement I, 2008 URL: Amanda Baggs, In My Language, 2007

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc

Freak/y Epistemology (Prependix)

challenging the foundations of self, body and knowledge production Drag as a set of artistic methods that produce a distance to norms and subjection deeply challenges the foundations of epistemology, conceptions of the self, theories of the body as well as art theory. It entails and asks for a theory that leaves the scene of knowledge production open and the roles of the participants in this scene as well as the division of power permanently contested. This theory I would like to call “freaky” (cf. the appendix of this book). Its distribution could be based on contagion rather than on recognition. A freak/y theory will (1) challenge the boundaries of truth and lies and of legitimate and dubious knowledge. It may (2) shift the rules of intelligibility through a new division of power and it could be further developed without authorization. It may be produced by and speak of “deviant” subjectivities without identities (3) and therefore it will be able to connect different representations of sexuality and gender with other discourses and axes of power. It may (4) talk about embodiments between the fake and the fictional and therefore not allow for a legibility of bodies. This theory is perhaps not able to leave the constraints of late capitalism (5), but it may invest in alternative economies and give credit for unexpected profits. Finally, it intervenes into dominant notions of space (6) and time (7) 35

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and thus disrupts their power to stabilize hierarchies and to normalize the current conditions of life. In order to develop a freak(y) (rather than simply) queer theory of art, I would like to begin this book with a discussion of Wu Ingrid Tsang’s video The Shape of a Right Statement I (5 min., US 2008) and the way it refers to Amanda Baggs’s video In My Language (9 min., US 2007). Both works could be designated as freak(y) art in their interplay, which produces, as I would like to show, a specific kind of epistemic intervention and knowledge production. Later, in the appendix of this book, I will reflect again on this chapter and draw from it seven methods of a freak theory of contemporary art. These thoughts about freaky art and theory may provide a critical framework for the considerations on drag that form the middle part of this book and hopefully challenge a reductionist thinking of queer as isolating gender and sexuality from the history of various other violations and normalizations of bodies, minds, and socialities that people experience. 1 knowledge Very little happens, the first image remains almost unchanged for five minutes. We see a person, the artist Wu Ingrid Tsang, in portrait, relatively motionless. He stares into the camera. He speaks a text, mechanically, impersonally. Only in the closing credits of his film The Shape of a Right Statement I do we find out that we were listening to the text from a video manifesto by the autism activist Amanda Baggs, which can be viewed on YouTube. Amanda Baggs’s video bears the title In My Language and is composed of two parts. In the first part, we see a performer, the artist/activist herself, in an apartment, at first in a kind of living room with some furniture and a window. She is often seen from behind and in fragments while she incessantly touches objects in the room, producing rhythmic sounds and singing along to them but without using words. Her body sways rhythmically back and forth; she moves her raised arms and individual fingers. Past her body, we see out of a window to bare trees. In an extreme close-up, we see her hand holding a thick rope tied into a noose and being scratched across a surface. In the next image, a hand is holding a silver chain while the other hand slaps it. Flat objects are pressed onto one another, a silver chain hits up against a door handle. After a few fixed shots, the second part of the video begins with the text frame: “A Translation.” We see more interactions, a finger moving in a stream of water coming out of a tap, or the performer standing 36

prependix . freaky epistemology

in the middle of the room swaying back and forth, moving her hands and fingers. We hear a computer voice that, as we briefly see later, is produced by Baggs with a voice computer. In this second part, the text reports on the experience that the language of the first part, which she calls her “native language,” is not only considered incomprehensible, but that people deny that it is a language at all, or that she could communicate with it. By “native language,” as is demonstrated on the visual level, and in the first part also the acoustic level, Baggs is referring to a language that does not function through symbols and meaning, but rather through action and interaction. When Baggs touches water, letting her index finger slide through the stream of water in the sink, then the water, as she explains later, does not stand in for something else; it does not symbolize anything, it’s about an interaction with water. Baggs makes a scandal of how directly a connection between language and thought is produced: since her practices, terms, and images deviate from cultural standards, her very capacity for thought and her status as a person is called into question. She clarifies how an asymmetry of power is produced; for she is only taken seriously when she has learned the dominant speech, while in reverse, the failure of others to understand her native language is considered “natural” and unproblematic. In her video, however, Baggs shows that she is not only capable of speaking her own language, but also of learning that of “the others” and even of creating a translation. By using the computer voice to speak, she herself takes over producing knowledge about autism and shows that the so-called experts and doctors have in fact understood very little. She turns these into ‘others’ as well, who she outdoes with her bilingual ability. In Baggs’s video, taking on the authority to speak without authorization is successful not only due to her savvy and the high level of reflection expressed in the text, but also in part through her clever formal construction that puts the viewer in the position of needing a “translation,” which Baggs then provides. But what happens when Wu Ingrid Tsang restages this video? Here we do not see Baggs but Tsang, who speaks the same text, maintaining the “I” of Baggs. Initially the words of the video seem to narrate the life of the performer’s personal history and biography. But since we see the performer speaking without mechanical support, copying the mechanical way of speaking indicates that he does not speak with his “own voice.” The voice is detached from the body; it becomes a transportable object like clothing or props. The body can obviously be linked to a voice, as if it were a wig or an object. We thus hear a biography that 37

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does not pretend to be authentic – that is appropriated to a certain degree and put together from heterogeneous elements. And although the text thematizes social power differences and the effects of exclusion and devaluation, by which the speaker in the video might also be excluded and to which this obviously refers, the relation of the speaker to these power relations nonetheless remains fictional due to the appropriated life story. Elements of authenticity are lacking that could entice viewers to draw nearer to the film through feelings of pity and thus to enter into the “sentimental mode.” The “sentimental mode” is one of four possible modes that Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2001) describes in her visual rhetoric of (photographic) representation of difference and where she argues that pitying simultaneously produces superiority. The framing, in which the performer can be seen in half-portrait before a solid background, would perhaps suggest the tradition of the painted portrait (cf. Schaffer 2008) or a popular image from the production of knowledge – that of a TV news reporter. At the same time, the shiny, colorful curtain, which is more reminiscent of a club than a middleclass home or a TV news studio, creates a certain distance to the mode of knowledge production – to seriousness and rationality. Tsang’s work does not repeat the first part of Baggs’s video, in which she presents her own language. Tsang contrasts Baggs’s constant movement and interaction with a bodily tranquility, almost rigor, in which he speaks the text. Instead, Tsang introduces another element: a tear, which can already be seen collecting in his eye at the beginning of the video, runs down his cheek at exactly that moment in which the text speaks of the experience of exclusion. This tear becomes a sign, since it is here obviously not a spontaneous and perhaps unintentional expression of emotionality, but rather a carefully timed staging. The tear takes up the motif of “water” from Baggs’s video and shifts the functionality of a sign reminiscent of Baggs’s remark that water has no further symbolic meaning. This prohibits any quick closure at the level of meaning, which might bring us to understand the tear as the expression of sadness or vulnerability. Yet, this sign can also refer to the fact that people with autism are declared to be unable to react emotionally, and it could thus provide a further translation that does not function at the linguistic, rational level. The tear can also be understood as an indicator that the production of knowledge includes levels of feeling and intuitive understanding, of empathy and vulnerability, which possibly mark the boundaries of language. By means of this shift away from a personal history to an epistemological reflection, the question of the social function of knowledge becomes 38

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more fundamental. Knowledge is scandalized as a means of creating hierarchies and producing exclusions, in that the means of production of knowledge are unequally distributed, and in that stereotypical ideas are reproduced of what qualifies as knowledge at all. 2 re-division of power The shiny background in Wu Ingrid Tsang’s video, as well as the head covering that the performer wears (a tight-fitting nylon cap that can serve as support for a wig) provide possible references to a queer subculture. This even more so if we take into account Tsang’s other work running Silver Platter, a well-known queer club in Los Angeles, or his activity as a trans activist. When Tsang speaks the text as a performer, it is associated with queer politics. It is implicitly thematized that queer genders and sexualities can only be articulated by acquiring the dominant, heteronormative language, and that there are numerous sexual languages that are disqualified as incomprehensible or impossible, and whose use put people in danger of losing their status as a “person.” Amanda Baggs suggests such a transferal when, at the end of her video, she makes two dedications that construct two groups: one dedication is to those with similar experiences, people labeled as “non-thinking,” and the other is to those who do such labeling. Both are groups that are qualified by their practices and cannot be ascribed to any preestablished identity. Through this construction of the two groups, Baggs makes possible the shift analyzed by Amy Robinson (1994) by herself moving from a minoritized position into one of the authority and the producer of knowledge. Amy Robinson sketches a model in which a previously minoritized group shares a certain knowledge (becoming an insider group), and thus create a second group of those who “do not understand” or are deceived, the so-called dupes. These dupes are, in Robinson’s model, those who are excluded from exactly this knowledge. A social constellation arises, Robinson argues, in which the rules of intelligibility – the rules of what can be spoken and who can speak – are shifted. Those who belong to the dominant social groups, who usually set the rules of knowledge, are here excluded from the position of knowledge. The viewer of the film thus risk becoming the “dupes” (the deceived, the non-knowing), especially in the first part of the video, when Baggs presents her “native language.” Over several minutes, the viewers watch the performer making noises in a living space by rhythmically hitting her hand against objects, all the while producing a loud humming tone. No 39

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explanation for this behavior is provided and it is difficult to classify it into familiar genres of music, performance, or visual art. In the second part of the video, Amanda Baggs “guides” the viewers, especially those who see themselves as “normal.” These are the possible dupes who might have found this behavior “strange” or even “boring” and “meaningless,” and who may not have realized that her behavior is a matter of language – of intelligent, human behavior – and who perhaps never once attempted to understand the rules of this language. Baggs does not, however, wish to fix the group construction, but provides the dupes with the opportunity to cross over into the “in-group”: those who, due to the explanation given in the second part, gained better insight into the multiplicity of possible behavior and who now recognize this “native language” as a language. Other viewers can ally themselves with Baggs, understanding their own “enfreakment” better, since they also belong to the group of those who are labeled “non-thinking.” Thus, the viewers are offered possibilities to transform in Baggs’s video. The problem of wanting to produce an alliance through the restaging of the text, without presuming to speak for the experience of others and to insinuate common ground, is expressed in the formal setting of the Wu Ingrid Tsang’s video. Even though the text is once again spoken in the first person, a certain distance to this remains in place. The video sustains a continual tension or paradox that is characteristic of queer politics: between the possible functionalizing of the autism manifesto for transgender issues and the wish to use it to create a broad solidarity with autism activism. 3 multivalence Wu Ingrid Tsang’s video refers to the socially devalued status of resistance in the field of autism,– I myself only became aware of Amanda Baggs’s video through this restaging. It makes Baggs’s analyses and experiences accessible for a queer debate. At the same time, the experience described with respect to language and cogitation is relevant, for instance, also for many migrants, who may well speak another language than the dominant one and who may share the experience of being devalued or not accepted as a person for that reason. Precisely because the video reports of experiences that are not characteristic of any particular group, but are instead positioned as problems in norms and normalization – above all in the politics of language, belonging, and exclusions – Baggs’s video opens up possibilities for action. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (1996: 10) accordingly understands 40

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the “freak” as an icon of general embodied deviance that can affect gender, race, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. She thus refers to this figure as “multivalent.” This multivalent character suggests rejecting renewed categori zations and pathologizations. The interplay of Tsang and Baggs’s videos produce a multivalent generalization without abandoning specificities. 4 embodiment I read Wu Ingrid Tsang’s presentation as a form of freak embodiment, an idea that I will connect to the figure of radical drag, which will be developed in more detail in the following chapter. The body that is displayed by Tsang’s performance – the shoulders, the clothing (of which we can see very little), the covered hair, and the androgynous face–gives out no visual qualities that might suggest the gender or sexuality of the person. Gender and sexual markings are instead clearly revoked. This is then no attempt to visually present a gender or sexual identity; no female or transgender body is made visible. Furthermore, the performer imitates a voice that is not his own but, as we learn when we see Amanda Baggs’s video, it is also not the voice of Baggs. Instead, it is a “female” computer voice (since with computer voices, there is usually the choice between “female” and “male”). If presumed “recognizability” on the visual level is often the basis for homophobic and racist statements, refusing or non-visualizing can be considered an important queer-artistic strategy. The performer in the video is obviously wearing a cap like those used as the foundation for a wig. Thus, while on the one hand, every gendered specificity is rejected, on the other, the possibility is opened by the performance to add gendered markings in the form of a wig. The visualization of the body chosen here thus suggests how a representation of gender and sexuality that does not refer to heterosexual norms and binary gendering might look. It also cannot be pinned down as “the other.” The possibility of wearing a wig presents gendered markings as non-natural, as constructed and constituted. Since the video does not accomplish any closure, the border of the human and how this is produced become the topic of the video without repeating these borders themselves. What is considered monstrous and as non-human and why? How are these borders drawn? The strategy of Baggs’s video is different, in that the performer exposes herself and her body to the starers, even if her body is often backlit or only partially visible. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2002, 2009) has 41

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described the process of staring as a performative one, in which the hierarchy between “normal” and “different” is not presupposed, but rather created through it. The starer confirms his/her normality through the process of staring, while the one stared at accepts becoming the object of staring. While Tsang’s video rejects this process by reversing the positions of staring – the speaker in the video stares back at the viewers – Baggs initially permits this process, formulating in the second part of the video that she is reflecting it, knowing that most of those who would simply see her on the street would not have believed that she could produce such a video. She seems to be saying: “Many of you are thinking that I am ‘strange,’ and it’s true, even more than those who simply see me as such can imagine, but with your limited perception and the common cultural codes, you simply cannot recognize the potential of my difference – my productivity and ability to communicate.” At the same time, however – and many viewers only understand this through the explanations of the translation part – the filmmaker produces “drag” or more precisely “radical drag” by showing a body or parts of a body that are constantly coming into contact with objects, tables, doors, windows, and water, which gives rise to “arm and hand of Amanda Baggs and table” or “finger of Amanda Baggs and water” or “Amanda Baggs and computer,” and thus to a visualization of a body in which no coherent and self-contained element by the name of “Amanda Baggs” can be found. A body is proposed that seems to come close to Donna Haraway’s cyborg as a powerful fiction. Like Baggs’s assemblages, the cyborg produces a delicious confusion of boundaries, for example between person and machine or between person and object. At the same time, a cyborg takes over the responsibility for (newly) constructing boundaries, like Baggs does in the second part of her video when she explains her concepts of “being-human,” of “language,” and “communication,” and thereby tackling what is understood as the foundation of our self-conception as human beings, as the foundation for “normal,” and as universal. As Haraway notes (1991: 151), “The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.” The images of both films thus also work on the paradox of taking on the violent gesture of putting-on-display through a putting-oneselfon-display while at the same time seeking to reject this violent act. A freaky image is shown without, however, allowing for any comprehensive access to the kind of freakishness, to what exactly produces difference here. Both films thus produce images-in-difference that avoid 42

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dealing with stereotypes and thus challenge racism, homophobia, and/ or ableism. But this avoidance of categorizations and stereotypes must also be considered in relation to neoliberal economy. The politics of neoliberal diversity and commercial advertising systematically produce images of freakiness or non-normativity that are displayed in order to be stared at, yet also foster an understanding of difference as cultural capital – a potential to be turned into utility according to liberal market expectations. To what degree are Baggs and Tsang’s videos in danger of, or resistant to, neoliberal appropriation? 5 economy In late-modern societies, as Antke Engel has shown (2009), the regu lation of gender and sexual manners of existence does not primarily function through prohibition and repression, but rather through normalization and integration. Neoliberal restructurings of national and global economies, which can be characterized as the process of a systematic “redistribution upwards,” make quite a targeted use of the “positive” representation of difference, which is not given as essential, but seems formed and formable. This gives rise, according to Engel (2009: 13), to images of homosexuals in service of the state, to representations of migrants in the public sector, and to depictions of sports pros or famous scholars as part of the mentally or physically differently abled community. Obviously, this is the source of the current interest from the queer-political side in taking note of those approaches in disability studies that reject normalization and insist on the right to difference. Robert McRuer, in his book Crip Theory (2006), emphasizes the degree to which the current economy appropriates and integrates camp strategies, which in the past still allowed for a distance to normalization. He claims that both queer theory and disability studies have been “disciplined.” One could thus ask whether precisely the rejection of an enfreakment and the emphasis on Amanda Baggs’s capabilities in translating her language does not in fact support the logic of integration in neoliberal economy? However, Baggs does not shy away from once again presenting the practices and embodiments taken as “strange” in dominant perception, insisting on a social space for these practices. Such a strategy of overemphasizing difference, which for her is neither characterized as formed nor as “natural,” can in no way be described as “integrative.” This focus on difference is nonetheless revoked in the visual composition of Wu Ingrid Tsang’s video. 43

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6 heterotopology The cap in Wu Ingrid Tsang’s video also functions as a sign that, for those who can read it, keeps ready a reference to the subcultural practices of drag and to the history of queer cultural politics. The background of the video image, a kind of metallic shimmering curtain, supports this. Elspeth Probyn (1996) views the term “desire” as decisive for an analysis of queer culture, proposing a concept of “desire as method” that would allow the creation of connection that cannot be linked to any model of identity. Her term “outside belongings” is used in the plural: there are always a variety of belongings that are desired, but that cannot be possessed. I would like to connect Michel Foucault’s (1986) idea of heterotopia – of another place that is still not “outside the world” and its power relations – with Probyn’s notion of “outside belongings,” representing heterotopia as a kind of outside-place that gives a place to desire and which is indeed “inhabited,” but cannot be possessed and appropriated. It is however no less real than other places, and provides for a kind of “belonging” by, for example, allowing for alternative logics and models of conflict in dealing with processes of differentiation. Thus, Tsang’s video produces a space in which the voice (materialized from a computer by Baggs) as well as the visualization by Tsang produce an embodiment (a radical drag) that can be valued precisely due to its non-classifiability. The concept of “outside belongings” at the same time also makes it possible to depersonalize identity without taking away of the significance and meaningfulness of the “longing to belong.” The term “queer,” according to Probyn, is a method of “making strange of belonging” (1996: 68). From the perspective of freak theory, the film could thus be seen as a way of making strange the allocation of Amanda Baggs to a group –the “handicapped” – and of showing the wish to find, as she does, one’s “own language.” At the same time, the film makes visible the process of differentiation itself, as well as the establishment of norm and deviation and of the recognition of scientific authorities. 7 heterochrony The first part of Amanda Baggs’s video is unusually wasteful with time. The same movements are shown over and over again, accompanied by a monotonous singing. But here we are not seeing productive, if boring, repetitions of work on an assembly line. Instead, time extends, as the sense of the movements cannot initially be grasped. Through the instruction of the viewer in the second part, the sensation of time is shifted yet again. The differently abled body, the body that proceeds 44

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uneconomically with time, can in no way be judged as regressive, but rather is shown as progressive and especially able. The video thus contradicts a model of progress that starts from the effectiveness of bodies and their careful reproduction as well as from the formability of bodies by medicine and consumerism – allowing difference only in an economically exploitable framework. Wu Ingrid Tsang’s video is already a “repetition.” It makes it clear that it is not sufficient to state Baggs’s critique and call only once – that there is no immediacy of transformation – but that this represents a work to be repeated with great effort. To connect an artistic practice with a “freaky” epistemology allows for a decisive shift in the understanding of “drag”: radical, transtemporal, and abstract drag are then less about working through preconceived categories than they are about experimenting with alternatives.

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Shinique Smith, Untitled (Rodeo Beach Bundle), 2007

Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, announcement card, 1992

Performances by Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, in: Sick by Kirby Dick, 1997

I. Radical Drag

A a body/bundle (shinique smith) A large format photograph by Shinique Smith shows a stretch of coastline, the middle of which is obscured from view. On the left of the image we see low waves; on the right, a sandy beach bordered with rocks. Visible in the background is a bit of green, hilly landscape, above we see a bright blue sky. There is no evidence of any life in the landscape, nor houses, cars, or any other objects. The only sign of human beings is a mass of footprints in the sand and the fact that someone must have taken the photograph. A rock protrudes into the foreground of the image; a large object is leaning on it hindering our gaze. Or is it a rock with an object sitting on it? A kind of bundle made of fabric and other materials bound up together? There is a blue plaid cloth with the same pattern as the plaid plastic bags that have become one of the signs of migration. There is also one of those bags with the same pattern in red, a white lace tablecloth, and bright yellow blocks of foam rubber, all held together with striped straps. The bundle is reminiscent of a human form; there could be a person hidden in the bundle, but that cannot be said with any certainty. Above, under the cover, which could also be a headscarf, there is a round form, perhaps a head, and underneath there could also be a torso hid53

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den inside a thick packing of foam rubber. This would then be a bulky burden on the back, which at the same time is no burden at all, since we, the viewers, know how little foam rubber weighs. On the one hand, the blocks seem solid and angular. On the other hand, we know that they are soft. The figure therefore is bearing a burden that is at the same time not a burden, or only a sign of a burden – a kind of fake weight. If the thing in front of us should be a human being, then there is nothing to be seen of the surface of the body and there is no evidence of gender, family background, or sexuality. Nor is there any evidence of age, weight, or appearance. In the introduction to this book, I described such a visualization of bodies – one which thematizes dichotomies such as man/woman, able/non-able, while at the same time refusing to endorse them, and which sketches bodies that cannot be addressed within such dichotomies – as characteristic of a practice that I call “radical drag.” This being, if it is one, does not present itself to us, the viewers, at all. On the contrary, it has its back turned to us, not only impeding our view of the landscape, but also refusing the typical pose of a portrait. The viewer is thus denied any access to the landscape and the portrait; we cannot see clearly what’s going on there and what object has been placed there, or which person might have set him/herself down there, although the large-format and carefully photographed image seems to extend the invitation to view such things. The title, Untitled, provides no further information, though it is amended by the addition (Rodeo Beach Bundle), so that we find out that the photograph is of Rodeo Beach, an urban surfing beach in San Francisco. At the same time, the word “bundle” reminds us that we cannot assume that the object before us is human, but that what we are seeing is first of all a “bundle.” The whole object or being could be a bundle, it could be about an object and not a being at all, but it could also be about the bundle or the burden that someone bears, just as it could be about the meanings or restrictions that one is burdened with. While we are denied any kind of truly revealing information, the fastening of the bundle is reminiscent of SM bondage practices, as well as of images of migration: the bearing of loads and heavy baggage in improvised bags, the headscarf, which is well-known as a sign of ethnicization from many visual representations of migration, and which is usually read as “feminine.” The photograph therefore refers to our ways of connecting the Western discourse about migration with the perception and the “reading” of individual bodies, which is here understood as a 54

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practice of power – a practice that links bodies with meanings and involves material effects. Understood in this way, the image is more about the viewer or the viewer’s relationship to what is represented – the possibilities and limits of producing knowledge by means of seeing – than of what there is to see in and of itself. While the links I just mentioned can be drawn, the figure nonetheless remains a “bundle” that does not claim any status as a person. The landscape as well. It could be one on which boats of illegalized immigrants land, who will soon be located and checked by the police, or it could be a landscape inviting us to vacation, swim, or picnic. It could be the kind of landscape that triggers a desire to see the world and to take to the seas and to reflect on other ways of life. The character in the otherwise “empty” landscape, however, is also reminiscent of the documentation of land art, especially that which positions the body of the artist in inaccessible and rarely visited landscapes, thereby developing a performance or an artistic practice that is not meant to become a product, or to be fodder for exploitation in the framework of the art market. Radical drag is thus a practice of visualization that invokes and reminds us of practices of power while at the same time refusing the option of merely repeating them. The photograph remains “strange” in the sense that it rejects the usual categorizations. If meanings nonetheless become attached and linked with the “bundle,” they may indeed potentially alter this body, or produce subjectivities. But these meanings are not created through the body. They function much more as a set of power practices, of possibilities or the lack thereof, of privileges or the lack thereof, which are affixed to this body but not produced by it, which have no “source” that can be traced back to this body. The bundle in the photograph remains untouched by all the meanings, thoughts, or sensations that we might attach to it. It is not defined by them; it shows no feelings and its future remains open. It is a future in which, for instance, it might end up for sale at an art fair, or take off on a journey, or land in deportation custody, along with many other possibilities. The fact that the figure remains undefined and ambiguous, that various desires or fears can be connected with it, does not mean that its fate is random – existing outside the order of the social, or playing no role at all – but that the viewer is invited to think through its possible fates and to sound out his or her own possibilities of agency in respect to this fate. Radical drag is then in no way a practice that merely playfully tries out new images and embodiments, thereby producing bodies that are not categorizable and which would be untouched by current 55

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migration politics or the inequities of the capitalist economy. Rather it is a practice that seeks out the possibilities of “becoming” within these experiences of inequality and hierarchies. It attests to the fact that these possibilities have not been completely colonized by the experiences of violence and disempowerment. Radical drag on the one hand produces a chain of objects, bodies, and meanings – a chain that invokes meanings without being dominated by them – which are “other” without it being possible to say “other than what.” At the same time, however, it produces a configuration that focuses on how the production of knowledge is dependent on social practices. Other works by Shinique Smith show “bundles” assembled together out of soft materials and fabrics and reminiscent of the human form, while clearly there is no human being hidden in this form. Untitled (Rodeo Beach Bundle) however, as can be learned from an interview with the artist (Pinder 2008), is the product of a performance in which Shinique Smith herself was tied up and had herself photographed in the process. But evidence about the performance can only be obtained through additional research, and not through the image itself, its title, or its mode of presentation. With this information, we know that it is indeed a body that is packed up in the bundle, and precisely that of the artist herself. And we know that she cloaked herself in the bundle – that the process of showing and simultaneously not-showing a body is thus the object of the performance. If we consider that it is a performance by the artist to be seen here, this seems to say: “Hey, you’re seeing a body here, but you can’t be too sure that it is a body, so just don’t say anything about what body it is and how it might fit into categories like ‘race’ and ‘gender,’ and since it’s less a body than a certain arrangement of body and objects, it’s also not ‘my’ body, and everything that you’re seeing in it isn’t ‘me’ either. Yet, this body has possibilities. It is open to relationships of desire and to a ‘becoming’ that cannot be restricted by any norm or limitation, by any deprivation of resources. You’re invited to participate in these experiments, but they don’t grant you any kind of privileged access or any kind of seeing that would at the same time also be ‘knowing.’ All ‘access’ is simultaneously a work of making accessible, and it always remains fictional.”

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B drag work (ron vawter) He takes off his tuxedo jacket while stepping in front of the stage. Wearing just trousers, a white shirt, and a bow tie, he addresses a few “personal” words, as he calls them, directly to the audience. His name is Ron Vawter and he is just about to show his performance Roy Cohn/ Jack Smith (1993/94) but he would first like to make a few preliminary comments about the two people who provided the names for the performance. First about conservative, right-wing Roy Cohn, who in the 1950s was Joseph McCarthy’s advisor during the persecution of (supposed) communists in the US, and who was later known for his work as a lawyer for conservative family politics and against laws that arose from gay liberation. Second about Jack Smith, who not only made films but also appeared as a performer in his own theatrical productions, which were important for a number of artists, including for Ron Vawter himself. Both men were gay, according to Vawter, but while their relation to gay practices could not have been more different (Vawter tells us in his performance, “Roy Cohn publicly denied his homosexuality his whole life; Jack Smith made it the radical center of his creative work,”) what they had in common was that they both died of HIV/AIDS in the late 1980s. Ron Vawter, as he adds, is also a person living with AIDS. Over the 17 years since I saw this performance in 1993 at the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt, this introduction has stayed sharp in my memory. Not only because Ron Vawter died the following year from AIDSrelated causes, thus retroactively making it very clear how much the engagement with death – with what is called “dying early” and “from AIDS” – also entails the question of “how one should live” or “should have lived.” It was also because this introduction made clear that he was willing to make this engagement public, to turn us, the audience, into participants, and to show us what concerned him. This seemed to imply a certain appreciation for “us” in his taking time for us, involving us in this debate, these thoughts and emotions. Another image is imprinted on my mind: Ron Vawter, who over the long course of the performance wraps himself in turbans and shawls, reclines on a divan draped in jewelry, and, in my memory, does little else other than concentrate with great calm or even slowness and attentiveness, on the small details that actually belong more to the careful preparation of such a performance. Putting gels into spotlights and deciding which color he would look better in; arranging his costume on the divan so that the fabric lies well; taking new pieces of jewelry from a toilet 57

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bowl next to the divan, trying them on and wearing them. He speaks little, and even when he does it is sentences like “No kidding, folks, they love dead queers here,” which is neither explained nor positioned. Or he calls out “Focus, focus!” giving vehement stage directions for how the performance should proceed, turning directly to other people working on the piece, who remain unseen, and who he criticizes or even attacks. In my memory, almost nothing happened for more than a half hour, nor did he say anything much in that time. If he did, it was mumbling and speaking to himself. Vawter created a public situation that was announced as communicating something about sickness and dying, and then did not spend this time on a critique of homophobia and health politics – he did not “use time well” – but instead let it elapse to a certain degree. He offered himself up to the audience to be viewed and observed, while at the same time ignoring the audience. He followed none of the demands of information and concentration. All of this seemed to me outrageous and impressive. I was astonished to find out later that this part of the performance in fact covered six pages of text. While I was familiar with Ron Vawter through his work with the New York theater company the Wooster Group and his appearances in experimental and Hollywood films, it was first through this performance and afterward that I learned about the work of Jack Smith, whose 1981 performance What’s Underground About Marshmallows was reconstructed by Ron Vawter here. In 1992, when Vawter first performed the piece, Jack Smith had been dead exactly three years. Smith’s person and his work were not “historical.” In fact, all his friends and other interested persons (even those who’d never liked his work) were still quite present. In the film documentation of Roy Cohn/Jack Smith by Jill Godmilow (1994), one sees close friends of Smith, such as Penny Arcade, in the audience. The reconstruction of the performance was thus a way of being engaged in the “afterlife” of Jack Smith, of keeping him alive among friends in an underground community, and of honoring a dead man who didn’t necessarily belong to the dead, who in the wider public was considered, in the words of Judith Butler, a “mournable life” (2010). According to descriptions of Jack Smith performances, for instance those of Stefan Brecht (1978), they frequently took place in his own apartment and often had no more than two or three or five spectators, so that the reconstruction of a performance is also a way of further distributing it. What also made a great impression on me when I saw Ron Vawter’s performance was the obvious opposition between the very personal and moving opening of the performance and its strict and simple form. It 58

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consisted of two parts separated by a break in which the audience left the theater. Both parts in themselves evidenced little change in tempo, set, costumes, and events, while nonetheless each part was sharply distinct from the other one. While little happened in the second part of the performance on Jack Smith, time stretched out and understanding was hindered. The first part was equally long and uniform but still seemed “concentrated,” which was due to the fact that a great deal of information was given, the plot was immediately comprehensible, and that it took up the conventions of a speech or lecture, which we are used to following throughout their entire, sometimes annoying length. In the first part we saw Ron Vawter’s staging of a speech by Roy Cohn, in which he stood behind a lectern wearing a lavender tuxedo jacket and holding a glass of champagne and spoke for about 40 minutes. The sentences in the speech provided the audience with a whole series of biographical hints and guesses about Roy Cohn. For one, about his double standards, indicated by his endorsement of conservative family politics and denunciation of homosexuality in the face of the fact that he himself had no family and lived as a gay man. And for another about his biography: about the time that he was an employee of Joseph McCarthy engaged in red-baiting; about his dismissal when it was brought up time and again that he had a relationship with his male advisor; about his role as a prosecutor in the espionage trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in the 1950s, in which he pleaded for the execution of Ethel Rosenberg, who is today largely considered to have been uninvolved in the spy case at hand; and finally about his bourgeois, wealthy family house, his anti-Semitism, and his own Jewish background. The 40-minute speech performance, compared to a real speech, is delivered in real time; it borders on the limits of what patient listeners at a “real” banquet speech would be willing to put up with before eating. The strict structure of the performance, the details of set and costumes and the clearly perceptible tempos, are some of the elements that affect and involve the spectators. They do so without pursuing “being gay” as an identity category but rather through thematizing it as a singularity that is lived and experienced in a particular way, while also existing in diverging axes of power. I would therefore like to trace, in relation to this performance, what possibilities it contains to work with and develop the term “radical drag,” and also what possibilities the term radical drag might offer to understand this performance as a queer practice beyond identity and categorization, even if it is a matter of a white, US-American man who identified as gay staging two people of the “same kind.” 59

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the threefold work of drag Although the term “drag” has often been used and discussed as a designation for cross-dressing within subculture, there are surprisingly few queer-theoretical reflections available on this term.1 Judith Butler, in the early 1990s, introduced drag as an exemplary figure of the political in her book Gender Trouble (1990). As Butler argues, since drag imitates gender identity, it implicitly exposes the imitation structure of gender identity as such (1990: 175). Drag can denaturalize not only the twogender system and heteronormativity but also, if we understand gender and sexuality as a structuring force for a wide variety of social institutions, this practice can intervene in the various areas of the social – in hierarchies and exclusionary practices. In this early work, Butler also calls such performances “gender parody,” while emphasizing that it is not gender that is parodied, but the notion of the original (ibid: 175-76). Drag would thus not be a kind of acting, distinguished from everyday practice by its performative operations. Instead it would show everyday activities, costumes, embodiments, and narratives in a way that makes it possible to understand all everyday practices of subjectification as performance and mimetic repetition. Fundamentally, it is the function of drag to make it visible that all practices of subjectivization are “drag.” Accordingly, I could also describe Ron Vawter’s representations of Roy Cohn and Jack Smith as drag, even if they are not based on any gender change. Vawter shows two very different ways of living and performing gay masculinities, although both take place under similar social circumstances: whereas one practices homophobia and a homophobic, deprivileging handling of AIDS, the other participates in gay subculture. Due to the stringent structure of dividing the performance into two, there is an emphasis on the different speeds of the body movements in the two parts, as well as the costume change–in the first half, Vawter is wearing a tuxedo and in the second he dons a lavish costume that includes a turban, a cloak, jewelry, and a lot of naked flesh. The tuxedo is just as much a costume of a gender performance as is the exotic and gender-ambiguous costume of the second half. Furthermore, the manner of speaking and gestures in the first part become “artificial” in hindsight. In Gender Trouble, Butler argues that such a corporal or performance practice is made possible and intelligible through the imitation of gender and sexual norms, while at the same time it produces these norms. But they potentially or even surely produce them with a difference. Drag can thus not only reflect the norm, according to Butler, but it can also destabilize it with its incomplete or parodic performance. Therefore, 60

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drag is successful when the normal or the original proves to be a copy, an ideal that no one can embody. One could argue that the performance Roy Cohn/Jack Smith produces such a repetition with a difference – in particular because it is a reenactment of other events and performances. In my view, however, drag creates something else, something that goes beyond, which cannot be sufficiently grasped through the model of performative repetition. Drag produces: (1) a distance to subjectification rather than a model of subjectification and thus the prerequisite for experimentation and the possibilities of going beyond norms and normalization; (2) a work of desire; and (3) a practice that is in no way individual, but always relational. 2 If I wish to understand the performance Roy Cohn/Jack Smith using the term “drag,” extending it here to “radical drag,” this is to point out the renunciation of and discontinuities in the performative process and their unpredictable effects (not only productive ones, but also destructive ones) on all social relations. radical drag (as experiment) When I saw this performance in 1993, the opening statement seemed to be something preceding the actual performance, something that was meant to explain to the audience the motives that had given rise to the research for this performance. It reminded me of a lecture, at which the speaker, before beginning the lecture, explains in a few personal and improvised words why s_he entered this research area, thus inviting the listeners to follow along. But in the film Roy Cohn/Jack Smith by Jill Godmilow (1994), which documents the performance, rehearsal footage is shown that clearly demonstrates that the introductory passage is just as carefully prepared as the other parts of the performance in its sequence, the stance, the text, and the emphases. Even the seemingly improvised and reflective words with which Ron Vawter ends the introduction, saying that it had come out “more solemn than I had intended,” exist as a written text and in no way represent any kind of spontaneous excuse (Vawter 1998: 457). The appearance “as Ron Vawter” is no less a precisely calculated performance than the appearances in which Ron Vawter is seen as Roy Cohn or Jack Smith. For the spectators, it is Ron Vawter that we hear, talking about his illness and introducing the performance; but at the same time it is also not Ron Vawter, but instead a performer playing Ron Vawter, and therefore himself. It is precisely this copresence that makes it drag. Ron Vawter and at the same time “Ron Vawter drag.” For the spectators, this means that a certain proximity to 61

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the performer is created because they learn something personal about him, which is nonetheless shaped for this public event, thus creating a certain distance and leaving certain questions open. For instance, does this information inspire sympathy in me or rage about the politics of AIDS? And what am I going to do about it? Would I be so public about this, and if so, what effects does this have and how would I do it? Would I choose similar words and a similar habitus? Instead of an evening about the person Ron Vawter, which might have followed from such a personal statement, we then see an evening about Roy Cohn and Jack Smith, two “points of contact” that are grounded on a biographical proximity, since both were gay and died of AIDS. Ron Vawter presents himself in a group with both of them, as someone who in the future will also most likely be someone who died of AIDS. In this way, the portrait of Cohn/Smith is at the same time a self-portrait that negotiates the performer’s politics, fears, questions, and possibilities without binding them to a body, a biography, or to practices that can be directly considered or understood as “his own.” Thus the genre of self-portraiture becomes newly invented as something that does not so much demand a view inward as it privileges the view to assemblages, to contact with others, to an association with others, and to a comparison with other biographies and other courses of action. This produces a projection of possible but (so far) unlived practices that could have determined one’s own past, or which are possible for the future: in this case, a disavowal of being-gay and of illness, which is directed against others as well, as in the case of Roy Cohn, or a radical critique of capitalism and heteronormativity, which defines the work as much as it makes it precarious and only accessible to a few, as in the case of Jack Smith. The latter produced embodiments of “queer” in his films and photographs that could not be read through the grid of masculine or feminine and did so in a radical aesthetic and formal configuration that was “contagious” – a practice which was taken up by many others, including Ron Vawter.3 This was by no means done in a conciliatory manner. Time and again Smith publicly denounced people who seemed to him to be representatives of capitalism as exploiters (even if he did use his own vocabulary, such as “Uncle Fishhook”4). Compared with other artists with whom he collaborated and who drew many ideas from him, such as Robert Wilson or Andy Warhol, Smith was much less well known during his lifetime, had less audience, and was hardly economically successful. Smith’s radicalism, which can also be expressed or at least regarded as personal failure within the existing society, produces a desire and allows 62

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for the possibility of creating a different society, which Ron Vawter then brings to the stage. This even if Vawter himself obviously (in part) made different decisions in his life (he was publicly present both in experimental theater and as a Hollywood actor). In both parts of his performance, Ron Vawter does not “play” Roy Cohn and Jack Smith; he makes no attempt to “be” Cohn or Smith or to make the spectators temporarily believe that he is them. Instead we see Ron Vawter on stage performing how he has established contact with the materials that both his titular figures left behind. Not only with the clothing and props that can be seen in photographs, but also with, for example, documentary films about Roy Cohn and recordings of his appearances as a politician and lawyer. Or in the case of Jack Smith, with an audio recording of one of his performances, and other materials unearthed by means of research (for instance by visiting Smith’s favorite costume rental shop). Finally, Vawter also used material from his own notes, for instance about the construction and design of a Jack Smith slide show. Especially because of the introductory words, the person of Ron Vawter, his sickness of AIDS, his motifs, and his interests remain an essential element of the performance, which is in no way meant to be completely covered by the reconstruction of a Cohn speech or a Smith performance. We see Ron Vawter-Roy Cohn, Ron Vawter-Jack Smith. We see a body getting in touch with the various costumes, speeches, and tempos of speaking and moving; with actions in various political contexts such as the McCarthy era and the beginning of the so-called AIDS crisis; with various ways of producing or undermining meaning. the elements of contagiousness The audio recording of the Jack Smith performance What’s Underground About Marshmallows, which Ron Vawter draws from, plays on a Walkman that is obviously used during the whole performance as a basis, and which is also played aloud several times, audible to the spectators. Vawter turns the sound on for the audience and repeats the sentences, or he turns it on and says them at the same time. The tape is clear evidence that it is not Jack Smith that we are seeing and hearing here, but someone else, Ron Vawter, who is remembering Smith, who needs help remembering, and who is furthermore no longer quite Ron Vawter, since he is saying words and doing things that he pulls from the documentation of someone else’s work, and who gives himself over to the work of someone else. The connections that Ron Vawter commits to have a dynamic of their own that cannot be planned in advance and 63

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that refer to the aesthetic and “contagious” qualities of the materials and to the way that these move in space and time. The reconstruction extends not only to the words and the habitus in which they are spoken but also – as Vawter stresses in an interview – to the particular quality of time, especially the slowness, which distinguishes performances by Jack Smith (Vawter 1998). As he explained, he used the recordings not as a memory aid to the text or the voice, but as a kind of metronome to set the pace (ibid: 449). The goal was thus obviously not so much to convey an impression of “similarity” to Jack Smith or to deliver any particular interpretation of the person of “Jack Smith,” but rather to allow Smith’s working method to run through his own body by means of the materials left behind, which is only possible due to the prosthetic Walkman. The connection of Walkman-Ron Vawter-Jack Smith-manner of speaking makes it possible for him, for example, to waste time (both his own and that of the spectators), and to do so in the light of AIDS and of the urgency and the lack of time associated with it, which then perhaps becomes more evident. So a space emerges – a deferral and a gap – for engaging with AIDS politics and for the vulnerability of bodies, a space that is not predetermined. The costume is not the costume from the 1981 performance, but was reconstructed from a photo of Jack Smith, which stems from another context. Neither did the slide show, which can be seen in the background, take place in Smith’s version, although there was one in many of his other performances. This was obviously less about an exact reconstruction of a particular performance than it was about a reconstruction that collects materials and puts a certain emphasis on the choice, and thus also on the person, Ron Vawter, making the choice according to his own interests. At one of Jack Smith’s slide shows, Ron Vawter had made notes on the construction of the images and the sequence of the slide show, and then staged such photographs during a journey to Amsterdam, in which he himself wore similar clothing and assumed similar poses to Jack Smith in the urban landscape. One could thus say that the renewed embodiment of the historical material not only encompasses the elements of a performance which Ron Vawter experimentally and provisionally takes up (as is shown in the careful repetition of the text, part by part), but also elements from their preparation, as the new embodiment, and the making of slides in another city on another continent. This, however, was not clear during the performance and produced a slight discomfort 64

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about whether we were seeing “original” materials, that is, whether the slides showed a heavily made-up and costumed Jack Smith, or a quite similar Ron Vawter-Jack Smith. In the case of Roy Cohn, Ron Vawter found no material that he wanted to use as the basis for his reconstruction, and instead relied on an incident related by Roy Cohn’s chauffeur in a biography. The chauffeur tells of driving Cohn and his lover to a dinner at the American Society for the Protection of the Family. Cohn was the invited speaker. His speech attacked homosexuality (Vawter 1998: 445-46). Since there is no documentation of the speech and the American Society for the Protection of the Family (unsurprisingly) refused to cooperate, Ron Vawter decided to write the speech himself, together with the playwright Robert Indiana. The speech, which could be a document, is thus a dramatic text, and one that goes to little effort to appear genuine. Not only does the speech mention several details from Cohn’s life that he would no doubt have kept hidden at all costs – such as the fact that he himself had no family or that he was suspected of having a homosexual relationship during the McCarthy era – but other details are narrated in such a way that they are left ambivalent in the best case. He denounces anal sex in the speech, for instance, with a (sexist) excuse to the ladies in the room in a way that not only produces a hate-filled speech but that also links up with sexual pleasures, activating this with words and gestures (he shows his fist and how far it submerges). In the text and the lecture, therefore, Ron Vawter not only reconstructs a possible speech but also conveys the results of his research on the person and biography of Roy Cohn, which at the same time turns the speech into a (fictional) document of Cohn’s conduct and a critique of this conduct. To a certain degree, Ron Vawter stands alongside his reconstruction of Roy Cohn, adding in what the other left out so that he could pass as “heterosexual.” He employs the speech, however, in order to put gay sexual desire into words and images. At the same time, it is a contact with himself, with what he himself did not do or decide, despite the fact that he could have done so. But there are also similarities with the aspects that, according to his assessment, say something about himself by the example of others. In the interview with Richard Schechner, Vawter states that he did not so much produce and denounce the person “Roy Cohn” as he denounced the “Roy Cohn in me” (Vawter made, for example, absolutely no attempt to imitate Cohn’s way of speaking) (Vawter 1998: 448). In particular, according to Vawter, through this text he was able to make contact with the time in his life when he was in the military and then left it and had 65

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his coming out: “Once I got the text together and began working on it, it was hard not to identify, not to recognize in my own life that I had done a lot of things like Cohn had” (ibid). Since he did not explain this any further, I can only make a few conjectures here, for instance that homophobia in the army had caused him to pass himself off as heterosexual, even at the cost of insulting, offending, and denying privileges to other members of the military, who might have shown ways of behaving or embodiments that were legible as “gay” or “transgender.” Passing as heterosexual presumably demanded a high outlay of “sexual labor” (cf. this book’s introduction: footnote 3; Lorenz and Kuster 2008; Lorenz 2009a) to produce actions and embodiments that were accepted as heterosexual (i.e., having a tough body, being good at sports and physical exertion, having a lack of emotionality and a callousness toward others, cracking sexist jokes, and making innuendos of relationships with women). A “longing to belong” (Probyn 1996), the wish to have a coming out, and the wish to identify as gay can thus also be seen in a homophobic environment as violence against the self and others. A reconstruction of himself as Roy Cohn, whose right-wing and violent behavior took place in public and is incontrovertible, thus allows for a critique of such ways of behaving and retroactively facilitates taking responsibility for the shaping of the relation to oneself and to others. The reconstruction of various materials traces out the field of possible deterritorializations and reterritorializations. So on the one hand, “Ron Vawter” becomes fictional and multiple and is confronted with different possibilities. On the other hand, he nonetheless produces references to other figures – contemporaries who grew up with him but who had already died of AIDS – who are not disparaged through his own history and its own motifs. This contact produces a fictionalization of Ron Vawter who does not appear as autonomous and solitary but rather in radical drag as an embodied being that is linked time and time again to one person or another, as well as to materials, actions, objects, and situations, and who is altered in the process. This contact also takes place unconsciously or in ways that are spiritual. Vawter played audio recordings of Cohn while he slept in order to let his way of speaking enter into his unconscious (Vawter 1998: 449). In an interview, Ron Vawter talks about a practice that he drew from Native American rituals and used in his attempt to identify the contact points with Jack Smith. Since his grandmother had grown up on a Choctaw reservation, Vawter visited a workshop about ceremonies and dances in relation to the ashes of a deceased person: “There are man66

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tras that get sung and dance steps around ashes. Then you mix the ash with the color you’re using as makeup” (ibid: 451). After Penny Arcade, a friend of Jack Smith’s, had provided him with some of his ashes, Vawter mixed them with the glitter that he wore at every performance. Together with Schechner he tried to put into words what this did, “something spooky.” “I get a very, very heavy charge which pulls me through the performance” (ibid). Schechner suggests the term “trance” as a second presentness that is together with one’s own on stage. “It’s like a different rhythm from mine,” says Vawter (ibid). They discuss the degree to which an unconscious dimension is in effect here, without disturbing or preventing the conscious and studied actions. If this can serve as an example of radical drag, it is about a copresence that does not produce any transition from one state to another (from femininity to masculinity, from Ron Vawter to Jack Smith), but a third thing – a collective body that remains in movement and that shies away from any conclusive appropriation, any understanding or access. re-employing estrangement Roy Cohn-Jack Smith drag does a variety of things. It turns bodies into performers. It connects them with certain ways of speaking, a certain temporality, with homophobic AIDS policies, as well as with performances that allow us to imagine alternative bodies and ways of behaving. It connects them with objects. It extends the body with costumes (a tuxedo, a lot of naked flesh, a large number of necklaces). And it cites materials that were found or invented, and that are then presented. In her book Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany, Katrin Sieg draws on the estrangement techniques of Bertolt Brecht in order to explain the way drag works, or more precisely the way “ethnic drag” works (2002: 59ff.). This gives preference to a model of acting not based on any identification of the spectator with the character that is represented. Instead, techniques are introduced that produce a separation between body and role, thus making it non-selfevident and visible how the body comes into connection with elements of class or gender. “It throws the truth-value of identitarian signs into question while pulling into view the social apparatuses that enforce and punish certain acts and scripts” (ibid: 59). The actor does not “act,” s_he does not merge into the role; instead s_he cites actions and emotions. As Brecht notes (1964: 137), “The actor does not allow himself to become completely transformed on the stage into the character he is portraying. He is not Lear, Harpagon, Schweik; he shows them.” The sound and the 67

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stance should always retain something of an offer or a suggestion; the intention should not be to merge with the performance (ibid: 138). As an exercise, Brecht suggests speaking the stage directions aloud in the third person, so that two tones of voice clash, and the second (that is, the actual text) is defamiliarized. A defamiliarizing deferral comes into play because an action only happens after it has already been outlined and announced in words (ibid). The actor also makes no attempt to hide the fact that s_he has rehearsed the text and that there is a textual basis, just as s_he emphasizes that it is her own account, view, version of the incident that is on offer here (ibid: 139). Brecht distinguishes between facial and bodily gesture, linking bodily gesture with the character represented and facial expression with the observation and assessment of the character by the actor (Sieg 2002: 60; Brecht 1964: 369). The actor also develops visible feelings, but they are not necessarily the same as those of the character (Brecht 1964: 143). Other elements of the theater should also be liberated from illusion, for instance, projections should be clearly visible as such, or the light sources/spotlights should not be concealed (ibid: 141). The elements of the performance Roy Cohn/Jack Smith which have already been mentioned (the introductory explanatory speech, the citation of materials and their open usage, for instance in the use of the Walkman or the placing of spotlights on stage) seem to owe much to this theatrical technique. This technique would lead to a historicization of the incidents, according to Brecht; even if the incidents take place in the present, they are clearly and perceptibly placed in a social and historical context (ibid: 140). With the epic theater, as he calls his technique, Brecht develops a countermodel to the bourgeois theater as a model for the ideological reproduction of capitalist society. Sieg limns: “It deploys an elaborate, illusionist machinery to hide the labor expended to produce (hi)story, and agency is either veiled (the theatrical apparatus) or denied (spectator)” (2002: 60). Are the estrangement techniques, as Brecht described them, therefore suitable to mark the deferrals and gaps that I associate with radical drag and with the artistic methods of deconstructive queer art? ec-static/s As Bertolt Brecht writes, the estrangement effect is introduced in order to make the self-evident in a certain sense not so evident; “but this is only in order that it may then be made all the easier to comprehend” (1964: 143-44). The actor described here is thus one who knows the 68

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boundaries between him[!]self and the persons represented, and is sure of his own motives; he knows what he wants to make clear. He has in his hands, so to speak, the means to shape the social and history. He can show how this happens and also convey this capacity to the spectators. I would like to confront this model with Judith Butler’s reflections on a decentered subjectivity, which she refers to as “beside oneself” or as “ec-static” (2004). The starting point for her reflections is the AIDS crisis. Vulnerability – physical and psychic – up to the possibility of losing one’s life, produces a self that can be wounded by others and that therefore is dependent on others. Butler uses mourning a loss as the example to clarify how possible it is to end up “beside oneself” – to lose control and no longer to have a sense of oneself as “autonomous.” As we might add, mourning is also a state in which mechanisms of subjectification, for instance technologies of the self that observe, judge, and regulate one’s own behavior, are deferred. Whether a behavior is recognized, whether is it usually associated with shame, whether it corresponds to expectations in gender roles or appropriate sexuality – when one is “beside oneself” these things do not play the role that they otherwise do. Aside from mourning or the fear of death, there are other opportunities to end up beside oneself; sexual passion, grief, or political rage can also lead to it (Butler 2004: 20). What is interesting in Butler’s model for the discussion of radical drag is that on closer examination it is less a model of subjectification than one that defers or interrupts subjectification. A deferral and a gap that make it possible to abandon norms, not to submit to normalization, and to become estranged thus emerges in a state of extreme vulnerability and dependency, and precisely not in the mode of autonomy and separation from others and the other, as Brecht’s model seems to suggest. In order to formulate the contradiction, Butler introduces the term “undoing.” This lets her on the one hand speak further of “I” and the “others” and also to be able to sense oneself readily as “I,” but on the other hand to see subjectivity and embodiment as inseparably connected to others and the other. If “I” create connections, it is paradoxically always a work of “undoing” the self. In this way, Butler can then also characterize sexuality and gender (and other ways of “being beside oneself” that one might add) as modes that are less our “property” than they are “modes of dispossession.” Since Butler has elsewhere emphasized the degree to which subjectivity always means both recognition of the “I” as well as subjection to norms (2001: 101), it is therefore a matter of modes in which we not only do not belong, but in which we also do not subject ourselves. 69

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Since it is important to me to characterize a distance from subjectification (which becomes ever more clearly the largest possible distance to the “I” or to an “identity”) for the way queer-artistic practice works, it seems notable to me that art theorist Irit Rogoff has adduced similar affects or emotions to those described by Butler as a motif for an involvement in the politics of the visual arts. She speaks of a mode of “being implicated,” which at the same time serves as an argument against a continued existence of the separation between “artistic work,” the “producers,” and the “viewers” (Rogoff 2010). Accordingly, a queer-artistic work would be appropriate to produce connections and separations that noticeably interrupt the autonomy of the artistic work as well as the autonomy of all participants. A “being implicated” or a “being beside oneself” can then set denormalizing practices into motion, since the stabilizing norms on which a self is based here form the foundations and potentially become a motif of rage, but also and at the same time are abandoned in that one’s own state of “being-beyond-oneself” is acknowledged, indeed, it becomes the starting point of politics. The way that Ron Vawter embodies Roy Cohn and Jack Smith, letting their timing, their habitus, their voices, or even the ashes of Jack Smith’s body run through his own, could then be understood as the recognition of this being beyond oneself and as the starting point for denormalizing practices. a mode of dispossession Amy Robinson (1996) makes clear through the example of “passing as white” the degree to which the idea that identity is a possession – and thus that passing is an “acquired” identity, the theft of something that does not belong to one – is linked with other possessions and the social role of “private property.” This is particularly alluded to by the meaning of “to pass” as “to fall into someone’s possession”: “If identity is to be considered as property – as what belongs to me and what makes me belong – then it is not altogether irrelevant that commodification operates as one of the earliest interpretive frameworks associated with passing. Although private property can be understood as one potential form the commodity takes under capitalism, I will contend that the process of commodification is itself inimical to the very idea of identity as private property” (Robinson 1996: 248). Private property and also the right of the “private person” to possess oneself has historically not be allowed to everyone. While Brecht demands the autonomy and independence of the actor from the connections that he incurs precisely in order to cri70

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tique bourgeois ideology and private property, it becomes clear here the degree to which autonomy is based on private property. If there is private property, it must be protected. Therefore the concept of the private citizen also encompasses the claim to a “private sphere,” from which the burden of the social can be excluded (ibid: 245). Amy Robinson cites the legal scholar Patricia Williams: “‘Black,’ ‘female,’ ‘male,’ and ‘white’ are every bit as much properties as the buses, private clubs, neighborhoods, and schools that provide the extracorporeal battleground of their expression” (quoted in Robinson: 246). The right to privacy thus includes the right to associate with those experienced as “same”. Williams continues: “These social spaces [...] are defined against the threat of intrusion produced by the difference of certain kinds of social subjects” (ibid). Ron Vawter-Roy Cohn makes it clear that “passing” is a (drag) performance, which then becomes a successful “passing” when others read the embodiment proffered as a clear-cut and understandable identity (here as a white, heterosexual US-American) (cf. ibid: 241). Vawter’s performance makes it comprehensible that the “passing” obviously and above all could succeed because Cohn defined a “private space,” his own and that of the American nation, which was not to be entered by others, above all not by “homosexuals.” This allowed him to act against “gay rights bills” time and time again. In contrast, a mode of “dispossession” can be understood as a (queer) intervention into the social meaning of private property. Dispossession intervenes in the possession of one’s own body and of the self. A denormalizing “freaky” theory and politics will thus in no way pursue the demands of integration, since these leave intact the idea of a private (or national) space inhabited by people who are more or less the same, or by those who are at least the same in that they share particular values and norms, particular modes of embodiment, and particular practices. Instead of a common identity, Judith Butler suggests “vulnerability” as the starting point of a community that is linked over possible differences: “We have all lost someone in recent decades from AIDS [...] we are as a community, subjected to violence, even if some of us individually have not been. And this means that we are constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies; we are constituted as fields of desire and physical vulnerability” (2004: 18). This political “we” however raises the question of how to address the fact that the one, although vulnerable, became “Roy Cohn,” while the other went through life as “Jack Smith.” 71

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Roy Cohn/Jack Smith seems to make clear that the practices and politics that characterize those who can be or are wounded, or to be more precise are afflicted with AIDS and in the end must die, point in such different directions that a common politics of these three protagonists seems unthinkable. Roy Cohn’s homophobic and violent politics quite obviously rule out any political “we” that would include him. Indeed, one could object that his politics were not remotely based on the starting point of his own “vulnerability,” affirming the “undoing” of his self, but on the contrary that they claimed autonomy and invulnerability, even when one’s own existence is threatened (be it through loss of a job and social ostracism or be it through sickness and death). In contrast, Jack Smith in the performance seems like someone who over-affirmed vulnerability. Not only statements like “I have to live in a squalor all day long playing hide and seek with odors” or “They love dead queers here,” but also his talk about the “safe” in which he and other underground filmmakers were kept, leads to the fact that the section Ron Vawter-Jack Smith raises the question of vulnerability retroactively, also for the Roy Cohn part of the performance. This is supported by Ron Vawter’s radical drag performance of Roy Cohn, by his fictional speech that takes its starting point exactly in the vulnerability as it is muddled by elements of “undoing”: be it through references to Cohn’s dependence on the politics of the father and the family of origin when it is mentioned that the father was also a judge and how the family lived together; or be it through references to sexual lust and to gay desire. f.p. & a.p. (queer estrangement) In his book Queer Theatre, which first appeared in 1978, Stefan Brecht, the son of Bertolt Brecht, introduced – as I would like to put it – a kind of queer theory of estrangement techniques that undermines any rationality and autonomy on the part of the participants, thus not primarily taking “private property” as the preeminent feature of a bourgeois life, but rather ownership of the self. The participants are “queers – but not the nice kind” (he specifies: “drag queens & dykes & leather/motorbike/ S&M hard trade”) (Brecht 1978: 28). It has an ironic effect and thus produces a certain distantiation from his father when Stefan Brecht as well proposes a model of theater as a challenge to bourgeois life in capitalism – indeed an innovative, queer, and highly denormalizing theater, which he not only describes as immoral, but also as “pointless, emotionally impactless, untheatrical; cer72

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tainly devoid of social relevance” (28). (Stefan Brecht refers to the New York “theatre of the ridiculous,” which, alongside the early performances by Jack Smith, he describes in his book as exemplary queer theater.) Institutional theater, as Stefan Brecht suggests, sustains heteronormativity by privileging traditional forms of cohabitation and by regulating individual and collective practices, especially sexuality. He develops the acting figure of his model of theater as a non-identitarian one, and the theatrical group as “family,” which despite the name seems to allow for a certain distance, both to the family of origin and to the “community.” They are both the personnel of the theater proposed here as well as the designations for a mode that comes close to that of “dispossession.” The participants of this theater and of this way of being are somehow not subjects, as their practices consist above all in making fun of various things. They are-not. They are fictional (thus corresponding to the personnel of radical drag). As Stefan Brecht writes, “His [!] personality is like the make-believe identity a child assumes in play with others or an actor assumes in the theatre and is as real as these – accepted (felt by him and projected outward in activity), real not in the sense of corresponding to any true given nature but as being his free product expressed in action” (30). They have various qualities, but they are above all not reasonable and reject values. In his excursus entitled “Family of the f.p.,” which begins with a citation from Charles Ludlam that “Jack [Smith] is the daddy of us all,” Stefan Brecht develops the qualities of the “free person” (or f.p.) in distinction to the “authoritarian phony” or a.p. (28ff.). At first glance, this seems to idealize gay identity as free and to delimit it from heterosexual identity as phony, but at second glance it is rather associated with practices: “The life-style adopted is that of a free person as distinct from an authoritarian phony, the civilized adult” (30). The difference is clearly made, but this “theory” and the lifestyle connected with it also seem to make fun of difference. There is already an implicit irony in the fact that the abbreviations are chosen in such a way that the meaning of the “p” seems interchangeable: the free person and the authoritarian phony or the free phony and the authoritarian person. An a.p. approximates a robot who accepts preprogrammed wishes and ideas as his own, thus consigning himself to others: “He then acts out a role-identity not his at all” (31). An a.p. takes things seriously and attributes meaning to life. He is value and achievement oriented, and accepts standards of conduct as objectively valid (31). He seems to be a Fordist high performer, whose values can still be discovered everywhere today. 73

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In opposition, “The f.p. is erotic, socially self-assertive, playful and imaginative. His erotic and self-assertive inclinations are social and coincide – two facets of his love/hate, selfish/other-oriented, life-affirming/ life-destroying interest in the personality and reactions of others – facets of the same natural propensity to relate personally to others, physically and mentally, thereby to come to be somebody” (30). In this short outline there are also other parallels to the reflections on “vulnerability” and dependency on others given here: “Personal identity comes into being by imposing it on another; it does not preexist privately” (30). The goal of the f.p. is oddly to establish families, but these are open or only momentarily stabilized; they are not communities of the same but have “the aim of moving, penetrating, dominating the other” (30). And since an f.p. possesses no values, the family is constituted freely and follows freely convened rules (31) – what that might mean is not developed any more precisely – and this familial life nonetheless claims no objective validity. The practices of an authoritarian phony consequently conform to a conventional theatrical performance, as Bertolt Brecht also criticized. Stefan Brecht notes: “He participates in an institutional ‘theater’ with prepared scripts, mistakes the play for reality, his part for himself and the action assigned to it for his life” (31). A possible dichotomy of f.p. and a.p. also breaks down where, in the end, both end up in chaos: “But since his values and reason are as arbitrary as the f.p.’s self-dramatizations, the phony’s judgments and order are chaos” (31). drag as a labor of desire With the introductory words that Ron Vawter-Ron Vawter addresses directly to the audience, he takes them as a group of people who may not necessarily know him personally (“My name is Ron Vawter”), but who are prepared to co-produce the performative assumption – certain belongings and non-belongings – with him. For instance: the rejection of the homophobic and misanthropic politics of Roy Cohn, his own vulnerability to such politics, and the wish to avoid normalizing practices (which means, not meeting rich people for dinner in the framework of the “society of the protection of the family” in order to uphold the family and denounce all other ways of living). The audience becomes a group of accomplices in the project for the evening. This introductory act already transforms them from a random theater audience to a political “we,” which recognizes vulnerability to homophobic, racist, and exclusionary practices as a common starting point. 74

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Ron Vawter’s announcement, that he will show the spectators something, initially seems to correspond to Brechtian estrangement technique, since this requires that the actor perform everything that s_he has to show with the clear gesture of showing, thus drawing the audience into the performance. S_he rejects the illusion of a fourth wall and presents, according to Brecht, his_her actions, her wishes and interests with regard to (historical) materials, and allows the spectator to develop an engagement as well. “The spectators don’t have to completely merge or identify with what is shown, but with the act of showing” (Sieg 2002: 60). Since the first part of the performance has the format of a speech, however, the audience is not simply confronted with a contact point to Roy Cohn, but is directly drawn into this. It is, to a certain degree, itself in drag. For Ron Vawter-Roy Cohn directs his speech to the conservative members of the American Society for the Protection of the Family, whose role is taken up by the audience at the performance. As such, the complicity of the audience is not restricted to a connection with Jack Smith and an understanding of a common critique of heteronormativity and the homophobic discourse about AIDS, but it is also addressed as a group of accomplices in Cohn’s politics. According to the artistic strategies of drag, the audience as well is “fictionalized” to a certain degree. If the audience, in a Brechtian sense, is required to take on a heteronormative position and to develop an appropriate political behavior, then it is also just as much an artistic strategy of creating contact, the outcome of which remains open, as it is the strategy of speaking to a group of conservative family protectors. The audience “is” no queer community, but comes into contact with what it might mean to be such a thing. When Ron Vawter-Roy Cohn raises his cautionary fist, the same one that can practice anal sex, he seems to be saying: “Look here, this is not me. I’m Ron Vawter (that is, Ron Vawter-Ron Vawter), not Roy Cohn. But it’s important for me to show you that there are lines of flight here and from these lines of flight opportunities can arise to disparage others, to be full of hate and violence. I, Ron Vawter, am talking back here. I’m activating myself. I am no passive receiver of hate speech. I am not the victim of this homophobic politics. I repeat this speech, I make it my own speech, and in doing so I repeat it, not with a difference, but I double it, speaking once as Roy Cohn and once as Ron Vawter.” And for us, the participants in this project, this results in the possibility of tracing lines of flight and possible becomings. So, by means of repetition, the setting that Roy Cohn produced in relation to his listeners can be 75

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proposed completely anew, and an experiment can be suggested that goes beyond the critique and visibility of circumstances called for by Brecht. I would like to address such communication with the spectators through the possibilities or difficulties, the pleasure or the rage of joining Ron Vawter, Roy Cohn, or Jack Smith as “drag as a work of desire.” The fictionalization of the audience becomes paradoxically clearer when its appearance as a “queer community” is foreclosed in the second part of the performance, in the citation of a queer performance from the early 1980s. Ron Vawter-Jack Smith in no way complies with the rules of a performance or having respect for the audience. What happens occurs tantalizingly slowly. He does not address the audience. He seems to see no commonalities. Especially in contrast to the first part of the performance, the performer seems absolutely uninterested in the audience. Ron Vawter-Jack Smith gives the impression that the performance, if we want to call it that, is more for himself than for others, and that he is still stuck in the preparation stage of the performance, since he has neither decided how the lighting should be or which exact costume he will wear. If the audience produces “belongings,” it is not because the performance invited them to do so. The audience is dismissed, so to speak, from the community. In the first part, a setting is produced in which the audience is in fact doubled, but simultaneously is made a co-producing part of the performance. A meaningful and cohesive speech is offered to the audience, which both shows an attitude and also critiques it. But in the second part sense is withdrawn and the audience is left alone with the question: “What the hell is that and why is it being shown in this way?” This contradicts the recommendations of Bertolt Brecht, who required the actor to communicate with the audience and to win them over to his critique (1964: 144). In contrast to this, the queer politics of this performance obviously consist in producing uncertainty in the relation to the spectators – perhaps especially for those who are not familiar with Jack Smith’s work – and to continually dismiss the audience from the position of those who understand something. This opaque character of the performance – which largely limits the connection between the audiovisual, the temporal, and the conventions of meaning without replacing them with new, legible signs – corresponds less to the epic theater than to the theater of the f.p. that Stefan Brecht proposed as a queer way of being. One problem formulated by both Judith Butler (2004) and Irit Rogoff (2010) is that the language is missing that might take the place of the de76

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mand for political rights, a language that is not only in the position to confirm or to claim our legitimacy as legal persons, but also a language that makes it possible “to do justice to passion and grief and rage, all of which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, and implicate us in lives that are not our own, sometimes fatally, irreversibly” (Butler 2004: 20). Ron Vawter’s performance, I would like to suggest, can be understood as work on such a language, if we understand “language” as a set of artistic means which take “vulnerability” as the starting point, thereby placing difference in the context of social power relations and precarious circumstances of living, but which still succeed in grasping these not as “difference from” but as “becoming.”

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C doubling embodiment/pain and pain (bob flanagan and sheree rose) What does the claim that “embodiment” is dependent on others – that it has a public dimension and is tied into social practices – reveal about the notion that bodies age, hurt, become sick, or die? Obviously sickness has a public dimension; the sick body is especially dispossessed by attributions and expert knowledge. Even the comparison of healthiness and sickness produces an evaluative categorization that has been taken on by activist initiatives, such as the Socialist Patients Collective (SPK) in the 1970s. According to the SPK, everyone in capitalism is “sick,” as sickness is the only possible form of life in capitalism; but a few are “unfit-to-work sick” and thus in a position to intervene politically against capitalism and alienated work. For this reason, the SPK also refused the identities and roles of doctors and patients. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his opening greeting to the pamphlet Make illness a weapon: “Obviously the cure cannot, in our regime, be the suppression of the illness: it is the capacity to continue producing all the while remaining ill” (1987: 5). But isn’t sickness, in the form of exhaustion and pain, also directly tied to this one particular body, and can it not also be made to disappear through resignification or drag? The public dimension of the body also means not only that it is “dispossessed,” that embodiments and subjectifications have collective elements, but also that I am made responsible for my body. My body is considered exactly what belongs to me, what makes me visible to the outside, what I have to take care of. Michel Foucault impressively described this compulsory link between “I” and “embodiment” in his radio text Utopian Body (2006), which I have already mentioned. The unloved shell of the body is what I have to speak from and what I can let myself be seen from. What relation does “radical drag” and the distance associated with it – the deferral and gaps – have to such a compulsory linkage? I would like to pursue this question through the example of the work of the writer, artist, and performer Bob Flanagan, who died of the illness cystic fibrosis in 1997, an illness that he had thematized in his work for many years. A whole series of his works were created together with his SM and life partner Sheree Rose or were documented by her. In his performances, Flanagan or Flanagan/Rose referred to his sickness and above all to the public perception of the sickness. He made appearances in a hospital bed or a coffin, often beginning his performance by reading from newspaper articles that started with the words: 78

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“Bob Flanagan should actually be dead.” These articles are making reference to the short life expectancy of those with cystic fibrosis; Bob Flanagan’s sister, for instance, who also had the disease, died at 21. At the end of his life, Bob Flanagan kept a pain journal in which he formulated his feelings and thoughts on life with the sickness, with pain and the threat of death. In it, he made clear what role pain and fear took up, at least during this time in his life, and how rarely he appeared as heroic or philanthropic, but also how important it was for him to make even this public: “Horrible stomach aches and nausea. Heavy little shits. Is it the new antidepressant, the Wellbutrin? Don’t know if I’m sick or crazy. Short of breath everywhere I go. Making like I’m dying. Am I exaggerating? Why would I? Who am I trying to impress? All the time thinking I’m going to die, talking myself into a frenzy of phlegm and fatigue. Maybe I’m getting better. Maybe I’m not. Now they say I should exercise. First they say use the wheelchair and conserve your energy. Now they say ‘exercise.’ Exercise/ wheelchair. Exercise/ wheelchair. Hard to know what to do or who I am in it all. And while I’m dwelling on death–Preston, 23 year old from cystic fibrosis summer camp, died a couple of days ago. Funeral tomorrow but I’m not going. Should have called him last week, but what would I have done, wished him luck?” (Flanagan 2000: 14ff.) Yet, Bob Flanagan thematized and produced, usually in cooperation with Sheree Rose, SM practices and scenes in his performances. He had himself beaten or pierced, bound or hung by the feet from the ceiling, and he became famous for a scene in which a nail was driven through his penis. Two parallel stories emerged: that of the pain in SM and that of the pain of the sickness, both of which were made public and had some relation to one another but were not congruent or interchangeable. In this way, Flanagan obviously managed to eroticize the pain; and he claimed that he would not have lived as long as he did without SM (Flanagan lived to the age of 43). In a performance in which Flanagan appears as Supermasochistic Bob, and which is documented in the film Sick by Kirby Dick (1997), we see Bob Flanagan in a kind of “freaky” Superman outfit. The cape is made from a hospital gown, blowing behind his naked torso, and he is wearing a mask that leads to his nose and supplies him with oxygen. Tubing runs over his chest into a round plastic piece on which he has painted a red “S”. His nipples are pierced and his abdomen shows decorative scarification. To the melody of the famous Mary Poppins song he sings, “Super-masochistic-Bob is cystic fibrosis, he should have died, when he was young . . .” Even though it is explained 79

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over the course of the song that he would already have died of cystic fibrosis had SM not preserved him from it, this in no way produces an image of a superman that puts a beautiful, athletic, and “able body” in place of the image of sickness and pain. Flanagan’s song is constantly interrupted by coughing, which makes the image of sickness and the image of “cheating sickness” simultaneously perceptible. He is the one who can sing and the sovereign performer who continually makes his audience laugh with his pain, his timing, and his ironic lyrics. At the same time, he is the one who can’t really sing well since he constantly has to cough. In his song, Flanagan does not produce any theory about how exactly SM-pain and CF-pain relate to each other. “Fighting Sickness with Sickness,” both redundant and ambiguous, is one of his statements on SM, sickness, and the appearances that brought both the one and the other to the public. In his poem “Why” (1993), Flanagan answers the frequently posed question “Why do you do this, Bob?” (By which people mean: “Why do you do something so perverse as SM?”) But here as well, we do not receive any answer that formulates its own theory on this question nor, equally imaginable, do we get this question refuted as impudent, meddlesome, meaningless, or insulting. Instead we hear a very comprehensive collection of answers that seem to contain both his own experiences, opinions, and ironic exaggerations as well as they describe a series of attributions, prejudices, and compulsory measures that were possibly ascribed to him. And in this collection, there is no difference made between answers that are meaningful to him and those that he might experience as impertinence. Flanagan rants: “Because it feels good; because it gives me an erection; because it makes me come; because I’m sick; because there was so much sickness; because I say FUCK THE SICKNESS; because I like the attention; because I was alone a lot; because I was different; because kids beat me up on the way to school; because I was humiliated by nuns; because of Christ and the Crucifixion; because of Porky Pig in bondage, force-fed by some sinister creep in a black cape; because of stories of children hung by their wrists, burned on the stove, scalded in tubs; because of Mutiny on the Bounty; because of cowboys and Indians; because of Houdini; because of my cousin Cliff; because of the forts we built and the things we did inside them; because of what’s inside me; because of my genes; because of my parents; because of doctors and nurses; because they tied me to the crib so I wouldn’t hurt myself; because I had time to think; because I had time to hold my penis; because I had awful stomach-aches and holding my penis made it feel better; because I felt like I was going to die; because it makes me feel in80

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vincible; because it makes me feel triumphant; because I’m a Catholic.” (Flanagan 1993) Obviously, it is not only the pain that is eroticized here and infused with desire, but also the (psychically but perhaps also physically) painful connection between bodies and meaning. If the relationship between the pain of SM and the pain of sickness and the pain of meaning still cannot be explained, the various discourses nonetheless are constantly getting mixed up, even when Flanagan himself did not directly plan for this. His describes a situation, for instance, in which he was approached by one of the kids at a summer camp for children with cystic fibrosis who asked him about an article in which his (public) SM practices were described. It turned out that the article was in the office of the Cystic Fibrosis Society, which had a clipping service. The office director was obviously downright annoyed, since the society, according to Flanagan, was dependent on sweet, sick children whose images were printed on posters to aid in collecting donations. As Flanagan noted, “And I’m like the poster child from hell saying, ‘Don’t give us money because we’ll grow up to do things like this!’” (quoted in McRuer 2006: 189). If the body is then the medium by which we appear in public, then a doubled body becomes public here. The SM practices prevent the body perceived as sick from being completely integrated into the discourse on sickness and from eliciting pitying or sentimental reactions. The offensive exhibition of sickness also prevents a normalization, commercialization, and integration of SM practices (as a further, interesting variety of sexuality), as well as the idea that sickness can in fact, as Flanagan often insinuated, be completely domesticated through SM. The juxtaposition of pain and pain allows not only for a forming of the body – radical drag – in which pain is linked to pain in a way that a third thing is produced. (This thing cannot be categorized; it produces meanings and makes connections but does not bring anything to a halt.) It also allows it to become public even from a non-authorized position: while Bob Flanagan may have had the chance to speak from the charity position, as an aging poster child, or as one who himself provides support in the cystic fibrosis camp despite his own sickness, he manages to take up the discourse about sickness in a completely new place through the connection with SM. He shifts it in the direction of “perversion” and of a distance to “normality” and integration, and speaks, as it were, to sick people as a sick person. Pain and pain do not result in any dichotomy here; instead they also change what counts as an “able body.” He is able to perform, able to invent, and to demonstrate SM practices but at the 81

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same time he is marked by the sickness: he is sometimes pushed to the performance on a hospital bed, he needs oxygen, he needs assistance, and he is not fully in control or autonomous. The film by Kirby Dick (1997) also shows Sara, a 16-year-old who also has cystic fibrosis and who contacted Bob Flanagan through the Make-a-Wish-Foundation. This society lets sick children make a special wish, most often a trip to Disneyland. Sara, however, wished to meet Bob Flanagan. In an interview, she describes how impressed she is to see that Flanagan has an occupation and an artistic practice – that despite the prospect of an early death he “has a life.” During the interview she is sitting next to her mother. When the interviewer asks whether she is also interested in Bob Flanagan’s SM practices, her mother shakes her head “no,” while Sara explains that she is indeed completely attracted to the idea of inducing and sensing pain that she herself has control over. Later we see her visiting Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose; she tries out lying down in the coffin and has her nipple pierced in a tattoo parlor. As Robert McRuer formulates, Bob Flanagan’s work is also about surviving and surviving well, and paradoxically, according to McRuer, surviving well can also mean “surviving sick” (2006: 181). Surviving well and sick also means potentially appearing weak, out of control, miserable, naked, and as a sexual being. And it raises the question of how such an image can be attractive to others – to those who are not themselves sick from cystic fibrosis like Sara – and how it can initiate a “becoming.” How can working with images that are not intelligible, that are distorted, enter into cultural fantasies? Perhaps radical drag, to give a cautious answer, is an assemblage that can make unprecedented connections in the face of cultural evaluations and hierarchies. shame, not identity Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and a few others, such as Douglas Crimp, have seen shame as an affect or emotion that both takes the place of an identity while at the same time preventing the formation of identity. Shame makes it possible, according to Sedgwick and Crimp, to connect someone else’s vulnerability, discouragement, or degradation with my own particular vulnerability (Sedgwick 2003; Crimp 2002). Most people are familiar with situations in which they feel ashamed for someone who seemingly has nothing to do with them. “Someone else’s embarrassment, stigma, debility, bad smell or strange behavior [...] can so readily flood me” (Sedgwick 2003: 37). Shame, however, surprisingly produces no connection with this person. As Sedgwick impressively describes, 82

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I instead feel completely separate from this person and I feel a shame that is only my own; I am humiliated for something that belongs to me and only to me. “My shame is taken on in lieu of the other’s shame. In taking on the shame, I do not share the other’s identity. I simply adopt the other’s vulnerability to being shamed” (Crimp 2002: 65). Douglas Crimp has demonstrated that this taking on of shame in no way means that I believe I understand the other’s otherness or that I think that we are the same. “In this operation, most important, the other’s difference is preserved; it is not claimed as my own. In taking on or taking up his or her shame, I am not attempting to vanquish his or her otherness. I put myself in the place of the other only insofar as I recognize that I too am prone to shame” (Crimp 2006: 65). So I am not “like Bob Flanagan,” but in view of Bob Flanagan I become aware of my own particularity and I also feel publicly visible with this. Blushing can be a sign that conveys my shame or my involvement to others. Those who are prone to shame, then, are all those who themselves have once been shamed, who have themselves already experienced what it means not to conform to certain ideals, norms, or expectations. Accordingly, for Sedgwick, shame is a synonym for “queer” – for all practices and embodiments that oppose normalization and integration or do not conform to ideals and norms. Deviations from ideals of gender identity or of “able” and “beautiful” bodies, then, or from the ideal of heterosexual desire, for instance, can become the trigger for shaming. As Michael Warner argues, relationships to others can be formed in such a way that they initially perceive and recognize what is least reputable in others, and what deviates most from ideals and norms (quoted in Crimp 2006: 65). Shame is thus necessary to transform one’s own particularity and the particularities of others into queer dignity, without these particularities having to be understood, and without having to compare them, categorize them, or pin them down. The performances of Bob Flanagan and his radical-drag multiplication of pain with pain then also contribute to the fact that a queer dignity – a reflection of one’s own vulnerability and a recognition of the otherness of others – can take the place of hierarchizing and normalizing emotions such as, for instance, pity. His texts and performances produce both sickness and SM as public discourses and collective practices in which he himself is involved but which, however, in no way constitute “him” or make him comprehensible. Therefore, radical drag is not a repetition of norms with a difference but instead the production of a configuration that is experimental, that distances itself from iden83

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tities, that “is different” without formulating what it is different from. It is something that makes references possible that shift the social meaning of individual elements (e.g., having cystic fibrosis). This opens up possibilities for living that lie beyond these discourses and the norms associated with them and makes it possible to become both “different” and “other.”

1 In this book I draw, for one, from Katrin Sieg’s book Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (2002) in which she understands “ethnic drag” not only as “cross-racial casting on the stage,” but furthermore as “performance of ‘race’ as a masquerade.” I also discuss Elizabeth Freeman’s use of the term “temporal drag” in chapter 2 of this book (2005). Cf. also Garber (1997) and Halberstam (1998), as well as the German-language sources Thilmann et al. (2007) and Schirmer (2010). 2 In her later rereadings, Judith Butler reconsiders the characterization of drag as a subversion of the performative repetition of norms in the passage from Gender Trouble cited here, emphasizing much more strongly the possibility associated with drag of reworking the norm or even abandoning it altogether, questioning the current understanding of reality and introducing new modes of reality, without, however, explaining more precisely how this could be imagined (2004: 217). 3 As I will argue more thoroughly at the end of this book, the figure of contagion was present, above all in the latter half of the 19th century, as one that linked a diffusion of marginalized social practices with the discourse about illness. It was said, for instance, according to Georges Montorgueil, that the famous doctor Gilles de Tourette died from the disease epilepsy after having not only studied the movements of hysterical patients, but also after having carefully observed the movements of a performer, Diamantine, at her shows (quoted in Gordon 2009: 30). Although this connection allows for social practices to be pathologized as “sick,” it also obviously makes it possible to establish as idea the fact that resistant or denormalizing practices can be passed on “through contact” or by means of a performance. 4 As he called Jonas Mekas, the director of Anthology Film Archives.

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Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Salomania, 2009

Henrik Olesen, Some Faggy Gestures, 2007

Jack Smith, Gas Stations of the Cross Religious Spectacle

II. Transtemporal Drag

A the chronopolitics of becoming salome Scene 1 (1:35 min.): A person with long, black hair pulled into a ponytail enters the room through a door. The camera follows her to where s_he stops in front of a microphone, directly facing the camera. S_he is wearing a white T-shirt with a large face printed on it in black. She begins speaking: My name is Oscar Wilde, the whole country knows me. I choose my friends for their beauty and my enemies for their intelligence. On my grave in Paris it is written, ‘Famous for his play Salomé and other literary work.’ I don’t hide my male lovers. When the situation in town is getting tense, I go to the colonies, spend the winter in Morocco, where I can do as I please. I am Alla Nazimova. I am shooting the film Salomé. I am 45, and, as you notice through my accent, I am a Russian immigrant. I am the richest actress in Hollywood. I love women, I don’t hide it. I am directing this film, I produced it, and 93

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I act the main role. I am Salomé, I just became 14. I am the Jewish princess of Galilee, today north of Israel. I will dance for my father in law, Yvonne. In exchange I can get all I want. I want blood. The speaker leaves the room through the same door. The camera follows her onto a street at sundown with houses, billboards, cars, palm trees, and the blue silhouettes of mountains in the background. 1 The figure of Salome and the image of her dance had a particular appeal at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. They circulated widely. They were taken up by a long list of well-known cultural producers such as Oscar Wilde, Alla Nazimova, Loie Fuller, and Aida Walker. In England, women also met privately to dance Salome’s dance, a movement that was called “Salomania,” as if it were a kind of infection. Shortly after the first appearance of the Richard Strauss opera Salome (1905), there was even an article in the New York Times that urged President Theodore Roosevelt to prohibit the fad from spilling over into the US (New York Times, August 16, 1908). The various texts and performances were (and are) based on the biblical story of Salome, often in the version by Oscar Wilde. King Herod desires his youthful stepdaughter Salome. She, in turn, wants to kiss the preacher John (the Baptist), who rejects her. She opts for a trick, seemingly submitting to Herod’s wishes and performing a seductive dance for him, only then to demand, abruptly and relentlessly, John’s head. At the end, she gets her wish and kisses John’s severed head. Turning back to the figure of Salome, I suspect that even amid the violent social circumstances of the late 19th and early to mid 20th century – such as colonial history, homophobia, and Taylorism – Salome provided the opportunity to live and fantasize about sexuality and gender outside gender binarism and heteronormativity, and without resorting to new, fixed identity formations. Obviously the social meaning, benefits, and use of this figure remained “in movement” over a long period of time, over several decades. I would like to propose a perspective that would make it possible to trace the denormalizing use of the Salome visualizations, which simultaneously took up the present and the past, and which produced projections and wishes with regard to a future life. I would like to understand this usage as “drag,” or more precisely, as “transtemporal drag,” as an embodied intervention in time and temporality. 94

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circulating Scene 5 (6:15 min.): In front of a white wall, decorated with a black-and-white art deco fan, we see two performers, Wu Ingrid Tsang and Yvonne Rainer, as “themselves.” Yvonne has discarded her tuxedo jacket. Her bow tie is dangling loosely from her white shirt collar. Wu has changed clothes and is now wearing black, loosely hanging pants with a tank top, similar in form to an evening dress. Aside from their different ages, we notice that the body presentation of the two performers is equivocal – gender and sexuality cannot be attributed to any category. The typical gender markers such as first names, clothing, etc., are indeed used, but are clearly not significant in any sense of gendering. This body presentation, however, also does not become the topic of the film in the sense of “making equivocal” (Engel 2002), and the impossibility of categorization does not necessarily even come up. Yvonne says that she saw Alla Nazimova’s “Salome dance” in the late 1960s and that her dance was a reference to it. Wu asks her whether the erotics and the camp character of the elements in Nazimova’s dance of the seven veils contradict Yvonne’s manifesto-like perspective on dance as formulated in the 1970s (“no to seduction, no to camp”). Yvonne begins to teach Wu parts of the dancer Valda Setterfield’s solo. The figure of Salome circulated: Alla Nazimova, an immigrant from Russia, at first acted on Broadway, often in plays about the liberation of women (especially Henrik Ibsen’s). Later she was under contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and became the highest-paid actress in early Hollywood. Her numerous affairs with female Hollywood stars, such as Mercedes de Acosta and Dorothy Arzner, were an open secret (Lambert 1997: 11). Obviously in an attempt to counter the exoticism and conventional heterosexuality of the roles offered to her, she herself produced and directed Salomé in 1923, a film that refers in location and character to an important collection of texts from the Near East that is at once the basis for both Christianity and Judaism: the Bible. The costumes were based on the scandalous drawings that the young artist Aubrey Beardsley designed for the first English edition of Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé (1894): the painted nipples and ornamental, flesh-colored trousers of the Syrian; the threatening and simultaneously appealing SM look of the executioner; the eerie asceticism and gauntness of John the Baptist; and a horde of the most diverse drag queens in Herod’s court (White 2000: 65). Nazimova’s film, which is today considered the first “art film” in the US, was at the time of its release such a huge commercial failure, 95

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and received such bad reviews, that it abruptly ended Nazimova’s foray into independent filmmaking, seriously damaging her career as an actress as well. The choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer saw Nazimova’s film, probably in the late 1960s. Using elements from this performance, she fashioned a piece for the dancer Valda Setterfield. The veil, which plays such a large role in Nazimova’s dance, was replaced in Rainer’s piece by a small red ball, which stands in for the head of John the Baptist that Salome’s dance tries to get cut off. The seductive dance and the aggressive demand for the head, two different scenes in Nazimova’s film, are here consolidated into a single image. “Valda’s Solo” was part of Yvonne Rainer’s film Lives of Performers (1972). And it was performed again in 2000 by Mikhail Baryshnikov, who danced it in a gender-ambiguous costume that was a dress in the front and trousers in the back. Oscar Wilde’s play, Salomé, written in French in 1891, premiered on February 11, 1896 in Paris by and with the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Wilde made Salome into the central character of the Biblical story, providing her with her own gaze and desires. The title role was written specifically for Bernhardt – an actress who often appeared in pants roles. Wilde himself was in prison at the time of the premiere. The father of his long-term lover Alfred Douglas had left Wilde a card on which he referred to him as “sodomite.” When Wilde attempted to defend himself against defamation in the courts, suing the initiator, the trial quickly reversed and become an indictment of Wilde. During the trial, not only were his writings characterized as “sodomitic” and “perverse,” but the prosecution also went into detail about his relationships with (young) men who often belonged to another (subordinate) class, a factor that in no small part contributed to his conviction (Coates 2001). Oscar Wilde was released in 1897, but his health was so compromised by two years of hard labor that he died three years later in Paris at the age of only 47. What we have left from this period is not only the play Salomé, but also a photograph, which can be found, for example, in Richard Ellmann’s biography of Wilde. It shows Oscar Wilde in drag as Salome. This photo, however, can be found on the Internet today with a second caption. According to this second caption, the person depicted is not Oscar Wilde at all, but rather the singer Alice Guszalewicz at a Cologne performance of the Richard Strauss opera Salome, taken some ten years after Oscar Wilde’s death. The photo apparently landed in a French photo agency with the wrong attribution, where it fell into the hands of Oscar Wilde’s biographer (Theiss 2000). In the following 96

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decades, the photo became productive despite, or precisely because of, this mistake. It was printed, for instance, in Marjorie Garber’s book Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (1997), as an early example of cross-dressing. Along with the new legends, the false photo gave rise to research and cultural production that traced the figure of Salome as a “transvestite” one. “I want to argue [...] that the dancer is neither male nor female, but rather, transvestic [...] transvestism as a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture. That is the taboo against which Occidental eyes are veiled” (Garber 1997: 342). The writer Gustave Flaubert referred to an affair with the dancer Kuchuk Hanem in his notes and diaries from a journey to Egypt in 1849 and 1850. Later, in his story “Hérodias” (in Trois Contes (Three Tales) (1877)) he wrote a description of Salome’s dance, presumably inspired by this Egyptian dancer. The fact that Flaubert transformed Kuchuk’s material flesh into an occasion to produce poetic images represents, for Edward Said, a paradigmatic example of the mechanisms of Orientalism: the masculinized, penetrating West adapts itself to the feminine, “peculiarly Oriental” sensibility for its own purposes (Said 1979; Boone 1995). Joseph Boone (1995: 92) comments on this critique 15 years later, noting that Said overlooked the fact that the exotic dance that Flaubert saw was not that of a female dancer, but of a famous male-to-female transperson. The appeal of such an encounter is not that it constructs and solidifies the Western idea of dual genders, says Boone, but precisely that it puts into crisis assumptions about male sexual desire, mascu linity, and heterosexuality that are specific to Western culture (ibid: 90ff.). Aida Overton Walker was a director, choreographer, and actress who, among other things, contributed greatly to the perfecting of “Williams and Walker,” her husband’s vaudeville comedy duo. In 1908, she presented a version of Salome, integrating it into Bandanna Land, a play from the group’s repertory. It was untypical for a black Broadway show to incorporate modern dance into its repertory. But Walker successfully introduced the character of Salome, thus positioning herself within the establishment of the white practitioners of modern dance – even if her central role has often gone unmentioned in historical overviews and is only now being written (Elam and Krasner 2000). In addition, Aida Walker brought traditional black songs and dances into an entertainment format that was dominated by the pejorative minstrel shows (cf. Kusser 2008). Aida Walker and her husband were well known for their performance of the cakewalk, a dance that had been developed by enslaved Africans who mixed European dance styles, 97

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such as the minuet, with their own dance steps, performing them for the slave owners (and at the same time subversively mocking them). In this way, Aida Walker negotiated the relationship between her belonging to the Harlem community and her belonging to the development of (white) modern dance. When George Walker fell ill in 1908, Aida Walker put on her husband’s male costume and played both her own role as well as his. But in the following years, even after those particular pieces were no longer being performed, Aida Walker liked to appear in men’s suits with a top hat, surrounded by a group of showgirls (Elam and Krasner 2000). The dancer Loie Fuller emigrated from the US to Europe. For 20 years she lived with her Jewish-French partner Gabrielle Block (who always wore men’s clothes) without doing any damage to her career. She was known for her sculptural costumes and her innovative light design, for which she obtained a patent. By moving huge amounts of fabric with special mechanisms and providing each movement with its own color of light, she achieved cinematic effects, producing conjunctions between the human (female) body, machine, sculpture, and animal. The Lumière brothers captured her “Danse Serpentine” in a film from 1896, emphasizing the cinematic character of her connections between movement and light. At the 1900 Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair) in Paris, Loie Fuller was the only participant to have her own theater. While all around, buildings and housing from the colonies were being reconstructed, and women from North Africa were being paid to exhibit their everyday life at the fair and to perform traditional dances, Loie Fuller was dancing excerpts from Salome. Her technological innovations fit perfectly into the image of the Exposition Universelle, which was not only trying to familiarize people with the “foreignness” of the colonies, but was also seeking to justify colonial domination by representing railroads, telegraphs, and (especially important) electricity. If we look for an illusion in Loie Fuller’s performance to the brutality of murder, this was simply indicated by blood-red light. She also briefly toured with the dancer Maud Allan, helping her to stage her own Salome dance (Garelick 2007: 93). Maud Allan’s The Vision of Salome was first performed in England in 1906. In the years following, drag queens in England often named themselves either Maud Allan or Salome. Maud Allan’s dance was considered particularly scandalous because, alongside her own (female) moving body, there was an immobile, male head-object on stage: the severed head of John the Baptist. As a Canadian dancer, Allan was seen as a foreigner in Germany and England, where she primarily appeared. In 1918, when it seemed that Germany was going to win the First World 98

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War, Maud Allan, who was playing the title role in Wilde’s Salome at the time, was involved in a court case that ruined her career – much like in Wilde’s case. Noel Pemberton Billing, a conservative member of the British Parliament, claimed in his newspaper, the Vigilante, that there was a blacklist circulating in Germany on which the names of 47,000 highranking “perverts” were registered. The list also included, according to Billing, several British men who shared Wilde’s sexual preferences and who therefore could easily become the victims of blackmail by German agents. The men would also be convictable as sodomites if it were to be known that they had seen Maud Allan’s Salome and the “perverse” dance of the seven veils. The court case of Maud Allan was the first time that, alongside all the other perversions that were thematized in Salome – for instance, incest, desire, murder, and necrophilia – Allan was also incriminated “as a lesbian.” Paradoxically, this is one of the few sexual practices that is not mentioned in Wilde’s play (Bentley 2005: 47ff.). What queer chronopolitics – that is, intrusions into normalizing concepts of time – become visible or appear possible when we collect these examples and confront them with a refiguration, Pauline Boudry and I asked while working on “Salomania” (2009)? This installation, cited here, consists of a film (HD/Super 8 film, 16 min.) and documentation. The film’s performers are the trans activist and artist Wu Ingrid Tsang (cf. this book’s prependix) and the feminist filmmaker and choreographer Yvonne Rainer. The film deals with Nazimova’s silent film and its reworking by Yvonne Rainer. It shows six successive scenes that are mostly unconnected and use various film genres (documentary, dance film, fiction) and different styles of performance. It connects the different times of the historical film by Nazimova, whose dance is projected in a scene, with a restaging of this dance, as well as with a contemporary performance. The film was recorded in a dance studio in Los Angeles (the city becomes visible in two scenes, framed by an open door) as well as at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, a park with loose peacocks and a small palm-encircled lake, where many films were shot, including several versions of Tarzan, parts of two Jurassic Park movies, and numerous B-movies that presumably take place in a distant and “exotic” jungle. the temporality of salome drag Scene 3 (4 min.): The background wall is filled with a projection of the dance of the seven veils from Alla Nazimova’s film Salomé. The scene shows Alla Nazimova 99

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in the Salome costume: dressed in a short, tight white dress, in bare feet, with a platinum wig with chin-length, very thick hair, and painted with strikingly dark eye makeup. She dances, at first with two short veils guided along her arms and held in place at the belt. Over the course of the dance, she crumples them and throws them away. Later, dancers in enormous, angular art deco costumes that cover them completely up to their heads spread a large veil out over Nazimova. Nazimova’s dance seems improvised, with elements of expressive dance, when she –shown in close-up – stares into the camera with her eyes and mouth wildly open. In front of the historical film image, the performer, artist, and trans activist Wu Ingrid Tsang performs the same dance in sync with the film. His white dress and veil become a screen for the film and, in reverse, his body is doubled as a shadow on the film image. In Nazimova’s film the dance is constantly interrupted by countershots that show individual members of the court or the leering Herod in extreme close-ups. In the film Salomania, we see these oversized heads in a wide shot. They are apparently looking down at the dance of the contemporary performer. Close-ups of the performer in front of the Nazimova performance create transitions between elements of the historical film and the reconstructed performance of Salome in the new film. In the countershot we see the second performer, Yvonne Rainer, in the position of Herod, watching Salome’s dance and at the same time the historical film, imitating – in extreme close-up – the movements of Nazimova-Herod. Yvonne Rainer is sitting next to a mirror so that a new image is created in the countershot, bringing different times into contact: the historical film, the reconstruction of the dance, as well as Yvonne Rainer’s gaze become asynchronic-simultaneous elements. The historical film becomes a third element in the relationship between the two performers. The characters not only gaze out of the film, being seen by the performers, but they also share a common interest in the film and its reworking. It obviously determines how they see each other and how each of them shows her/himself to the other. In view of the many different performances of Salome, it does not seem entirely adequate to explain the interest in the figure of Salome, as well as the effects of the denormalizing and desubjectivating use of the Salome story at the beginning of the 20th century, solely through the Biblical description of her, its reworking by Oscar Wilde, and the meanings associated with it in various texts (for instance of a woman taking on the role of a man, of economic independence, and of sexual autonomy).2 100

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Although everything indicates that it was often lesbian or transsexual dancers who danced Salome’s dance, and that Oscar Wilde had Sarah Bernhardt, who often played pants roles, in mind for the main role, at the same time it is saying both too much and too little to see Salome as an icon of lesbian sexuality or of transsexuality. This would claim that the figure of Salome was somehow more suited to this than other figures, and would underestimate the complexity of the histories of its use and the multiplicity of the various points of relation. For my purposes, the initial question is, which theorizations and conceptions of the political could give importance to the historical use of the story in cultural productions and their denormalizing strategies, and, more significantly, could make these strategies available to us today? Alla Nazimova, 45 years old at the time, appears in Salome drag as the actress Nazimova, while obviously also letting certain aspects of herself become part of the drag in a particular way. Perhaps, to mention a few references that spring to my mind –references to a time before 1903, in which, “as a Jew,” she experienced anti-Semitism in Russia or to a time after 1904, in which she emigrated, not disclosing her Jewish ancestry, but worked in the US “as a foreign actress with an accent.” Perhaps they were references to the heteronormative and Orientalist narratives of early Hollywood film and the confrontation of this narrative with her own life, in which the relations of work and love with women took on an important role. (The dance of the seven veils makes use of the modern dance style of Isadora Duncan, who not only publicly spoke out against marriage, but was also publicly criticized for her ostensibly Bolshevik dances. And who, it is said, had her bisexual “coming out” on her US tour of 1922-23, when she caused a scandal by exposing her naked breast, swinging a red scarf, and crying, “This is red! So am I!”) And at the same time, Nazimova in Salome drag is Salome, the 14-year-old Jewish princess whose words and actions stem from a then 30-year-old text written by Oscar Wilde. In the trial of Oscar Wilde, these words became part of a conviction that was based on the perversion of his writings, which were understood as the sign of his sodomitical biography. At the same time, what is called forth in Nazimova’s drag is the context of a large number of Salome performances, mostly by performers who – like Nazimova – were renowned for their samesex relationships or their gender-transgressing practices (Nazimova, for instance, was called “Peter” by her friends). All the performances have John’s death as their theme and the severed head is often a central prop; 101

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many of the performances, for instance that in Nazimova’s film, also end with the death of Salome, who obviously must accept loss of life as the price for her passion.3 Salome drag thus produces a simultaneity of various sexual and gender concepts that depend on a “laborious crossing between time.”4 I would like to describe this simultaneity, potentially of contradictory and temporally disparate elements, in analogy to Michel Foucault’s model of a heterotopia as “heterochrony” (1986). A heterochronology opens up the possibility of imagining a multiplicity of temporal concepts that are livable, and which demand a heteronormative and late-capitalist organization of time (cf. also Foucault 1986: 16). With my reflections on the understanding and practice of drag, I would now like to tie into a debate about “queer chronopolitics,” intervening in heteronormative and (post-)colonial concepts of time. Judith Jack Halberstam (2005) has explored the degree to which our notions of normalcy and respectability are constructed on a logic of reproductive temporality. The dangerous and turbulent phase of youth is usually followed by the desired period of being an adult, which is characterized by getting up early, caring for children, making a living, and therefore not going out too much in the evenings. In contrast, lifestyles that are unstable – that are not or cannot be geared toward a “long life” – are pathologized. Correspondingly, it is obvious that processes of denormalization can be set into motion through chronopolitical practices. Furthermore, reproductive temporality regulates not only individual lives, but also has a biopolitical dimension that affects the population as such, as Elizabeth Freeman argues: “Some cultural practices are given the means to continue; others are squelched or allowed to die on the vine. Some events count as historically significant, some don’t; some are choreographed as such from the first instance and thereby overtake others. Most intimately, some human experiences officially count as a life or one of its parts, and some don’t. Those forced to wait or startled by violence, whose activities do not show up on the official time line, whose own time lines do not synchronize with it, are variously and often simultaneously black, female, queer” (2005: 57). The chronopolitical intervention thus refers not only to concrete, individual destinies or specific historical figures, but brings a whole sociocultural context into play along with them. The temporality of reproduction is linked to a clearly laid out and organized succession of generations, which – protected and supported by family groups – pass down not only wealth and commodities, but 102

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also values and rules from one generation to the next. So the family is not only dependent on future familial stability and security, but also on national stability – the destiny of the family and that of the nation are linked. A clear-cut futurity is also usually inscribed in this politics by a concern for children, for instance, or the “generation of children.”5 Halberstam writes about a hypothetical temporality, which she calls the “time of what if,” and which demands insurance, health policies, and political regulations in order to ensure a secure future (2005: 5). Elizabeth Freeman also points out that concepts of living are accompanied by hegemonic assumptions of what makes a life sensible; events like birth, marriage, and death are considered central (one might also add career milestones). A queer politics today, such is Freeman’s thesis, must aim at chronopolitics: at producing an alternative to a time-concept of development and then to oppose the time cycles of state and market in both neoliberal capitalist concepts as well as in racist and post-colonial ones, which see some groups as progressive and others as regressive (2005). Freeman proposes the term “temporal drag” to describe a chronopolitics of drag that can jump over time, be anachronistic, and, as one might formulate with Halberstam, to counter a reproductive model of time, as opposed to emphasizing an exclusive understanding of drag as a subversion of gender norms (2000: 729). This terms has been taken up in a variety of ways (Bryan Wilson 2006; Schneider 2009; Boudry and Lorenz 2011), 6 but Freeman initially introduces it in order to mark an anachronistic moment within queer politics in which identifications with (in her example) lesbian politics and embodiments of the past take place. (For instance, when someone in the 1990s identifies with the lesbian embodiments of the 1970s or 1980s instead of current queer postpunk). “Temporal drag,” according to Freeman, is opposed to a derogatory characterization of these past formats as a politics of essentializing of bodies, of normalizing feminine sexuality, and of a limited understanding of politics (2000: 728). Thus, temporal drag is a constitutive part of queer subjectivity and, by means of such anachronisms, joins queer performativity with a political history that is usually disavowed and understood after the fact as not-queer and out of date (ibid: 729). My point – that discontinuity in dealing with time and simultaneity in different temporal concepts forms an embodiment of displacement and of deferrals and gaps instead of one of a subject or an identity (and that this embodiment also intrudes into social relationships in which it acts chronopolitically) – is perhaps better served by speaking not of “temporal” but of “transtemporal drag.” Drag is thus more and different 103

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from a subcultural practice. It is a transtemporal deferral from and an alternative to subjection to biographical and historical concepts of time. Furthermore, it is precisely the paradoxical tension between discontinuity and simultaneity that might perhaps replace a sentimental practice of turning back to history through a complex practice of transtemporal embodiment, which tends to intervene in and work through conflicts and violent circumstances, rather than avoiding them. Transtemporal drag transforms the body into a “historiographical instrument,” a function of bodies that Freeman analyzes (in a later text) as both the embodied and the symbolic practice of sadomasochistic sexuality. It “offers a metacommentary on the dual emergence of modernity and its others, on the entangled histories of race, nationhood, and imperialism as well as sexuality” (Freeman 2008: 34). Salome drag is delineated discontinuously through lies, deceptions, temporal jumps, artificial elements of embodiment, contradictory actions, and alternative economies (the trick that allows Salome to exchange a dance for a murder). While Elisabeth Freeman would like to shift the focus on the concept of drag that transgresses gender to a newer concept of drag that transgresses time (2000: 729), the example of how Salome is used makes it clear how very interdependent these are. A blond wig, a small, red ball, or a severed head with hair, a word from Oscar Wilde, an applied swollen nipple: Salome, her story, and the play(s), cannot be understood as a unified figure who is used by various performers. Rather these things constitute a set of elements that facilitate links as much to the homophobic and violent conviction of Oscar Wilde and his writings as “sodomitical” as they do to the history of modern dance or the tradition of “female impersonators.” Nazimova-Salome therefore does not allow for any clear distinction between original and copy, or for any relation of identity to difference, or of subject to object. Dance and performance by drag queens, dancers, and actors as Salome do not take on another role or another gender according to this model. They do not represent anything. They do not “replace” they do not “extend” the actors’ bodies but in the process of encountering one another, they produce something new. This model of drag thus does not remain in any logic of identity, in a way that the Salome performer would become half performer and half character. Instead, they allow transtemporal Salome drag to be understood as a “becoming”-Salome, an action in which the Salome figure is taken into social use in order to produce connections to a set of actions, movements, costumes, and contexts (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 256). 104

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Becoming-Salome produces a multiplicity of unique connections. Each use (Salome-Wilde, Salome-Fuller, Salome-Tsang/Rainer) is a singular one, which cannot be sufficiently described with the text of the story or its plot. As Elizabeth Freeman emphasizes, deviant chronopolitics are embodied politics that also have important functions for connections to desire and pleasure. “Queers survive through the ability to invent or seize pleasurable relations between bodies. We do so, I argue, across time” (Freeman 2005: 58).7 Salome drag is therefore on the one hand embodied and sexual, and on the other it facilitates a depersonalizing and denaturalizing view of sexuality and gender as something that – as Elspeth Probyn formulates in relation to Elizabeth Grosz – has nothing to do with “what a body is” but with “what a body can do” (Probyn 1996: 41). Strangeness, a freaky difference, is thus produced through embodied practices and connections, and at the same time through a freaky chronopolitics that becomes possible by juxtaposing differing, even fictional, utopian and contradictory concepts of time. connections Scene 2 (1:40 min.): The scene begins with a film clapper that is quickly removed. Two people, one sitting, one standing, have their backs to the viewer. We can nonetheless see their faces, visible in a large mirror that fills the frame of the image. In the background, also doubled by the mirror, are an art deco floor lamp and a large fan in the form of a palm tree, the leaves of which have been replaced by black and white ostrich feathers. Performer Wu Ingrid Tsang is standing. He wears his hair concealed under a net, which is used as a base for wigs. The second, older person, with short, dark hair, the choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, is sitting. She is wearing a white shirt and a tuxedo jacket. She takes off her glasses. Wu begins to put makeup on Yvonne’s face with gentle movements of the finger. Yvonne completes the costume with a bow tie and a ring, then turns to face the camera: “My dear audience. I’d like you to be a bit wary of the dance you’re about to see. It may lead you into homosexuality, transsexuality, transgender, perversity, and lesbianism.” Nonetheless, not every Salome drag is a “queer practice.” Each one must be viewed differently, according to whether social norms, hierarchies, and/or violence are secured, produced, and/or reinforced. Loie Fuller, of whom it is said that she lived together with her girlfriend, can pursue 105

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lesbian desire with the Salome dance without fixing this as an identity. At the same time however, the Salome image, as it is used, can fit into a colonialist setting and take part in the creation of that setting, as when Fuller was the only performer to get her own theater at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. The Salome dance could here obviously also establish connection to the political directives of the colonialist country France, which used the Exposition Universelle to familiarize people with the customs and aesthetics of the colonized lands that were fantasized as “exotic.” Additionally, Fuller’s patented knowledge in the field of electricity and light, which she used to great effect in her dances, was also welcome (in France’s colonial project), in order to visualize the construction of the West as “advanced” in opposition to the “backward” countries outside the West. A denormalizing practice with regard to gender and sexuality can at the same time contribute to reinforcing racist assumptions and colonial claims to possession. For Aida Walker, in contrast, the Orientalism in the Salome story astonishingly became a means to produce her place in the history of modern dance and in doing so to put a snag in the narrative of an exclusively “white” history of modern dance. un/becoming Scene 5 (1:20 min.): The film material changes. Instead of high-resolution images in 16:9 format, we see the pixilated, colorful images of a Super 8 recording in 4:3 format. Very loud music – punk – plays, a French song from the early 1980s. A peacock walks across the street and looks into the camera. One of the performers, Wu Ingrid Tsang, is lying on the grass wearing a red dress, a white turban, and a large pair of sunglasses. More peacocks are walking around him, pecking and looking. Wu Ingrid Tsang is standing at a lake. The bank is edged with very high palm trees. There is an extreme play of light and shadows. Wu Ingrid Tsang, now no longer in the red dress but in the T-shirt from the first scene, walks across a parking lot in the city. Surrounding the lot are buildings, huge billboards, cars, and palm trees. Wu Ingrid Tsang points to the parking lot, bank, and McDonald’s, saying that this is the place where the actress Alla Nazimova lived. She had a large villa with a swimming pool in the shape of the Black Sea. More shots of this place, filmed with an experimental camera. The possible visualization of ourselves and others “as others” is the moment in which Judith Butler, in her more recent texts, also turns to the term of “becoming” in a way that significantly shifts her early ideas of 106

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performativity. 8 The “mode of becoming,” the “becoming otherwise,” is for her the possibility of leaving behind compulsions of embodiment and norms, or of instituting a different future of norms (2004: 29). Following Butler, we could say that Salome drag “points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home” (ibid). Drag as an embodiment of others or of other places in Butler’s thought would therefore be one possibility to connect and communicate with the constitutive outside of reality that can lead to calling a new mode of reality into life (ibid). At the same time, then, drag would be a practice that is not individual, but always already social, thus also making a “public” available in which the new mode of reality is activated. Since transtemporal drag is indeed crossing time, it brings participants together as a public-assemblage who are not contemporaries but nonetheless share an engagement with deviant connections. This assemblage differs from “history” since its fictional, embodied, and activist character is shifted into the foreground. It is furthermore enabled only through relations of desire. As such, Salome drag – a transtemporal recombination and production of elements that allow for a becoming-Salome – is a prerequisite of an “imagining otherwise.” Extramarital sex, lust and passion, obscene dances, same-sex kisses, or kisses between “whites” and “blacks” were not to be shown according to the Motion Picture Production Code (or Hays Code) – a so-called “self-censorship” of all Hollywood filmmakers for the production of normalizing images of gender, sexual pleasure, and whiteness.9 The code thus attempted to disappear these images from the social archive of images (as well as from social practices). An “imagining otherwise” would therefore be a contravention that alongside or despite the social order visualizes and practices (and at the same time conveys) a different way of living, communicating, and embodying. While Salome drag produces connections, at the same time it is active in dissolving other connections, (possibly) visualized through a series of very conspicuous elements: the violence, the murder, the severed head, and the blood. Salome drag thus does not produce the connections but rather dissolves, or as I would prefer, destroys connections to things such as the dual-gender system, the gendered division of roles, heterosexuality, white being-American, being-Western: unbecoming. the chronopolitics of becoming Scene 6 (1:45 min.): Wu and Yvonne in a dance studio. The right wall is covered with mirrors and opens to the street at the back. Yvonne leans against the wall in the 107

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back corner watching Wu. Wu, in black trousers and a tank top like in the previous scene, dances part of Yvonne Rainer’s dance “Valda’s Solo” with a small red ball. On the street, which is visible through the open sliding door, cars are driving by; pedestrians are walking by on the sidewalk, some of who cast a quick glance into the studio. It is a scene that makes the reconstruction of 1973 dance visible to a random audience on a November day in 2008. I would like to call the method that I have been using to trace the transtemporal crossings of the Salome image from today’s perspective by means of artistic work a “queer archaeology.” The “excavations” that this term refers to seek out a potential in destructive elements that have not yet been fixed to any writing of history.10 The term “queer archaeology” refers to a text by Matthias Haase (2006), but it is only briefly sketched out there. In order to take this method further, I would like to start from a remark by Gilles Deleuze (1990): he states that it was always becoming clearer to him how important it is to differentiate between “becoming” on the one hand and history on the other. Becoming is not part of the historical situation, not part of the object of history, but rather what the historical situation releases, what produces something new, what has become revolutionary so to speak. “What history grasps in an event is the way it’s actualized in particular circumstances; the event’s becoming is beyond the scope of history. History isn’t experimental, it’s just the set of more or less negative preconditions that make it possible to experiment with something beyond history. Without history the experimentation would remain indeterminate, lacking any initial conditions, but experimentation isn’t historical” (ibid). Deleuze criticizes the disparaging way in which the term “revolution,” for instance that of 1968, is currently being discussed. “They’re constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and people’s revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of people” (ibid). Following from this, a queer archaeology could consist of detecting the destructive or denormalizing strategies of becoming in the past and reinscribing these historical strategies into the field of politics and sexual pleasure. And this is precisely where the methodological difficulty lies for research. For, as Matthias Haase argues, queer forms of expression turn up in aesthetic discourse as “a disappearance.” “They become legible precisely to the degree that they no longer appear as an articulation of sexual deviance” (Haase 2006: 174). Instead they are transformed, 108

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for instance, into a history of modern dance or a history of Orientalism in film. Deleuze refers to the philosophical work of Charles Péguy to explain how it might still be possible to be concerned with “becoming.” “In a major philosophical work, Clio, Péguy explained that there are two ways of considering events, one being to follow the course of the event, gathering how it comes about historically, how it’s prepared and then decomposes in history, while the other way is to go back into the event, to take one’s place in it as in a becoming, to grow both young and old in it at once, going through all its components or singularities” (Deleuze 1990). Transtemporal drag could thus be viewed as a method by which it is possible “to go back into the event, to take one’s place in it as in a becoming.” It would facilitate an encounter between contemporary bodies and the historical body with all its connections, which can do justice to the “otherness” of the historical images while still making them available for future becomings.

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B speaking backwards (henrik olesen) Someone is wearing a shiny red jacket and a kind of stole or a wide scarf made of white fur, presumably ermine. Dark hair, a splendid beard, and a red cap on his head. One hand is elegantly holding a pair of gloves, the other is adorned with several rings, the fingers are stretched out coquettishly. Another person, in half-length portrait, has long, curly blond hair and is wearing a dark brown dress and a red cap. A hand, the fingers also outstretched, is lying casually on the breast, the gaze has a somewhat dreamy effect, somewhat sleepy, like it is under the influence of drugs. Someone is wearing a blue dress with a red shawl draped artfully around it. The long blond hair is tied together at the neck. The head is bent, he looks downward. And is wearing large brown wings on his back. Another person next to him in a dark dress with red stockings and boots has one hand resting on the hips; the other is very gently and carefully holding the hand of the larger one and gazing dreamily at him. Almost all the images, if we choose to believe the captions under many of them, or if we ourselves are familiar with the history of painting and sculpture, are at least a century old. Many come from the 15th or 16th century. All the centuries, if we follow this overview, seem to have exclusively generated painting and sculpture that depict highly genderqueer people – bodies wrapped up in queer practices that are made even more conspicuous by their crazy clothing. People are often also seen together with one or more other people, embroiled in a homosexual or at least homophilic bonding. There are reproductions of drawings, paintings, or sculptures, usually portraits or group portraits. The compilation follows no temporal chronology but instead traces a similarity of the gestures or situations represented. All of them are very small scale, obviously with no relation whatsoever to the original size of the works reproduced (sometimes ripped out, sometimes carefully cut out). They are pasted onto a series of standard-sized black cardboard and are shown on partitions in the manner of a touring exhibition or a thematic exhibition that seems more to present the findings of an academic research project rather than being immediately recognizable as one of the usual formats of a contemporary artistic work. Alongside a large number of the small-scale images there are textual commentaries and organizational terms. What strikes one immediately is the immense wealth of material. In its recently exhibited format, the work Some Faggy Gestures by Henrik Olesen presented hundreds of illustrations and snippets of text. It is not only the research on the work, 110

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given as two years, that “costs time,” but quite obviously also the work of finding and choosing all these images on the Internet or in catalogues, of printing them out or copying them, of cutting them out, of arranging them, of classifying them, of compiling them, and finally of pasting them up. The time invested in the work is visible; it automatically begs the question of whether this time was spent “sensibly” and what the goal of all this work was? This is a question that very often remains in the background of similarly laborious works – works that we pursue ourselves or that we see with others. The similarity of the images compiled is named by the title of each of the panels. So for instance “The Effeminate Son” shows a compilation of paintings of mothers with their young sons, dressed femininely, and who often have long, curly hair and serious, soft faces. Männerfreundschaft (Male friendship) presents drawings and paintings with two or more men who are related to one another and who are embracing: for instance the 15th-century image described above by the painter Pietro Perunino, which represents the archangels Raphael and Tobias wearing a rope around the neck or a wide belt around the hips. The titles are written by hand with white chalk on the black background, which draws attention to the subjective quality of the choice and which both gives the images a contemporary touch and makes them seem only provisionally arranged. The images are detached from their historical context and the usual means of understanding them; there is a certain distancing from history. They are compiled into a new kind of standing without turning them “into history” again. The compilation of images and organizational categories does away with the self-evident way that viewers in museums usually organize these images into a history of heterosexuality, the family, the sovereign, the ancient, and Christianity. The images are often reproduced with their captions, which provide some information about artists, dates of creation, and the institutions or persons to whom the images belong. These are visibly cut out and pasted on, so that both the image and the text on the panel are clearly “citations.” A doubt creeps in as to whether image and text were “correctly” grouped together. The board Dominance shows sculptures, drawings, paintings, and photographs that usually feature two men, of whom one is kneeling before the other and one is kicking, wrestling down, or striking the other. These older works, familiar from museums, as sculptures in public spaces, or from illustrated art history books, are obviously restricted to works – the most recent being an 1887 photograph by Eadweard 111

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Muybridge – for which the copyright has expired, and which can thus be reproduced largely without trouble. They are, however, supplemented on the panel by an anonymous photo with no further labeling that obviously stems from the present but not from any art context. The arrangement of the two bodies in this photo is notably similar to that of the historical sculptures shown, while at the same time it clearly shows a sadomasochistic scene, thereby suggesting SM practices as a model by which to “understand” the other illustrations. It shows someone lying down, his head cut off by the edge of the frame and his naked whitepink backside extended for the viewer. Behind him stands a person in a workman’s uniform. This person is holding the cock and balls of the person lying before him in one hand; the other hand is lifted up, ready to strike his backside. The thematization of SM now also links the black of the cardboard as the dominant color of the work with a leather-fetish context. The halfironic, half-serious arrangement of the images into queer practices taken up by this work thus also becomes possible through a comparison with contemporary visualizations in the field of gay pornography or even pejorative caricature (of the representation of gay men as effeminized). In moving the images out of their serious context and into a popular culture context, the bodies shown by the images become transformed: from respectable members of history and Christian or ancient mythology to members of gay or gender-queer subculture, which is generally refused recognition. Transtemporal drag is thus one possibility of newly reworking the historical positioning of recognition, knowledge, and cultural “roots.” At the same time, the cultural assets that serve as the basis of a Western, heterosexual, well-educated self-conception become disappropriated and claimed as the basis for a different, usually lessrespected history: that of SM and transgender. Since, however, the work is put into a new, high-culture context – that of contemporary art institutions (it was first presented at Zurich’s Migros Museum and published as a catalogue from JRP Ringier, an established Swiss press) – it becomes possible in turn to organize recognition and speakability for this outrageous act of transfer. The panel Women’s Portraits by Female Artists refers to the history of women painters. Other panels are concerned with historical subculture, for instance of the history of public urinals in London and their establishment and surveillance, or they single out individual biographies, for instance those of the painter Thomas Eakins, the painter Lili Elbe (alias Einar Wegener), or the painter and cross-dresser Rosa Bonheur. 112

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These panels often have more text, which also seems, however, not to have been written by the artist himself, but to have been copied from sources unnamed. Sometimes a caption is crossed out and replaced by a hand-written entry, or something is emphasized by underlining it with a pen. The compilation and notation of the images takes up the means of historical research. The seriousness of the production of knowledge is reinforced by “serious” themes, for instance that of the persecution and frequent murdering of sodomites in the Middle Ages. This is undermined, however, by methodology, for instance, when a panel claims to compare persecution in “Germany and Switzerland,” while the scant material allows for no such comparison, or when other panels bring together images from different centuries, even adding copied information, but without establishing any historical or local context. In the case of other panels, such as Some Faggy Gestures, which also provides the title of the work as a whole, portraits of men from various centuries are presented as described in the context of contemporary gay subculture or contemporary stereotypes, and one can barely distinguish whether the name Faggy Gestures as it is applied here produces this impression, or whether it is the suggestive combination of the images that does so. What is striking is that most of the images chosen are already in wide circulation, but that here they are seen from a different perspective. The work comes alive precisely because viewers do recognize many of the images, and because the images represent the foundation of modern art and culture. Still, the work “Some Faggy Gestures” makes no effort to pursue the images at the level of meaning. Instead it rigorously rewrites history from the perspective of current gender practices and queer futurities. The seriousness and respectability of art histories, their terms and methods, is thus rejected. In place of the widespread practice of discovering heterosexuality, family, or Christianity everywhere, this gaze only sees effeminized youths and adults, homophilic men, and the furnishings and clothing known from subculture. While the strategy of “camp,” discovering gay constellations even in non-explicitly gay cultural productions, is known from readings of films, particularly of Hollywood films (cf. for instance McLean 1997), it is less familiar in art history. The work Some Faggy Gestures does not abandon the call to collect knowledge about the regulation of sexuality and gender in history, and to scandalize, even while it quite obviously has no faith whatsoever in the methods of producing knowledge and culture, constantly opposing them with ironic, flippant, illogical, and sloppily created interventions. 113

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The intervention into history occurs less by adding new images than by the fact that these images, which had already been subject to various categorizations (styles, painting schools, centuries, price attained at auction, owners, museums where they are shown) are now subject to new arrangements. Indeed, arrangements that grant a privileged focus to the history of homoeroticism, the persecution of alternative sexuality, and the history of sexual and gender deviance, and which, at the same time, are often not even meant to be taken quite so seriously. In the installation of the work, aside from the partition walls, there is also a series of stuffed hens and roosters, which are positioned on a pedestal or on a partition. These inhabit the otherwise plain installation. Perhaps the hens that are standing around are privileged spectators, who have their own categories and methods; perhaps they convey the feeling of a time “after the installation,” a future in which the exhibition space will only be used as a chicken coop and the hens will build their nests on the pedestals. Perhaps their quality of “being-stuffed” places the work in the context of a historical museum in which even the gestures of a “current view” is viewed from our future. If we designate these animals as “cocks” it also becomes obvious that they could be understood as the effect of a psychic labor that Freud described in his “interpretation of dreams”: the suppressed meaning of the word “cock” as genitals gets replaced by a second meaning which is inconspicuous (Freud 1965). The animals, however, can also be read as a way to contact early sexology, for instance the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, whose book Geschlechtskunde, Bilderteil (Sexology, Pictures) from the early 1930s illustrated a large number of sexually or gender deviant bodies, juxtaposing the human bodies of cross-dressers, fetishists, and bearded ladies with images of intersexual butterflies or chickens. Hirschfeld also compiled a jumbled collection of images, originating from very diverse contexts, for instance from erotic calendars, representations of big city subcultures, travel photography, and freak shows (cf. Boudry and Lorenz 2011: 1852ff.). In conjunction with his studies, the historical and staged images that he used seem to be an objective view of bodily variations. While his procedures were to a certain degree similar to those of Henrik Olesen – creating a large collection of images and providing them with new captions and meanings – Hirschfeld nonetheless staked a claim of “being scientific” for his activities. While Hirschfeld also includes ethnographic images in his collection, Olesen’s collection is notable in that the history represented here is exclusively Western. The claim of an altering intervention into history 114

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remains understandably restricted to Western art history. In fact, the work cannot make any kind of statement about the homogeneity of art history as a “Western” and “white” history. There are nonetheless small hints, for instance the contemporary SM photo mentioned above shows a white man and a black man, making it clear in relation to the sculptures made of white marble or grey stone that these are usually read as “white.” The presentation of the panels – the number of images on a black background – represents a second contact point, this time to the art historian Aby Warburg, who was working on an atlas of images with a similar appearance from the time of his release from psychiatry until his death in 1929. Warburg used wooden frames covered with black cloth, on which he pinned photographs of paintings and sculptures, which were always grouped according to a certain theme or focus. He not only used objects from art history, but also images from advertising, newspaper clippings, and press photos. The atlas was called Mnemosyne Atlas, named after the Greek goddess of memory. With his artistic approach, Henrik Olesen takes up a relation to an art historian and his unorthodox scholarly methods, one who referred to himself as “incurably schizoid,” which further undermines rationality and produces a link to Deleuze and Guattari’s reworking of a critique of capitalism and psychoanalysis under the term of “schizoanalysis” (1977). In the artist’s book Some Faggy Gestures, which shows the work in book format, Henrik Olesen’s image collection is introduced by an artist’s text entitled “Pre Post: Speaking Backwards,” which emphasizes the focus of the work as an intervention in temporality. The text collects diverse anecdotal stories, likewise crossing a number of centuries, all of which have in common the question of the visibility or the makinginvisible of deviant sexualities and genders, usually in the context of art. One of the text’s main points, which is reflected in the panels of images, is the history of conceptual art in the 20th century. The stories make it possible to deconstruct the context of sexuality and visibility that is the basis not only of the conceptual works discussed, but also of Olesen’s own work. Such is the case, for instance, in a textual passage that concerns John Cage’s musical procedures of “silence,” drawing a parallel between this and his “silence” about his lifelong relationship with the choreographer Merce Cunningham, which was an “open secret.” Olesen cites Jonathan Katz: “If silence was, paradoxically, in part an expression of Cage’s identity as a closeted homosexual during the Cold War, 115

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it was also much more than that. Silence was not only a symptom of oppression, it was also, I want to argue, a chosen mode of resistance. Cage became notable precisely for his silences – clear proof of its unsuitability as a strategy of evasion. Closeted people seek to ape dominant discursive forms, to participate as seamlessly as possible in hegemonic constructions. They do not, in my experience, draw attention to themselves with a performative silence, as John Cage did when he stood before the fervent Abstract Expressionist multitude and blasphemed: ‘I have nothing to say and I’m saying it’” (quoted in Olesen 2008: 18-19). On the other hand, homosexuality was taken on as an artistic topic by heterosexual conceptual artists, thereby contributing to their success. One example mentioned of this is Vito Acconci, who did a now legendary performance in which he arranged nightly meetings at a well-known gay cruising area in New York. The text continues the inquiry of the work Some Faggy Gestures, which had to stop with the 19th century due to copyright, into the present. The seemingly evident correlation of signs and meaning in the history of art – from the Middle Ages to the present – is integrated into the history of heteronormativity and heteronormative concepts of time. This is (re)produced through the writing of art history, but also through an artistic practice that practices a mutual “understanding” and “seeing” among artists and a communication about methods and images, thus also working on the evidence of heteronormativity. The method of “Speaking Backwards” seems to be saying: in order to continue using the methods of conceptual art, it is necessary to expose the basis of this art, to call its legitimacy into question without completely revoking it. An artistic practice that critiques a heteronormative art and its temporality, and develops alternatives, must therefore be a queer-deconstructive art that questions sexuality in its functions for the history of art and which examines the contribution of artistic practices to the continued existence of heteronormativity. This obviously cannot occur in some instructional way, but only by developing a new artistic language, without completely rejecting conventional images, terms, and modes. “Speaking backwards” is thus one method of “transtemporal drag” that makes the history of art “precarious”; that shows that this history could also have gone otherwise; that demonstrates that the formulation of this history in books, museums, and catalogues is not to be taken so seriously; and that indicates that there are “becomings” to be discovered and inhabited, even in this history. The work offers a new but contestable arrangement, one which 116

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on the one hand is very present because it treats history unabashedly and disrespectfully, and which on the other hand allows for a distance because it is so clear that it is produced subjectively and provisionally.

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C the beauty of the form of time displayed (jack smith) He didn’t hear of the performance from advertising or announcements. It wasn’t publicized, except for an off-off-Broadway column in the Village Voice. He shows up at the time announced, midnight, at the address given, Greene Street in New York, but all the doors in the area are locked. No one is there. He rings at a door, which might be the right one, but nothing happens. He waits. Four others turn up, they ring, and Jack Smith opens the door and takes them upstairs. Inside, Smith puts on a couple of records and mumbles that the actors aren’t there and that no audience has come. The place, a loft, not very large, is decorated, although none of the objects possess any kind of glamour or beauty: a toilet bowl with trash, including a doll without a head, a pile of trash, for which lighting is set up later, and a few old Christmas trees, almost without any needles. People hang around, smoke, and wait to see if something will happen. In the first chapter of his book Queer Theatre, Stefan Brecht describes three performances by Jack Smith that he attended in 1970 and 1971 (Withdrawal from Orchid Lagoon, Clapitalism of Palmola Christmas Spectacle, and Gas Stations of the Cross Religious Spectacle) (1978: 10ff.). The performances create links to the past, for instance through the trash as the “remainders” of another time and usage, or through the music from old Hollywood films, or through old costumes and wigs that very visibly show the signs of their use. But the performances also intervene in temporality by means of their duration and structure, and by how the plot figures. First of all, they all begin at midnight and last until the early hours of the morning, so that taking part would represent a great challenge to anyone who had to work, for instance, the next morning, or take care of children. Withdrawal from Orchid Lagoon starts with a disappointing or at least deferred expectation, for Jack Smith suggests, even if he’s not certain, that it’s true: the performance was meant to take place differently, namely with actors (a whole group was announced as performing with the name “Reptilian Theatrical Company”) and with an audience. It also remains obviously unclear whether there is anything at all to expect in the next hours, whether a kind of ersatz performance will be offered. Later, assistants or replacement actors will be engaged from out of the audience, and given tasks to fulfill. I would like here to describe the way Jack Smith behaved in these performances, or how he interacted with objects – confronting the participants’ sensation of time with an alternative time – as transtemporal 118

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drag. Smith arranged the objects on the stage or did something with the objects in the room in a way that was slow and very concentrated or accurate. One didn’t have the impression, according to Brecht, that the performance hadn’t been prepared. It seemed as if there had already been a great deal of time given to arranging the objects in a particular way but that there was still a lot to be done (Brecht 1978: 16). And this took up so much time that there was practically no time left over for appearances or the actual “performance.” As such, “deferral” is a decisive temporal aspect of the action: an action or decision is deferred. It is about constantly testing out new ways of approaching simple things, over and over again, and this shouldn’t be carried out too quickly or carelessly. It should happen in some “new” way; obviously conventions should be avoided. Smith’s arrangements are “precarious,” Brecht says, pointing out the temporal dimension of “precarity.” That “precarious subjects,” for instance, as they have been described as the agents or even the victims of neoliberal economy, are also those that are only momentarily stable. Their future is uncertain, unsure, and remains open, even if attention, the whole of thinking and acting is geared to this future. “All of Smith’s gestures are hesitant. The simplest lifting of an object or securing of a string is a serious task which he will accomplish, but which he does not seem quite to know how to go about. He tries various approaches – in front of you – perhaps gives up some lines of approach too quickly. He is figuring out how to do it while doing it. . . . Any performance of his contains many such episodes of change of approach to a simple practical task” (ibid).11 Karl Marx (1967) distinguishes between abstract time and concrete time, where abstract time is the time in which something can be accomplished, in which it is possible, for instance, to produce a piece of clothing. This abstract time determines the exchange value of a piece of clothing, since it is not the actual time that someone needs to produce a particular commodity that is paid for, but the time in which this commodity could be produced. Much like Frederick Taylor, who studied hand movements and actions to determine how they could be better suited to accelerate the time cycle of production, Jack Smith also pays close attention to the smallest gestures, to the precise way that something is done. The actions in his performances are, however, by no means aimed at accomplishing something in a temporally effective way. Instead it is about a kind of alternative Taylorism; it is not about the fastest possible way of doing something (as with Taylor), but it is also 119

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not about a slowness that would counter efficiency. Instead it is about a goal that remains hidden, that is not formulated. Nonetheless, Smith is obviously impatient and annoyed in the performances when it is not accomplished. It is thus a kind of Taylorism of an alternative and strict, but also strange, rational, and freaky Taylorism. This rationalism is quite obviously embodied; in his description, Stefan Brecht particularly emphasizes that thinking and embodied action are linked for Smith, and they occur simultaneously: “He is figuring out how to do it while doing it” (1978: 16). Smith also uses a great deal of time in his performances to give commands to the assistants that he has just recruited from the audience. He tells them what they should do, for instance step forward, and incessantly corrects them throughout. They often do things too quickly, or incorrectly, or sometimes even too slowly. He complains that people are not capable of carrying out the simplest tasks. For the spectators that are not involved, should there be any, but also for the assistants, time often consists of waiting. Jack Smith gets something from somewhere, looks for it a long time then comes back, he changes the slides and that takes time, he shifts a spot light, very carefully and slowly. Even when the plot involves a love story or a sex story (for instance inspired by a B-movie), nothing in the performance is primarily sexual. Nonetheless, the description of the process is reminiscent of the structure and temporality of SM: the delay of an announced or expected pleasure; the instructions, given and followed, but never sufficiently followed; the critique demanding that something be done again and better this time; the way that a pause becomes corporal. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud characterized perverse sexuality as one that lingers and that proceeds wastefully with time: to “linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim” (quoted in Freeman 2008: 50). And Elizabeth Freeman points out that non-reproductive sexuality is often described as one in which nothing further happens – that remains at the level of foreplay (ibid: 34). So the performances described here, much like an SM scenario or like “perverse sexuality,” interfere in how a capitalist, heteronormative temporality is inscribed in, or interacts with, bodies, emotions, and desires. “SM brings out the historicity of bodily response itself” (ibid: 38). There is a correlation between the way that someone is sexual or emotional and a specific experience of time. And so, a different experience of time, transtemporal drag, is also possibly an intervention into the embodiment of subjugation and regulated sexuality by means of 120

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“time.” Those visiting Jack Smith’s performances, according to Brecht, reacted with sleepiness, boredom, sometimes irritation or annoyance (1978: 16-17). He himself writes that the only objection that Smith’s performance stirred in him was that he could also have had sex in the same time (ibid: 17). What becomes clear is how emotionality, corporality, and desire are tied to a temporality that is historical, predetermined, and contingent. And that it is confronted here with a different temporality that is equally not “one’s own” but is instead set apart and irritated by the fact that there are obviously rational reasons, even for this temporality, but that these are not proclaimed. This is indeed why time is shifted into the foreground for the other participants of the play and the audience, but it remains unclear why it is taking place here this way and not otherwise. It becomes clear that all participants incorporate “transtemporal drag” here as an intervention into temporality. Everyone takes part in assemblages that produce alternative temporalities. Nonetheless, “transtemporal drag” in no way stands outside powerful relationships and the dominant position which Jack Smith takes over, and from which he makes demands or gives commands to others, only making possible this intervention. Those attending also have their strategies of how to act in all this, in that they leave the performance at a certain point in time. Most people didn’t wait for the end of the performance Clapitalism of Palmola Christmas Spectacle; they didn’t wait to see if there would be an end to which everything was leading. Almost everyone left early, except for Stefan Brecht and a friend of Smith’s who was obviously stoned. Jack Smith served chocolate cake from the refrigerator. The dramatic “highpoint” of Gas Stations of the Cross Religious Spectacle was the death of the beautiful nun. Jack Smith played her by lying motionlessly on the floor for a long time.

1 Filminstallation by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz (17 min., 2009). The installation includes 13 photographs. Performers: Yvonne Rainer and Wu Ingrid Tsang. Camera: Michelle Lawler. 2 For a text that takes up this approach and at the same time traces the limitations of film representations of gender and sexuality, along with the formation of “race” and ethnicity, see Studlar 1997. She writes: “In dance, those qualities of the New Woman often at odds with cultural norms of traditional femininity became attached to sensual ritualized movement and to the spectacle of orientalized identities associated with ambiguous feminine power. Women’s newly realized social

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and sexual freedoms were crystallized in dance in the figure of Salome” (Studlar 1997: 106). On the biographies of the various Salome performers and their liberatory aspects, cf. also Bentley 2005. 3 This violent death can also be read as a re-establishment of the heteronormative order, since Salome is punished for her destabilization with death. 4 I have initially introduced the term “crossing” in order to mark the precarity of social positionings that have to be occupied and then abandoned, not only consecutively, but also and at the same time in contradiction to each other. So that individuals can be addressed, for instance at the work place, simultaneously “as feminine” and “as masculine.” On the one hand this allows for certain gains in freedom that were fought for by feminist, lesbian-gay, and antiracist movements, but on the other hand it is linked to the laborious and partially violent demands to constantly negotiate these positionings with each other. In the context of neoliberal economies, “crossing” thus (also) becomes a new dispositiv of power (cf. Lorenz 2009a). 5 In his book No Future (2005), Lee Edelman reflects on whether or not it is possible to understand politics without this element of imaginary futurity, coming to the conclusion that there could then be no more politics. 6 Cf. also Elizabeth Freeman’s recent publication Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010), as well as the book Temporal Drag (Boudry and Lorenz 2011), which includes Elizabeth Freeman’s text “Normal Work: Temporal Drag and the Question of Class.” 7 Freeman also characterizes her insistence on “pleasure” as a critique of queer politics that increasingly draw on “failure, shame, negativity, grief, and other structures of feeling historical,” since in her view these support a Protestant ethic that cannot understand pleasure as the basis for productivity, or would in no way lend desiring practices any historical weight (2005: 58). 8 On the debate about whether Butler takes the meaning of the term “becoming” from Deleuze and Guattari, cf. Hickey-Moody and Rasmussen 2009: 42ff. 9 Will Hays came to Hollywood around the time Nazimova’s Salomé was being made and proposed the ideas that were first publicized as the Motion Picture Production Code during the early 1930s. The code became obligatory for the next decades and remained in force until 1967. 10 Referring to Deleuze and Guattari, Verena Andermatt Conley writes, as has already been mentioned in the introduction: “One has to go back through a deeper and broader history of homosexuality to give it back all the otherness it contains and of which it had been stripped. This cannot be found in an unconscious elaborated by a repressive, official psychoanalysis but only through the progression of a sexual becoming that is always to come” (2009: 28). 11 Using an unusually long time for a simple action and in doing so accomplishing

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it in a particularly attentive way is an approach that had great influence on the performances of other artists, in particular Robert Wilson, in whose plays The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud (1969) and Deafman Glance (1971) Jack Smith also appeared.

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Zoe Leonard, Strange Fruit, 1992-97

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991

Sharon Hayes, I March In The Parade Of Liberty, But As Long As I Love You I’m Not Free, 2008

III. Abstract Drag

A an activity in absence (zoe leonard) Lying on the ground are small objects, many objects, which I would provisionally like to refer to as “bodies”: bananas, lemons, grapefruit, and oranges. Their peels are dried up, spotty, and completely brown instead of their familiar color. The most conspicuous difference from ordinary fruits, however, is that they exhibit more or less carefully sewn stitches, created with doubled thread or twine. Obviously, someone cut open bananas or oranges, took out the flesh of the fruits, and then attempted, for the most part successfully and as accurately as possible, to return the damaged and deformed fruits back to their original form with needle and thread. The orange (or is/was it a lemon?) has sunken spots, but for the most part it is almost, if not quite perfectly, round. The banana is flat but elongated like it was before and the peel is closed everywhere. One banana is wrapped in twine at one end, as if it were wearing a head bandage or as if it would fall apart if it weren’t fixed this way. It is quite obvious that none of these fruits could still be eaten. Possibly, or in fact probably, they were eaten already, but then they were sewed together to disguise the invasion, and an attempt was made to create the impression that they are still intact, which, how131

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ever, has not entirely been achieved, or at least not very well. This technique is reminiscent of the creation of taxidermied specimens or even the human taxidermy exhibits that have been presented as a spectacle in recent years (in which an enormous effort is made to reproduce dead animal or human corpses as if they were still alive, or as if there were only a single moment in time between their life and their new state of “being-stopped in time”). But while these taxidermied specimens, after their careful reconstruction, usually seem like there was no disease, accident, or violent death that brought them to their end – and as if the body had slipped over into death completely unscathed – the fruits quite clearly bear the traces of being sliced open and emptied out, of the time of drying and decaying as well as of being patched up again. They are fruits, and at the same time they are no longer fruits, for the fruit pulp is missing. In an interview, Zoe Leonard, who usually works as a photographer, compares these fruit sculptures with photos of fruits that – like the photo of a person that is not the person itself – do indeed look like grapefruits but they are not grapefruits anymore (Leonard 1997: 18). At any rate, the fruit sculptures differ from a photograph in that they continue to wear their original peels, which have changed to the state that we currently see and will continue to change in the future. Zoe Leonard has also explained that she was asked to preserve the fruits when it became clear that they were beginning to decay and disappear, but then she realized that the slow disappearance of the work is part of its character. She decided only to preserve a few of the fruits, which could then later in turn serve as a “photo of the work” when the work had fallen to dust (ibid). The work thus functions like a memory: it bears parts of its original matter, of which it is reminiscent, but it continually distances itself from this until in the end it is perhaps no longer there at all. The invasion with needle and thread would then not (only) be a rough invasion into the bodies, like an operation or taxidermy that leaves many or too clear traces, but would also be an attempt to create a reminder of the original fruit, not throwing away the peels, but recreating them as much as possible in the form of the original fruit. Zoe Leonard’s work bears the time marker “1992-1997.” This long time period and the reference to the early 1990s could be a nod to the so-called AIDS crisis, a time in which the public debate about AIDS was at its most insistent, and in which, also in the art world, the deaths of people, friends, and acquaintances, often quite young, were a regular experience for most survivors. Zoe Leonard makes such a link in the 132

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interview (ibid: 17ff.). While the interviewer, Anna Blume, who like Zoe Leonard was a member of the AIDS activist group ACT UP in the 1990s, draws parallels between this work and an activist work in which the bodies of dead friends or references to these bodies were presented in public. In comparison, Leonard presents her sculptures more as a work on relationships and emotions. She sees the work as supplementing the actions of ACT UP, which were often necessarily focused outward and on the surface, with another means of engagement: one that takes up the question of loss. She reflects: “The fruit is very, very silent. The fruit came from a deeply private, nonverbal, even nonvisual place. It is me alone in a room with my thoughts and thread. It was sort of a way to sew myself back up. . . . At first it was a way to think about David [Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of 37]. I’d think about the things I’d like to repair and all the things I’d like to put back together, not only losing him in his death, but losing him in our friendship while he was still alive. After a while I began thinking about loss itself, the actual act of repairing. All the friends I’d lost, all the mistakes I’ve made. The inevitability of a scarred life. The attempt to sew it back together” (ibid: 18). The work, called Strange Fruit is also a clear reference to one of David Wojnarowicz’s sculptures where he cut a loaf of bread in half and sewed it back together with red thread (ibid: 17-18). The fruits of the work Strange Fruit at first appear in “radical drag”: they are fruits, even if they are not natural but reproduced, and at the same time they are not. But how can we make a case that the fruits appear in the “abstract drag” of a human body? How can we understand this claim if the “abstraction” of a human body initially means that the work cuts short the ties to diseased or dying human bodies? There is nothing to see that could serve as or even hint at any visual relation to such bodies – nothing that we discover in the work. At first, therefore, this abstraction produces a gap or a deferral; it impedes identification, just as it impedes the possibility of immediately averting one’s eyes from the work in a counter-indentificatory act. My thesis is that “abstract drag” not only cuts ties, but also allows for a queer embodiment to appear in place of the representational conventions of human bodies, and in this way suggests new ties to bodies. The title of the work Strange Fruit refers to the Billie Holiday song of the same name, in which she addresses lynchings at the end of the 1930s in the Southern US: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black body swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” In the context of AIDS, 133

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the designation of dead bodies as “strange fruits” could also be made available for the dead of the so-called AIDS crisis, at the same time opening the question of responsibility for these deaths. These are not merely dead bodies; they died as a result of racism and, as one wants to add in this context, of homophobia. The point is not to equate lynchings with AIDS, but what Leonard suggests with the title is that spectators must figure out the connections between racism and homophobia, and draw attention to the bodies that carry the traces of the respective violations. In each case, it is a matter both of social micropolitics in which everyday exclusions and hierarchies are reproduced, as well as of the state politics that are responsible for the large number of deaths. The title of the work thus suggests that what there is to be seen can be seen as absences of human bodies. On the visual level, we notice on the one hand the vulnerability of the fruits; it is clear that they are fragile. On the other hand, the visible threads and the careful reproduction of their form points to the fact that someone went to a great deal of trouble to keep the fruits as they were as much as possible, at least enough that the viewer has a general idea of what the fruits once looked like. So the work not only refers to the destruction and the vulnerability for destruction of the fruit bodies, which creates a connection to human bodies, but also to the attempt, as careful and loving as it is perhaps futile and utterly insufficient, to maintain and to support. The fact that “abstract drag” cuts ties thus allows viewers, even requires viewers, to bring their own lives to the work, their own deaths, and their own knowledge about AIDS, or perhaps to acquire the necessary knowledge to do this. The responsibility for how the work is described or used thus lies with those who interact with the fruits; it cannot be delegated from the viewers to the artistic work. To refuse any connection to human bodies and their deaths merely because this cannot be seen would be a violent act not unlike denying the violence against those dying of AIDS and their friends and loved ones. Abstract drag can thus be characterized as the paradox of a presence of human bodies and their activities in absence. If we as viewers decide to pursue some connection to human bodies in relation to the work, then the appearance and the visible history of the fruit sculptures contributes greatly to the direction of these thoughts, around which emotions arise or are supported, and which appear to be future, possible, or desirable. Anna Blume, Zoe Leonard’s interviewer, formulates her impression of the sculptures in this way: “These pieces of fruit appear to me to be on the other side of 134

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that bridge between activism and fine arts. In part they are about the mourning and about the loss of our friends from AIDS. Not only did we lose them, but in a sense we didn’t have to lose them. If we lived in a world that had really cared about faggots and prostitutes and drug users, something would have been done. When I saw the sewn fruit on your windowsill, I could see it as the debris and the residue of that sense of loss. Even though they are really small and frail, I felt they were still a kind of intervention. They were a different kind of banging at the door of the NIH [the US National Institutes of Health], or carrying our friend’s bodies through the streets.” The works are therefore also an impression and a visualization of a conflict that is heard over and over again in the interview: of how it is possible to put up an exhibition while friends are sick and dying; of how in the face of AIDS any artistic practice, any time spent on practices that are not part of protests, that are not “social” in a direct sense, can be legitimized; of whether there is any legitimation at all for any practice in view of violent deaths.

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B the topography of desire (felix gonzalez-torres) not-showing In 1990, Felix Gonzalez-Torres began exhibiting a series of works made up of arrangements of small, detailed objects: hard candies. What catches the eye here, though, are not some vaguely yellowish sugary lumps, but the wrappers. In one work, he uses a type of candy that comes wrapped in silver cellophane. Large numbers of these wrapped candies laid out on the floor create a vast, reflective rectangle with a metallic shimmer. The name of the piece is “Untitled” (Placebo) (1991). In another work, the candies are wrapped in various brightly colored bits of cellophane and piled up in the corner as a colorful mound. This piece is named “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991). These works offer no direct political positioning, they refrain from any concrete reference to the events of daily politics and likewise make no clear break with the museum as a bourgeois institution. They forego any signs that might make them recognizable at first glance as an artistic practice contextualized by debates on sexual identity and origins. Contrary to queer photographic works by Catherine Opie, Del LaGrace Volcano, or Sarah Lucas, to name but a few examples, there are no visible bodies that challenge or rework two-gendered and heterosexual norms, viewing regimes, or representational conventions. The work doesn’t take on a particular discourse about regulating bodies around sexual or gender politics to reproduce it by means of text, sound, or illustration. I understand these works by Gonzalez-Torres thus as “embodiment without bodies”1 (cf. Spector 2007: 139ff.).2 Beyond ascertaining that the works avoid visually citing or newly producing corporal norms, and in an effort to extend the basis of what a “freak theory of contemporary art” might be, I would like to consider what exactly makes it possible for a “queer embodiment” to emerge. Since the works themselves make no attempt to represent bodies visually, instead replacing the point of visualization with abstraction, the question arises as to how and where “queer embodiment” takes place and whether the work itself provides any answers at all to this question? Or is “queer embodiment” possibly something that cannot be seen, found, created in careful observation, or isolated by writing analytically? the collapse of visual and linguistic signs The candy installation “Untitled”(Portrait of Ross in L.A.) has an ideal weight stated as 175 pounds. According to information provided by the 136

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catalogue and museum staff, this corresponds with the body weight of the person named in the title of the work. The name is a reference to Gonzalez-Torres’s life partner, Ross Laycock, who died of AIDS in 1991, the year the work was created. There is, indeed, a reference to a body, although this is done only by means of a linguistic sign, the title, which is added to the visual sign, the pile of colorful hard candies. In order to clarify which form of showing is offered up here and which denied, it might be helpful to establish the art-historical context that Gonzalez-Torres’s work is clearly drawing on3 – for instance, a classic work of so-called conceptual art from the 1960s, Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965). This work features three depictions of the same object: the chair as object, a photograph of the same chair, and a linguistic depiction in the form of an enlarged English dictionary entry for the word “chair.” Should the work be sold or loaned, it would comprise simply an enlargement of the dictionary entry and written instructions to select any chair as object and to take a photo of it. The work can therefore be distributed and used beyond the art market as well (cf. Buchmann 2007: 37). The aim is to evade artistic gesture and style as well as any possible value they might create, which is further reinforced by the stark refusal of every deviation from the meaning “chair.” The three signs refer to one another and can also replace one another. According to this concept, language can take the place of an object or a picture. They are all based on the same social conventions. Like other works by Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) takes up particular strategies from conceptual art. In this work, much like that of Kosuth, there is simply a certificate with instructions from the artist on which objects to buy for the installation and how then to install the work (cf. also Föll 2006: 105)4 . Since a title has been chosen that adds an obviously crucial meaning, “(Portrait of Ross in L.A.),” visuality and object here can also not be conceived outside of language. Unlike Kosuth, however, the linguistic and visual signs are in no way modes of depiction that could replace one another. The candies do not bring to mind memories of Ross and Ross does not make us think of candies. The weight of the candies, which refers to the weight of a body, cannot be recognized by appearances: no visual sign is employed that refers to an individual body or produces a similarity to a living or deceased person. In addition, there is a whole series of similar works by Gonzalez-Torres – candies wrapped in colorful or silver cellophane piled up in heaps or rectangular shapes – that all have different titles. “Untitled”(Lover Boys) (1991)‚ “Untitled”(Welcome Back Heroes) (1991), 137

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and “Untitled”(Public Opinion) (1991) for instance all make concrete sociohistorical references, but the connection between the names and the candy objects remains arbitrary. And it is just this arbitrariness that is on display. Rather than using tautological multiplication to prevent other meanings from being added to the visual signs, as Kosuth did, what is demonstrated here is that a variety of changing meanings can be applied to the sign “candies.” And these meanings can be applied in a way that abandons the conventional usage of language. The convention that the title of a work – as with Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs – doubles or explains the visual sign being presented is thus broken with. The series of similar works with a wide variety of titles produces a reference to the process of assigning meaning as a social practice – an indicative gesture further emphasized by the prefix “Untitled” added to the name of all of the works. The evocation of the social practice of assigning meaning also alludes to the fact that this is organized by institutions, power differences, and authorities that produce the acceptability of a particular setting (or indeed do not) and that allow for an arbitrary process to appear as natural or grounded. It also makes clear the degree to which “drag” – here, for instance, the appearance of candies as both the lover Ross and also as a group of celebrated war heroes – relies on communication with the viewers and their competence in breaking with conventions (Schirmer 2010: 163ff.). By foregoing any visualization of Ross, gay men, or people with HIV/ AIDS, the work does not allow us to take a voyeuristic position and ask, for example, if the body of a person named Ross showed traces of illness, if he seemed desperate or relaxed, or if he was an attractive, loving partner to the artist. Instead, a different topography is proposed: the space that the work “Untitled”(Portrait of Ross in L.A.) creates can be seen as a heterotopy, as a site at which the syntax, which Michel Foucault claims “causes words and things [...] to ‘hold together’” (1986: 42), is shattered. At issue is a process of visualization that, precisely in the act of producing visibility, allows for a collapse in the signifying conventions. I would claim that staging such a collapse of syntax in this installation as “abstract drag” makes it possible to produce a distance that interrupts the performative repetition of social norms. Before possibly bestowing meaning again, (conventional) meanings are first withdrawn. no palm trees, connoting identity What is it that enables Gonzalez-Torres’s work to be understood as an example of queer artistic politics? The withdrawal of signifying con138

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ventions initially means that the artist’s own statements, for instance made in interviews, take on a particular weight and become part of the work. For example, Gonzalez-Torres states in a commonly quoted conversation that he doesn’t fit the role of token very well. He thus positions himself critically in relation to the possibility of finding esteem in the art world as a representative of a marginalized group (which always goes along with the unspoken condition – often supported by granting or withholding resources – of representing this group by means of one’s work as well). As Gonzalez-Torres stated in 1993: “We have an assigned role that’s very specific, very limited. As in a glass vitrine, ‘we’ – the ‘other’ – have to accomplish ritual, exotic performances to satisfy the needs of the majority. . . . Who is going to define my culture? It’s not just Borges and García Márquez, but also Gertrude Stein and Freud and Guy Debord – they are all part of my formation” (quoted in Muñoz 1999: 165-66). José Esteban Muñoz has remarked upon Gonzalez-Torres’s strategy of not explicitly taking up identity in his work: “By refusing to simply invoke identity, and instead to connote it, he is refusing to participate in a particular representational economy” (ibid). What does it mean not to invoke identity but instead to connote it? Muñoz explains this by referring to the opaque character of the works, which make it impossible to understand it without asking: “What is that?” Any rational understanding or direct knowledge that could be derived from what is shown or said is thereby displaced. Yet this type of opacity is characteristic for a number of socalled avant-garde works, which means that it does not necessarily clarify whether and why the work might be pursuing a queer politics or a freaky politics of denormalization. It is precisely the abstraction, the de-enabling of unmediated identification, the interruption of connections to typical representation and to a usual understanding of bodies in artistic practice that paradoxically allow the work, as I see it, to make a claim to incomparability and singularity. Since the conventions of meaning are withdrawn, specificities – potential conceptual representations of art, AIDS, homosexuality, and so on – are replaced by the possibility of linking up with singular narrations, aesthetics, and biographies. The question arises, however, of how such linkages could occur, and what role the viewers play with respect to a non-random formation of these linkages. Teresa de Lauretis (1994) introduces the term “fantasy,” in reference to Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (1992), in order to develop a concept of social change that might do justice to the power of pu139

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blic images while at the same time make it possible to change them (cf. also Lorenz 2009a: 144ff.; Engel 2002: 35ff.; Engel 2009: 77ff.). In doing so, she relies on the fact that both public and individually meaningful images, as well as both conscious and unconscious processes, flow into the scenarios of fantasy that she describes. And that these include ideas and images as well as daydreams and nocturnal dreams, and that their complex, sometimes contradictory repertoire provides material for possible restagings (Lauretis 1994: 94ff.). Precisely because GonzalezTorres’s work produces an arbitrary connection between various signs and a momentary consensus with the viewers about this connection, the object of the candy (which cannot be understood in isolation as representative of queer experience) becomes linked through the work with fantasy to a singular queer history in the context of AIDS. Thus “connoting” an identity rather than securing one – Muñoz’s description of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work – would be the work of productive fantasies that allow, in defiance of social conventions, for the possibility of connecting signs with various and even contradictory aesthetic, emotional, and affective meanings. The pile of candy, there for the taking, points to the idea that it is not any individual story that is at question here, even if death and mourning affect individuals in particular ways. This facilitates on the one hand a link to collective moments in queer history and their social contexts, forms of resistance, and emotional states. And on the other hand, it makes possible a future moment of collectivity through taking and sucking on the candy. In order to inspect this artistic strategy more closely, I would like to come back to the idea that Gonzalez-Torres’s installations can be seen as direct reworkings of famous avant-garde artworks in terms of form and discourse. For instance, “Untitled”(Go-Go Dancing Platform), from 1991, a light-blue cube that is furnished with a row of light bulbs on the top outer edge and on which a go-go dancer occasionally performs, allows for a reference to Robert Morris’s grey cubes, in particular, to Morris’s cube entitled Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961), from which one can hear the sounds of the workers making this very wooden box. Meanwhile “Untitled”(Placebo), the rectangular grouping of candies wrapped in silver cellophane, takes up the heavy metal sculptures of Carl Andre – all works from the 1960s. One could say that these Gonzalez-Torres works “pass” as progenies of minimal art. Given this, the term “abstract drag” no longer only refers to the fact that the visualization of bodies is replaced by non-human objects, but also that this artistic practice appears “in the costume” of non-object art. 140

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In a conversation with Tim Rollins, Felix Gonzalez-Torres makes his relation to minimal art quite clear: “Forms gather meaning from their historical moment. The minimalist exercise of the object being very pure and very clean is only one way to deal with form. Carl Andre said, ‘My sculptures are masses and their subject is matter.’ But after twenty years of feminist discourse and feminist theory we have come to realize that ‘just looking’ is not just looking but that looking is invested with identity: gender, socioeconomic status, race, sexual orientation. . . . Looking is invested with lots of other texts. Minimalist sculptures were never really primary structures, they were structures that were embedded with a multiplicity of meanings. Every time a viewer comes into the room these objects become something else. For me they were a coffee table, a laundry bag, a laundry box, whatever. So I think that saying that these objects are only about matter is like saying that aesthetics are not about politics. Ask a few simple questions to define aesthetics: whose aesthetics? at what historical time? under what circumstances? for what purposes? and who is deciding quality, et cetera? Then you realize very quickly that aesthetic choices are politics. Believe it or not I am a big sucker for formal issues, and yes, someone like me – the ‘other’ – can indeed deal with formal issues. This is not a whitemen-only terrain, sorry boys . . .” (Rollins 2006: 74-75) Gonzalez-Torres’s candy works consist of materials that from a distance resemble steel, but that also allow other connotations and can be used in different ways. They can be eaten, sucked, or taken home. Process, objects, and bodies are thus detached from their usual meanings, shored up by the direct relation to art history. It is at least as much a break with this history as it is a citation. Rather than liberating the material from all social gesture, as Carl Andre claimed for his own sculptures, the placing together of objects and titles in Gonzalez-Torres’s work suggests that materials are linked, after the detachment from and destruction of the usual contexts, with other social discourses and practices, such as the so-called AIDS crisis or gay sex. The formal quality produces a connection to the knowledge about and the experiences with works of conceptual art and minimal art (while simultaneously breaking with them), thus calling up the past and present of artistic practice as an appropriate context in which to rework the questions addressed. what a body can do As José Esteban Muñoz has noted, when Gonzalez-Torres lists his cultural references, he includes certain artists from Latino culture, from 141

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queer culture, and also from the avant-garde art tradition, all of whom became part of his experiences, his image production, and his thinking. As is clearly shown from Muñoz’s text and through the example of Gonzalez-Torres, we live belongings not as “specificities” but as “singularities” (cf. also Probyn 1996: 9). Gonzalez-Torres, for instance, doesn’t refer to “Latino culture” but to Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, not to “queer culture” but to Gertrude Stein. The artistic works that he produces are social due to the fact that they continue certain other visualizations or actions, compete with them, and break with them. Is a “queer embodiment” that cannot be made visible, then, one that reaches beyond the individual body, that links itself to historical moments or to other bodies, and that takes up Donna Haraway’s question from her Cyborg Manifesto (1991), “Why should our bodies end at the skin?” Does a “queer embodiment” put a network of various singular belongings in place of clearly articulated identities? As I have argued elsewhere (Lorenz 2009a), the ability continually to “cross” different social positions is no longer only a liberating political demand. Instead, it has become a laborious requirement of neoliberal politics that indeed represents a new dispositiv of power.5 Elspeth Probyn accordingly problematizes the concept of a network of singular belongings by making it clear that, as soon as the issue of belonging is raised, it is always already precarious, called into question by the knowledge of its impossibility: “Processes of belonging are always tainted with deep insecurities about the possibility of truly fitting in, or even getting in” (1996: 40). Therefore, instead of “belonging” she speaks in the plural of “outside belongings” (ibid: 8; my emphasis). As she shows, belonging is not what is there and is connected with an individual body and its placement in the world (even if complex), but rather belongings are lines of desire, “desires for becoming-other” (ibid: 5). For this reason, the term “desire,” which she draws from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, is central for her notion of an “outside belonging.” She proposes a spatial arrangement of things, actions, and bodies that come closer or drift apart by means of desire. Desire is thus not individual but social, and “it is a method of doing things, of getting places” (ibid: 40). “Outside belongings” accordingly present a challenge to visualization and description since they are constantly found in movement and in the process of being produced. Probyn extends Haraway’s remark: “To replay Donna Haraway’s question, ‘Why should our bodies end at the skin?’, I also want to ask, why skin should end at our indivi142

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dual bodies? [...] Belonging expresses a desire for more than what is, a yearning to make skin stretch beyond individual needs and wants” (1996: 6). If we follow this, then Gonzalez-Torres’s silence about identity in his work is less about refusing his own identity (as a gay man, as Cuban, as an artist, etc.) than it is about extending the individual embodiment: not my body but a body (ibid: 49); not what a body is but what a body can do (ibid: 41). This results in an understanding of the body that is also social and not individual: “Bodies are defined not by their genus and species, nor by their origins and functions, but by what they can do, the effects they are capable of, in passion as in action” (ibid: 49). What would the corresponding queer embodiment then be that is made possible by abstract drag? If “Untitled”(Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is viewed as a spatial staging in which elements are arranged closer or further away, then this work does not show bodies without bodies but rather bodies without bodies in space, a moving topography into which viewers are also inserted. Viewers are expressly advised to eat the candy and thus to reduce the (body) weight of the work – even to the point of the work disappearing. For those who are informed about the weight of the work and its meaning for the artist, eating the candy refers to the disappearance of the dying body. By sucking on the candy and reducing the weight, the viewers find themselves in the paradoxical situation of both enjoying and taking part in the disappearance of the person named by the title. However, according to the certificate, the work requires an “endless supply” of candies that should be constantly replenished so that the act of sucking does not, in the end, become an activity that is visibly recorded in the work. 6 The paradox of doing something possibly taboo and at the same time of enjoying it is perhaps the reason that different commentators have associated sucking the candy with (gay) oral sex (Storr 2006: 8). The situation that the viewers find themselves in, then, is that of a randomly selected group involved in diverse desires for belonging linking themselves up with a work made of small parts, individually but also collectively, by sucking. They may follow the suggestion to fantasize the pile of candies as a gay body and connect their visual impression of the work and their shared activity with elements of their knowledge and experience. As I have mentioned, Probyn calls queer desire a “method.” Accordingly, desire that is not reterritorialized in a heteronormative way would here be a particular way of joining up the signs “Ross” and “can143

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dy” with other signs and images, thus “queering” them. By sucking and viewing, the linkage with the candy, bought in a shop, is probably dissolved, while the colorful wrappers of “Untitled”(Portrait of Ross in L.A.) or the reflective surfaces of “Untitled”(Placebo) take on a connection to a bar scene, to Andy Warhol’s silver helium balloons (Silver Clouds (1966)), to a demonstration against government inaction and homophobia, to camp aesthetics, or to the artificial-looking AZT pills by the artist group General Idea (One Day of AZT (1991)). The names “Portrait of Ross in L.A.” or even “Placebo” allow us to make connections with our own vulnerability through the dependence on others (Butler 2004: 17ff.); to real or possible mourning; to the experience of another’s death; and to the fear of our own. They enable us to perceive that skin is in fact stretched over our own bodies. What becomes possible is a mode of putting-oneself-in-connection that is not organized individually but rather socially and in the plural. 7 Queer embodiments thus emerge in the moment of connecting. They are neither visualized in the work nor do they represent the artist. They are equally not produced solely by the viewer. They do not so much invoke a category or a specificity by which consensus could be created in a society and which stabilizes and locks down the image of the other. Instead they allow for lines of flight made up of different singular images.

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C respeaking (sharon hayes) A performer, the artist Sharon Hayes, sits at a table and quietly reads one text after another, occasionally taking a sip of water or looking up at the audience. The performance bears the title My Fellow Americans (2004). The texts being read are all 36 official speeches that Ronald Reagan gave as an “Address to the Nation” between 1981 and 1989. The performance lasts ten hours. For another performance and video work‚ The Interpreter Project (2001), Sharon Hayes worked with the spoken texts of guides for tours through the historical homes of famous women. In the US, those who offer such tours are often referred to as “historical interpreters.” For such a tour, guides generally create their own texts in which they bring knowledge taken from books and other research together with anecdotes that partly draw on unusual or notable events from earlier tours. They thus refer their spoken texts to audiences that have already been there; they present what previous audiences found notable or funny or what happened once and only once. And they leave other things out. For her performance and video work, Sharon Hayes recorded and later read out the tour scripts through the historical homes of Clara Barton (18211912, founder of the American Red Cross); Mary McLeod Bethune (18751955, who was active in the struggle for the rights of African-American woman and civil rights); Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962, representative of social feminism, suffragette, and first lady); as well as Maggie Walker (1864-1934, first African American bank director). Hayes made no attempt to imitate the voices but she did maintain the rhythm of the spoken texts – the pauses and occasional laughs – so that the newly spoken text shows a similarity to what is heard without copying it. For the performance’s video work, the performance was shot on the street, that is, in “public space,” in front of homes in Los Angeles chosen at random. The text of a 15-minute tour was spoken four times in a row, so that the act of repeating, speaking conceptually, set up possible aberrations from the audio recording and a possible self-actualization of the text both over the course of the tours by the guides as well as over the course of the performance. For another performance, Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20 & 29 (2003), Sharon Hayes took up the subject of the abduction of Patty Hearst on February 4, 1974 by the Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA had Patty Hearst speak audio reports to her parents and the media on tape. On the fourth and last tape, Hearst an145

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nounced that she had joined the SLA and would now fight against the fascist American system. In a series of performances, which are also the source of a video work, Sharon Hayes spoke the text of each of the four audio recordings in front of an audience. She had mostly memorized the text but the audience was still provided with a printed version and was requested to correct any mistakes or lapses, so that individual viewers were constantly intervening in the shape of the performance and taking part in it. The artist is not presenting herself here as being in possession of a particular talent that would then be displayed in the artistic work, but instead organizes the performance in such a way that it is possible for the audience to criticize it, to improve it, and to take over the final decision about the course of the performance when Hayes’s memory isn’t perfect. In this way, the audience takes part in the practice of reproducing a spoken text – it becomes accomplices, maintaining the means to control how great the similarity or deviation from Patty Hearst’s transcribed audiotape turns out to be. The responsibility for the reworking of the material is shared with the viewers. This performance exists as a video work as well, in which the face of the performer can be seen in close-up, and the participation of the audience can be heard off screen. Sharon Hayes calls the method that she uses in all these works “respeaking.” “Respeaking” is borrowed from the technique of “reenactments” and means newly speaking a spoken text. Sharon Hayes herself points to the transtemporal moment of embodiment and recontextualization of the spoken text: “The work utilizes performative strategies to filter a spoken text through a process of interpretation (a sort of oral to oral translation) that is necessarily informed by the historical gap that exists between two moments of enunciation: the original and the respoken or re-presented” (Sharon Hayes, email message to author, Sept. 2, 2010). But “respeaking” also means “speaking back”: taking up the text that is spoken once again, not in order to leave it to the fact that someone spoke it and what the context was that this person chose or created, but to break it out of its context and to perform it again for others. For the listener, this dimension of “abstract drag” means that they hear a voice that is, however, not (only) the voice of the one speaking, but (also) the voice of another person who they possibly do not know or at any rate do not see but who is nevertheless absent and whose other bodily features, voice, emotionality, and authorization by an institution are not present.8 The spoken text is released from its previous, complex linkages. And in 146

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a second step, it becomes part of drag, becomes the starting point of a new queer embodiment. In the “abstract drag” of Sharon Hayes’s work, there is no reliance on a body that the witnesses of the performances or videos see. It is not the body that spoke the text first. Viewers must visualize this body themselves, for instance in the case of Ronald Reagan — they have to remember how it was when they first heard it, or for instance with The Interpreter Project, they have to imagine who spoke the text. The voice and its text, however, are also not acquired by the performer, since all the works make it clear that the texts belong just as much to the listeners: they are co-shaped by them and are dependent on their engagement. In all the performances, the “abstract drag” – the masking of the original creator of the spoken text and its contexts, as well as passing on the voice – produces an altered situation of communication. A collective project is proposed. The artist is not the one who would claim to have found a political solution that her project defines as an important building block, thus taking over political responsibility and taking it away from others. The “queer embodiment” that this connects to allows for no defined context in which the spoken text can be placed, but instead a complex situation of approaching or distancing oneself from the material of the past and its future use, a practice that Trinh T. Minh-ha has referred to as “speaking nearby” (1999: 209 ff.). This practice corresponds to a desire for belonging or a distancing from belonging, which at the same time remains in the state of questioning, in the working through of past events and thus in an “outside belonging” (Probyn 1996). The performance I March In The Parade Of Liberty, But As Long As I Love You I’m Not Free, which I would like to present in more detail, took place in New York on eight days in December 2007 and January 2008. Sharon Hayes went down various streets in Manhattan and stopped from time to time at a corner to recite a text over a megaphone. The work has since been shown as a sound piece in exhibition spaces. The voice of the performer, who speaks the text, can be heard; it is transmitted from a large speaker set up as a freestanding object in the exhibition space and next to which hangs a framed poster where the title of the performance can be read. At the beginning, the spoken text thematizes the attempt to convey something, to be “heard”: “no other way to get through.” Then it names the place as well as the political context of the speech at the moment in which the text is/was delivered as a performance: “So that you have a picture of where I am. I am standing on the 147

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street, on the corner of x [Prince St.] and x [Bowery]. I am speaking into a megaphone. It is Saturday, December 1st, it’s World AIDS Day.” When listeners witness the performance, this description gives the impression that the speech that follows is directed at some person or people who is/are far away, who does/do not want to or cannot come into earshot, or who is/are already dead. There is, even in further development, no final explanation of the address, so the role of the direct listeners remains unexplained. In the exhibition space, there is the additional factor that a visualization of the situation, of the situative embodiment of the text, as well as the occasion, is left to the listeners. Next the text gives the impression of speaking to a lover who is not described in any detail; only once in the further development is this fictional “other” characterized as “gay and angry.” Gender, age, and occupation are not mentioned. Hayes declares: “I need to speak to you my love. Of your life and mine, of the past and of the future, of sweet things changed to bitterness and of bitter things that still could be turned to joy. You refuse to answer my messages, my letters and my calls but I know that the ears are the only orifice that can’t be closed so I will speak to you from every street corner if I must.” In another section, topics are named that the speaker wants to discuss with the person addressed here who continues to remain unknown. “Cheney’s pompous warning to Iran, the Blackwater scandal, the bombing at Ghazil market and all this hurried talk of Baghdad returning to normal.” The urgency and emotionality of the desperate lover’s address, which appears to one on the street, is thus also directed at US foreign policy, which is as well very much criticized on the street at demonstrations and rallies but often without being heard. So a large part of the speech is also concerned with the hope of gaining political influence through communication on the street, and at the feeling of the futility of these efforts. (Futile) love and (futile) political influence – outside belongings – get confused over and over again and turn love into a field of political engagement as much as they turn world politics into the object of very personal and very emotional involvement. The desire for belonging to history and the future of leftist, but also queer politics, as well as the desire for successful love and communication is thematized. At the same time, however, as is shown, it cannot be realized by an artist holding a megaphone on a street corner. The text ends with a series of short sentences in which parts of historical love letters and slogans from the history of lesbian-gay liberation 148

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and protest movements are interwoven, suggesting a future linkage of the two: If you long for me, I long for you. I’m waiting for the war to end. Come out against war and oppression. I love you. I love you entirely. I love you so much that I cannot sleep. A dream is a dream, reality is real, open the door to the way we feel. The news is grave. Love is so easily wounded. Out of the closets and into the streets. We will not hide our love away. Gay Love-Gay Power We will not be silent An army of lovers cannot lose. ACT UP/FIGHT BACK I am beginning to think we speak in different tongues. Surely you must know that desire is cruel? I feel certain that I am going mad again. Nothing is real but you. I am a stranger in my own country. I feel as though a part of me had been torn away like a limb in battle. Nothing that has ever gone before was like this. What do we want? When do we want it? In the performance, the individual body above all is an essential element; it is a body walking from corner to corner with a megaphone calling out a text. While at demonstrations, it is the mass taking part and seeking to convince and the number of participants plays a significant role, it is here an individual person standing for herself, exhibiting the possible futility of her attempt, and shifting the focus to the vulnerability of the body (Butler 2004: 17ff.). It is precisely the vulnerability exhibited here that allows for the possible further success of the speech, that makes it clear that this success relies on the disposition of the listeners, on their embodied recognition, their attention, their respect and interest, but above all on their engagement and activity. This is reinforced 149

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on the one hand by the fact that the speech is performed without institutional endorsement (it is not held, for instance, in an exhibition space). And on the other hand by the fact that it appears over and over again as a lover’s address, thus underscoring the impression that someone is exposing themselves here – that someone is making public that they are dependent upon another or upon others. In this way, spectators must also define their own role or leave it open, for whether they are solicited as participants at a demonstration or whether, as voyeurs of a desperate love act, they should instead keep their listening secret, also remains unclear. The work speaks “nearby” of politics and love without fixing these contexts in relation to one another. The text of the performance is compiled from a whole series of citations: from parts of letters that Oscar Wilde wrote to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas from the prison to which he was sentenced for sodomy in the years between 1895 and 1897, as well as from slogans from the history of the early lesbian-gay movement and its demonstrations in New York. While the body that declaims is an individual, the voice declaims the texts of many different authors from various times. In this way, the performance thematizes the complex role of desire. Desire here is not only something that enables connection or distance in a love relationship. It also produces political action. It has a public effect. It allows for connections or separations between those who do not personally know one another or who do not live at the same time. And desire is collective: it has many voices and is patched together from different times. It does not belong to anyone. It is not bound to any individual body. “Abstract Drag” then occurs outside of a concrete, individual body but nonetheless cannot be conceived outside of (queer) embodiments.

1 Cf. the version of this text on Felix Gonzales-Torres (Lorenz 2009b) and also “Repräsentation von Körpern ohne Körper,” Spector 2007: 139ff. 2 Further examples of representing bodies without bodies would be GonzalezTorres’s “Untitled” (1991), a billboard placed in a public space and showing a photograph of an unmade bed. The impressions of two bodies, which obviously were lying here, can be seen. Another work (also from 1991) shows two clocks hanging next to one another and showing fairly precisely the same time. It bears the title: “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers). A photograph showing a close-up of flowers bears the title: “Untitled” (Alice B. Toklas’ and Gertrude Stein’s Grave, Paris). We could also mention his portraits that are in a sense textual works in which he joins individually significant data about a person, in writing, with socially or politically significant events.

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3 The formal parallels between Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work and certain works of avant-garde art has been repeatedly pointed out (cf. for instance Spector 2007: 16 or Föll 2006: 106). 4 The certificates provide guidelines regarding what candies to use in a piece and leave the installation open-ended; for example, for the candies, the original candy is used as a guideline–the exhibitor may choose to use a different candy based on what is standard and what is available in the country where the work is exhibited. The installation of the work is also open-ended in that, for the candy pieces, the candies may be installed in any shape or form. 5 On the term “crossing,” cf. chapter 2 FN 4 6 Felix Gonzalez-Torres allowed for a small wall label, no bigger than the wall text label describing the work, stating: “Please take only one.” (This wall label is not required.) In addition, there is the option that the candy pieces may diminish; this decision is up to the exhibitor of the piece. While there is an “endless supply” indicated in the medium of the work, the borrower may decide not to replenish the candies as a conceptual decision. 7 Muñoz (1999: 170) states that Gonzalez-Torres’s works enable a shared “structure of feeling” rather than evidence of understanding. This would not produce any identitarian group but instead cut through certain Latino and queer communities. 8 “Giving voice to someone” is the classic political tool that is meant to stand in for agency, but which here can only be had in a “stolen” and already used form.

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Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Contagious!, 2010

An End “When I hear the music, I become epileptic.”1 The film Contagious!2 begins with a person quickly moving through a hallway and walking onstage at a club. The space is painted black and is lit by a group of neon elements that vaguely locate the scene in the present. In fact, the club could be a futuristic environment from the 1970s as much as a New Wave design from the 1980s or a cool, reserved design from the near future. But the performer (Arantxa Martinez) is wearing a dress from the late 19th or early 20th century, a dress meant more for a show than for everyday bourgeois life. She looks at herself in a mirror set up on stage that alludes to a photograph of the dancer Polaire that is part of a series of collaged photographs that are also part of the installation. In fin-de-siècle Paris, Polaire was a representative of the “epileptic dance,” a dance based on photographs of hysterical crises (Gordon 2009.) These photographs became well known after Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot treated and researched thousands of hysterical patients (mostly women) at the famous Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. He first had the patients photographed in a studio he set up himself and then presented them to an interested audience in meticulously staged appearances (Didi-Huberman 1997). Polaire was known for her nervous, sexually aggressive dance style. 155

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The performer turns away from the mirror and goes to the edge of the stage where an audience in flamboyant outfits watches her. Some are wearing makeup and special hairstyles that also seem to float somewhere between the 1970s and the future. Instead of starting the show as expected, the performer puts her hand over her mouth and coughs. She keeps coughing, not stopping. Slowly we see and hear individual spectators start coughing. Soon, the whole audience is coughing. Later, the performers Arantxa Martinez and Vaginal Davis are seen in front of the now calm and seemingly uninvolved audience – an audience that both observes the dances and is part of the staging itself. The two performers present reconstructions of epileptic dances as well as the cakewalk (a dance that was initially developed in the US by enslaved Africans and that poked fun at European dance styles like the minuet). Vaginal Davis’s performance alludes to photographs of the dancer Aida Walker, who contributed to the emergence of modern dance with her performance of a dance about Salome. She also created a furor in Paris for her interpretation of the cakewalk. How is it possible to generate a freak/y knowledge from the artistic methods of radical, transtemporal, and abstract drag, to reproduce it, and in turn to connect it up with (new) embodied practices of denormalization? How to get around the rules of recognition that privilege the dominant forms of knowledge? The title of the installation Contagious! alludes to an idea from the late 19th century that seeing and imitating movement is contagious. Doctors claimed to have been infected by viewing the “tics” of their patients. It is said, according to Georges Montorgueil, that the famous doctor Gilles de Tourette, one of Charcot’s students, died from the disease epilepsy after having not only studied the movements of hysterical patients, but also after having stared at a performer of “epileptic dances,” Diamantine, at one of her shows (quoted in Gordon 2009: 30). The philosopher Paul Souriau also saw danger in any dance performance that, as he put it in his book The Aesthetics of Movement (1889), arose from the phenomenon of a mimetic and undesired as much as unconscious repetition of movement by the viewer. Convulsive movements in dance or in design can, he wrote, “by a kind of contagion, provoke in the viewer similar symptoms” (quoted in Gordon 2009: 6). Some doctors even believed that the body’s movements might change one’s way of thinking and feeling (ibid: 19). Practices and gestures were considered signs of deviance, and not only appearance and bodily features. As Rae Beth Gordon 156

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notes: “How gesture signified in the late nineteenth century was informed by racial classification, evolution theories and medical theories of degeneration, epilepsy, and hysteria” (ibid: 2). Gordon thus describes the epileptic dances as an “exhibition of strangeness” (ibid: 45). In colonial Paris, they embodied the idea of “being other,” of losing control, and of irrationality and dysfunctionality. They showed an (exaggerated) imitation and simultaneous subversion of what was considered feminine or foreign (ibid: 19-44). The figure of contagion, which was also present in the discussion of a threatening “Salomania” (cf. chapter 2 of this book), points to the fact that the repetition and reproduction of movements, practices, characters, and histories was viewed as performative, in the sense of producing social effects. Nonetheless, viewing the drag of hysterical crises or Salome drag differs from a model of performative repetition, which, according to this model, reproduces norms and simultaneously destabilizes them through imperfection, mistakes, or parodic elements. “Contagion” thus by no means corresponds to Judith Butler’s idea of a “performativity of gender” (cf. Butler 1991) but instead turns this on its head. Its leaps in time mark a distance from the performative, which Elizabeth Freeman has criticized as “progressive” and “future-oriented”: “To reduce all embodied performances to the status of copies without originals is to ignore the interesting threat that the genuine past-ness of the past sometimes makes to the political present” (2000: 728). Instead of reproducing gender norms, imitation in the context of contagion additionally serves as a multiplication of the “flight” from the norm – feared and at the same time desired. Contagious drag as an artistic strategy serves less to reproduce (post-)colonial and heteronormative conventions in performative repetition, or to focus on the process of production, than it does to draw attention to how breaks are made with evidence and conventions, and which lines of flight lead away from these. In the film installation Salomania (2009), performer Yvonne Rainer warns the audience precisely about this point: “My dear audience. I’d like you to be a bit wary of the dance you’re about to see. It may lead you into homosexuality, transsexuality, transgender, perversity, and lesbianism.” “Contagion” is thus simultaneously highly productive (without being intentional or having a clear origin) and destructive, since it breaks with conventions. Whether the performative-destructive act of contagion succeeds, however, necessarily remains open, since its historical usage is only reconstructable in part and its further use is not ruled out. Rosi 157

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Braidotti (2006) sees the question of “sustainability” as an essential part of ethics, thus addressing the question of how an affect that initiates change can continue on. Ethics means, as she claims, “actualising sustainable forms of transformations” (Braidotti 2006: 8). In contrast, the effects of contagion cannot be measured. Their sustainability arises less through a future-oriented social anchoring than by an unpredictable and uncontrollable effect of a change that can either be taken up and made usable time and again, or perhaps can be ignored and left to trickle away. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari associate the model of contagion with the concept of a rhizomatic connection that takes the place of filiation: “We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production. Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields and catastrophes. Like hybrids, which are in themselves sterile, born of a sexual union that will not reproduce itself, but which begins over again ever time, gaining that much more ground. . . . Propagation by epidemic, by contagion, has nothing to do with filiation by heredity, even if the two themes intermingle and require each other. The vampire does not filiate, it infects” (1987: 265-66). In a similar sense, Elizabeth Freeman takes up the narrative of the low-budget film The Sticky Fingers of Time by Hilary Brougher (1997). In the film, a scene narrates from a novel in which Frankenstein “splits his stitches and he dies, fertilizing the earth where that little girl grows tomatoes” (Freeman 2005: 60). The fact that Frankenstein sows himself into the tomato bed that the girl reaps and later eats is read by Freeman as a queer form of reproduction without father and mother and without pregnancy and birth. Freeman argues that this model refuses the cyclical temporality of reproduction. She points out that this model instead takes up motifs like obligation and belonging and she accordingly suggests the term “binding” as a form of connection to queer predecessors. Freeman’s suggestion might perhaps come too close to an “ethnic model” of homosexuality, which according to Christopher Nealon (2001) serves to answer the pathologization of alternative sexualities and genders with the fantasy of a transhistorical queer life, for instance when queer filiation is sought out in Greek antiquity (cf. also Danbolt 2011: 1984-85). In contrast, the practice of “bondage,” (with its SM connotations) which Freeman appends to “binding,” is perhaps better suited to designate the contagious connections mentioned here as “outside belongings” and to highlight the role of desire and power in them. 158

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The practice of desiring captivation would then also be one that does not seek to construct and secure a transhistorical identity, but rather seeks out moments of the past in order to work on future relations. As Freeman stresses: “In this sense, the monster’s body is not a ‘body’ at all but a figure for relations between bodies past and present, for the insistent return of a corporealized historiography and future making of the sort to which queers might lay claim” (2005: 60-61). The circulation of particular movements and characters could then be described less as a queer filiation than as a transhistorical practice of denormalizing that might be extended to those who do not appear in “Polaire drag” or “Aida Walker drag” but who nonetheless enjoy participating in this staging of drag. In this context, it may be more important that the epileptic dancer Jane Avril was herself interned at the Salpêtrière during her youth (Gordon 2009: 17), that Oscar Wilde was sentenced to jail as a “sodomite,” or that Maud Allen danced her Salome dances almost nude, that she also was prosecuted as a homosexual, and that many drag queens named themselves after her, than that the documented symptoms of hysteria or the contents of Salome are preferred here over other narratives. Therefore the figure – the hysteric or Salome for example – is not a “queer figure.” Instead, drag is contagious and initiates practices that can be described as queer (or also not). In Elspeth Probyn’s words: “They must be read as initiating altered and alternative relations within a matrix of class, race, and ethnicity as well as sexuality” (1996: 59). This is not about utopia in the sense of a view – its romanticizing dimension falling prey to power relations and social conditions – but about seeing where precisely these conditions destroy their own building blocks in a surprising, random, or calculated way, thus letting something else emerge. The performer Vaginal Davis in Vaginal Davis-Aida Walker drag walks on stage and dances a few steps of the cakewalk. Slowly, the audience starts to imitate the performer’s gestures. Everyone seems engaged in the dance movements. In the film, we see Vaginal Davis-Aida Walker in close-up. She screams, “Stop it!” The audience freezes. The connection is broken. Presumably it is not only connections that reproduce through contagion and that make leaps in time that are possible, but also breaks and incoherencies. The “queer ancestors” might protest against a desired binding, they will perhaps reject differences as unbridgeable gaps, they 159

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will view the methods of binding as inappropriate, or “bondage” could be crushing. Contagion is not appropriation.

1 Song performed in 1899 by Alice de Tender (Gordon 2009: 12). 2 Filminstallation by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz (12 min., 2010). The installation includes 11 photographs. Performers: Vaginal Davis and Arantxa Martinez. Camera: Bernadette Paassen.

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Appendix (Methodology)

7 methods of a freak theory of contemporary art Following the stagings, narrations, and performances of the historical freak show, I would finally like to trace the question of what it might mean to propose not (only) a queer theory but a freak theory of art. How can a theory be and act “freaky”? How can it “laugh rather than argue”? Through seven methods of a possible freak theory, I would like to propose some reflections about how the dual account of the historical freak shows – the exhibition of and staring at “other bodies” on the one hand and the corporeal practices beyond a logic of norm and deviation on the other hand – produce a theory that is embodied and at the same time acts with a certain distance to the body. 1st method: freak knowledge (the production of knowledge is placed in other hands and pursued by dubious means) One challenge for freak theory is that it is confronted with knowledge about bodies and bodily practices produced by so-called specialists, for instance scientists, legislators, judges, doctors, and educators. Certain people become authorized to speak the truth not only about themselves but also about others. People who obviously do not fit in with the body161

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ideals of their time are excluded from this truth production in a particular way. The historical freak shows were dealing with just such a process of power-knowledge production, transferring it into show business, an area that has not generally been granted the authority to produce knowledge. Correspondingly, in freak shows there was usually one central person, called “the professor,” who spoke about the freak-performers, their presentations, and their biographies. This speech was referred to as a “lecture” (Bogdan 1996: 27). The professor claimed that the stories were “the truth.” The narratives provided a scientifically authorized explanation for, to take one example, the black beard of the bearded lady. Perhaps, it was said, the bearded lady’s mother had been taken by surprise in her house by a puma while she was pregnant. There were frequent references in such narratives to science, scientists, and scientific organizations (ibid: 29). Moreover, many freak performers gave lectures about themselves. Since the professor or performer was supposedly telling “the truth,” which nonetheless quite obviously contained fictional elements, s/he and the audience would sometimes laugh about discrepancies in the performed statements. Laughing thus became part of the production of knowledge – a phenomena that undermined the opposition of “truth” and “lies” and turned the staging of bodies into an intersection between the most diverse elements from the fields of science, mythology, and literature, and into a field of possible contestation. So the freak production of knowledge practiced here claimed to be “true,” with a twinkle in the eye, thus thematizing its means and manner of production. If we follow this method, a freak theory undermines a logic of norm and deviation in that it produces or confirms the norm by deploying highly unstable narratives about the “other,” so that a kind of pleasure arises precisely from the instability of the narrative. David Hevey (1992: 53) has characterized processes that participate in critically constructing a dichotomy between “freak” and “normal” as “enfreakment,” a process that we might say is accompanied here by an “endragment.” The appearances present conspicuous bodies but as a performance: a visualization of bodies that in a certain way fictionalizes and unsettles these bodies, thus coming into a deviant and ambivalent relationship to norms, destabilizing and contesting these norms, or even abandoning them. In the freak shows there were different types of narratives used to present the freaks in the lectures. One type of story presented the freakperformer as superior and especially talented. Her_his social position, 162

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talent, family, or special bodily skills were invented or exaggerated. These freak performers were given important titles like “captain,” “general,” “prince,” or “king.” Since Europe was highly prized in the US, the freaks often came from Europe, and above all from England. They were – according to the story – highly educated, spoke several languages, and had aristocratic hobbies like writing history or painting (Bogdan 1996: 30). In another story type, the “mode of the exotic,” the origin of the freak-performer was shifted to some foreign and exotic location. So, for instance, it was claimed that someone born in Ohio or Brooklyn instead came from Borneo. Other shifts, inventions, or exaggerations referred to details of history in order to emphasize the exoticism of the performers and their culture. For instance, they would mention cannibalism, human sacrifice, bounty hunters, polygamy, unusual clothing, or dietary customs that US Americans and Western Europeans found repulsive, for instance eating dogs or insects. Both types of narratives clearly referred to colonial history and to the construction of a supremacy of the US and Europe and their “superior” cultures. This logic then gave the US and Europe the mandate to colonize the “uncivilized” peoples of other lands and their sometimes desired, other times feared exotic cultures. Pictures from imperial journeys and colonial research often supplied the details of the “exotic type” narratives. The presentation of the freak performers in terms of exceptional education or exoticism is thus based on social hierarchies and their associated ideas and fantasies. The production of knowledge in the freak shows resorted to this visual archive of deprivileging and excluding – to “ideals” as well as to images of the “other” that were then reapplied. We could nonetheless ask whether these presentations did not also manage to cast doubt on the objectivity of the knowledge about “savage,” non-Western bodies that was being constructed by dubious experts and exaggerated, fabricated, or ironic stories? And whether these presentations made the social meaning of a particular education a subject of reflection and even of mockery through affirmative-critical strategies, as well as through ridiculing the system of “tribute” inherent in titles by giving them out quite at random? The embodiments of the freak performers were associated with the socially approved system that short-circuited difference with hierarchy. But this was applied in such a “wrong” way that both the classification of the bodies presented as well as the so-called scientific method of classification could not be maintained. 163

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2nd method: the production of freaks and dupes (the social construction of inside and outside and the shift of the rules of intelligibility) During the freak shows, as Robert Bogdan (1996) has noted, a feeling of camaraderie and a similar view of life was shared between the showpeople, the hosts of the show, and the “human oddities.” Humanity was, according to Bogdan, divided into two groups: those who “are there” (that is, in the entertainment industry) and those who are “not there.” The construction of these two groups was supported by a common language, a shared lifestyle, insider secrets, and jokes about the outsiders. In some cases, these outsiders were cheated by manipulated gambling schemes or by pickpocketing. Those that did not belong were the ones who were taken in, either by the lies on offer and the manipulated bodily presentations or by theft. The construction of groups at the freak show were thus not based on presumably “natural” characteristics or differences – not on bodily or mentally “being-other” – but instead on particular abilities in which the freak performers were the side with the advantage. In her discussion of “passing” as performance, Amy Robinson (1994) explains that this performance need not necessarily be understood as a strategy of identity politics.1 What is much more pertinent is the social function that it has for the production of culturally recognized knowledge. The “deceiver” and the “insiders,” who observe and recognize the deception, form themselves into one group that understands procedures and operations to which the dominant society has no access. The question here, according to Robinson, is not really about whether it is true or whether anyone actually possesses such a special ability. The claim alone is a socially productive practice. When a group shares a certain field of knowledge (thus becoming an insider group), those who “do not understand” or are deceived, the so-called “dupes,” are in Robinson’s model those who are excluded from this knowledge. A social constellation arises in which the rules of intelligibility – the rules of what can be spoken and who can speak – are shifted. Those who belong to the dominant social groups and who usually set the rules of knowledge are here excluded from the position of knowledge. The dupes, the now non-knowing, are constituted as other. The deceivers and the insiders, who share their exclusionary knowledge, then take over the usual function of a majoritarian group. A certain economy of representation is thus turned on its head; the social constellation is shifted at the same time as it remains open to new shifts. When our attention is focused on such a triangular arrangement, it becomes clear that the deceiver and the insiders can make practices 164

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and images intelligible that are not legible within the hegemonic cultural conventions represented by the dupes. In relation to bodies, the focus is shifted from the identity of bodies to their legibility. It poses the questions: For whom does a body become legible? Who sets the rules of intelligibility? This, as Robinson argues, is exactly where authority lies for the “deceiver” and the members of the insider group. For two concurrent methods of recognizing and acknowledging are taking place. While the dupe can only see the assumption of a place – here that of the “freak” – those belonging to the insider group are in the position to observe the crossing from one place to another, and to see how a person is created as a “freak” by means of a performance. This perception is something from which the dupes remain excluded. It shifts, again according to Robinson, the rules of intelligibility, allowing for a challenge to the hegemonic rules of recognition represented by the dupes (1994: 730). Instead, the (so far) hegemonic reader is subordinated to the interpretative authority of the insider group. In this way, as Sue Ellen Case articulates it, passing is rather when “a strategy of appearances replaces a claim of truth” (quoted in Robinson 1994: 730). As Robinson summarizes, this represents a new model of how someone can maintain a position of power and presence in the Western order of truth (ibid). Therefore, the freak performance can be viewed as a practice of self-empowerment, intervening without authorization into the construction and understanding of one’s own body (cf. Butler 2004: 224). The freak performances can, however, be distinguished from the performance of “passing,” for the dupes are constantly being given the chance to understand or at least to guess that they are being deceived – that they are seeing a “show.” For the dupes (the hegemonic group), pleasure lies in the instability passing through them that contains the possibility that even their own bodies and their social positioning might be exposed to a similar destabilization. Therefore, even if it is only the insider group that completely “knows” that this is all about drag (a calculated performance) and fully recognizes the processes of production (thus landing in the position of the “knowing”), nonetheless “objectivity,” “truth,” and the “reading of bodies” is also cast into doubt for the dupes. In this process, therefore, not only are the positions of “knower” and “object of knowledge” switched, as Robinson describes it, but the methods and categories of knowledge production and the “reading” of bodies can also be disputed. This, of course, is a process that noticeably pulls the rug of certain knowledge out from under the feet of the dupes. 165

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3rd method: freaky multivalence (a figure of difference is produced that refuses to be categorized, immobilized, or exhausted through understanding) The freak shows were populated by freak performers who were supposedly born with a particular physical or mental quality, be it skin color, a particular kind of hair growth such as that of the “bearded ladies,” or many other things that would later be designated as “disability” or “illness.” Then there were those who had supposedly inherited such a quality later in life because they fell ill or lost a body part. Finally, there were also the so-called novelty acts: those who gave special performances such sword swallowers or snake charmers (Bogdan 2006: 24). Later, for example in the 1970s, the name “freak” also transformed into a name for social practices that called for the right to laziness or alternative economies. The term “freak” has been used to collect the most diverse ways of taking on or producing a certain distance to dominant norms or to the normalizing practices of white, heterosexual, masculine or feminine US Americans or Europeans without this difference in turn producing a unified and recognizable category. I would like to refer to such performance as “radical drag.” These freak performers do not only exhibit embodiments that resist dichotomous descriptions according to gender, sexual, or other categories. They are often also exhibited as dysfunctional or incompatible with social and economic demands, or they maintain abilities quite other than those normally recognized. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2006) understands the “freak” as an icon of general embodied deviance that can affect gender, race, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. She thus refers to this figure as “multivalent” (ibid: 10). The designation “freak” therefore also makes it possible to connect different representations of sexuality and gender with other axes of power and discourses, for instance with a discussion of racism, disability, or a critique of capitalist economies. 4th method: freak embodiment (staged freaks, fake freaks, and freak subjectification) The visual representation of difference often touches on questions of visual evidence. It calls up the notion that the bodies that are shown are legible. The presumed legibility of visual representations of the body was and is the foundation of various strategies of “otherings,” for criminalizing or pathologizing for instance. Alan Sekula (2003) has examined how the photographic portrait in particular is a form of depiction that claims to say something about the person depicted, especially about his 166

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or her personality. Photography is a technology that was already being used for police surveillance as early as the 19th century (ibid). It began, as Sekula notes, “to establish and delimit the terrain of the other, to define both the generalized look – the typology – and the contingent instance of deviance and social pathology” (ibid: 273). In Paris, Jean-Martin Charcot had a photo studio set up in the Salpêtrière Hospital in order to manufacture portraits of hysterical woman (Didi-Huberman 2004). In the context of colonial history, photography was used to fit the “family of man” into classification systems, to become acquainted with it, and to understand it (McClintock 1995: 124). The invention of photography gave rise to the idea that there is such a thing as a photographically represented body. This truth claim was also the foundation for photographic portraits of the freak performers, which already in the second half of the 19th century were being sold outside the shows as a kind of autograph picture. These photographs were carefully staged in terms of lighting, backdrops, costumes, and hairstyles. For instance, the bearded lady Annie Jones, whose portrait is the basis for the film N.O. Body (2008) wore long Victorian dresses in the photographs, emphasizing the contrast between her feminine dress and her masculine beard. Other bearded ladies were shown alongside their husbands to stress the deviation from the usual family portrait, or a very short man was placed next to a very tall one. The presentation of freaks thus touched on a performance involving operations such as displacement, exaggeration, and exoticization (cf. Bogdan 2006: 27ff.). The stagings went so far as to “fake” the particular qualities of certain freaks, such as a man with a second, smaller head on his forehead, who was presented with the claim that this head could speak until he was 20 years old (Bogdan 1988: 84-85). Or at least, it was not always known precisely whether certain talents and oddities were a fake or not. The appeal lay, as in the “lectures,” precisely in the uncertainty and the destabilization associated with it. 5th method: the freak economy (reworking capitalism) Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2006) has pointed out that the changes in production, work, and technology referred to as “industrialization” redefined the relation to the body. The growing significance of factories and machines in the 19th century led, according to Garland-Thomson, to a high valuation of bodies that were capable of following predetermined temporal divisions, of linking up with machines, and of being efficient (2006: 11-12). Practices such as standardization, mass pro167

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duction, and work with exchangeable parts led to the advancement of “sameness” (not equality) as a cultural value. In the economy of the freak shows, which was developing at the same time, the bodily features that were emphasized and exhibited through performance were precisely those that were in no way consistent with the industrial demands of sameness. As J. K. Gibson-Graham stresses in her book The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (1996), various economies always exist alongside one another that follow different or even contradictory rules. Capitalism can thus neither be approached as a uniform whole, nor should the alternative economies be overlooked. Freak economies thus definitely arose with industrialization and were consistent with the capitalist theory of surplus value in that an entrepreneur, usually P. T. Barnum, drew off the surplus value of the freak performer’s work, availing himself of a niche and exploiting bodies that fell outside the demands of industrialization. At any rate, it was also possible that those who had neither found work in industry nor in the household could here obtain both wages and social recognition. A few of the freak performers even became “celebrities.” Their biographies elicited great public interest and they could, as in the case of the bearded lady Annie Jones, attain a sizeable income. The question arises as to whether the integrative processes of current economies were foreclosed here. Today, according to Antke Engel (2009), we can recognize an increasing appreciation and integration of difference. Cultural images of hybrid, flexible, and ambivalent identities have been proposed as the epitome of successful, creative individuality, and new hierarchies have been opened up in relation to those who cannot be evaluated or exploited in the same way (Engel 2009: 13). We must critically ask, then, whether a (freak) performance disturbs the processes of hierarchization and ostracism via economy or can even produce other economies? On the one hand, economies also arose in the context of the freak shows that cannot be sufficiently described by the keyword “capitalism,” such as those of theft, which disregards the capitalist category of private property. On the other hand, the freak shows produced bodies that, to borrow a term from Robert McRuer, were perceived as “transgressive” and as such, despite possible economic success, enduringly brought images of bodies into the public eye that could not be associated with any similar success in other social fields (2006: 171). Robert McRuer derives his discussion of the “transgressive” as an economic-critical method from a debate about visualization that was sparked by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s texts (2001) about photo168

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graphs of differently abled people. Garland-Thomson distinguishes in the visual rhetoric of (photographic) representation of difference between four modes: the “wondrous mode” that represents subjects as special and admirable despite their deviation; the “sentimental mode” that elicits pity; the “exotic mode” that exhibits deviation (“which makes disability strange and distant – a freakish or perhaps transgressive spectacle” (McRuer 2006: 171)); and the “realistic mode” that minimizes deviation and reduces the distance between observer and observed (2001). Garland-Thomson assesses the “realistic mode” as particularly promising, since this one would make it possible for people with deviations to be integrated into work and consumption. Despite his esteem for Garland-Thomson’s theoretical work, Robert McRuer sharply criticizes this assessment since it offers a narrative of progress and is meant to line up with the demands of neoliberal economy instead of, on the contrary, paving the way to changing these demands – a way that would no longer privilege certain bodies and exclude others. He makes a case for the “exotic,” or as he would prefer to call it, the “transgressive mode” – a mode that would block any integration and any subdivision into norm and deviation. As an example of this mode, he takes up the work of the performance artist Bob Flanagan, who in the 1990s used his cystic fibrosis as well as his interest in SM practices as the starting point for his performances. Flanagan’s self-representation does not seek to solicit pity nor is it geared toward “normality.” According to McRuer, Flanagan’s works seem to say: “Look at me: I am like you [...] maybe. But we’re not like the others and we might, you and I, be able to imagine something other than, different from, or beyond all of this” (2006: 82-83).2 6th method: freak heterotopology (making use of the productivity of space) In her book The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (2009), Susan Schweik analyzed a set of “ugly laws” that were in force not only in the US, but also in Europe and Asia throughout the 19th century. According to these laws, which sought to regulate appearance and behavior in public, freaks shows were places where people with bodily particularities were not only exhibited but also shut away (Schweik 2009). In Michel Foucault’s terminology, such a place is a “heterotopia” – an “other” place – that is nonetheless not outside the world. Heterotopias are permeated with power relations and this determines their relationship to other spaces. In contrast to utopias, heterotopias are real and efficient places 169

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(Foucault 2005). As examples of heterotopias, Foucault names hospitals, nursing homes, barracks, and ships. Heterotopian space is not opposed to other space, like private space is to public space, for instance, or like the space of leisure is to the space of work. Instead, it is a space with the particular quality, according to Foucault, of having to do with all other spaces and relations while at the same time being quite different from them. According to Foucault’s classification, we could designate the freak show as a “heterotopia of deviation” in which individuals are found whose behavior deviates from the norm, such as psychiatric clinics or prisons (ibid: 12). The problem with Foucault’s term “heterotopias of deviation,” as I see it, is that he reaffirms the relation of norm and deviation, which is here spatially established, instead of stressing the capacity of heterotopia to shift this relation or even reverse it. I think, for example, of the well-known film Freaks by Tod Browning (1932) in which the main character, who is exhibited because he is considered very small, lives in a tiny circus wagon. The size of the wagon is such that it causes his so-called “normal sized” colleagues to appear inappropriately large – as non-normal or non-standard. A freak theory could thus propose a heterotopian space that would emphasize this capacity to produce one’s own measure, one’s own ideas of evaluation, one’s own aesthetics and logics. Admittedly, these are not independent of the power relations from, in, and against which they arose. They are nonetheless in the position of transforming, at least momentarily or fragmentarily, the relation between norm and deviation, and thus of functioning themselves as dominant, as hegemonic, and as determinant for the production of knowledge, intelligibility, and forms of representations. Foucault concludes his short lecture with the claim that every heterotopia has a certain function that it takes on in relation to the rest of space. So the question arises, what social function could the freak show have? For the social relations of power that lead to “enfreakment” are here constantly present and are repeated in the relationship between spectators and performers. Nonetheless, a space is created on the basis of the largest possible distance from a set of excluding norms. This distance makes it possible that the function of the space confirms the norms for the spectators (who perceive themselves as “normal” in contrast to the freak performers), but that the distance is also desired by them (Garland-Thomson 1996: 10). Identification with norms is thus deferred or shifted; the desired distance offers not only a spatially (and 170

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temporally) restricted alternative to certain social norms, but perhaps also makes it possible to install new ideals. A freak theory produces queer-artistic heterotopias, for instance in an exhibition space or a cinema, that are possibly in the position to oppose a re-introduction of the ugly laws, as Susan Schweik has discussed (2009). Schweik speaks of the “vestiges” of the ugly laws, as they can be seen, for instance in current practices of privatization and exclusion in public space where access is more and more regulated. 7th method: freak heterochrony (appropriating the productivity of time) Much as the freak show can be considered a heterotopian site, it also produces its own time (cf. also Foucault 2005: 16). Biographies are introduced that offer alternatives to a heteronormative biography in which youth and education is followed by childcare and wage labor. The stage props often connect bodies to another time period, for instance to antiquity. Compliance with a normative ideal is only rarely staged, as for example at the wedding of the famous freak performer Charles Stratton (stage name Tom Thumb), which was met with great interest in 1883 and was reportedly attended by more than 2000 guests. Not only did the biographies presented occur differently, often very spectacularly and full of magnificent incidents, but also, for instance, personalities were presented that were said to be 170 years old, or consistencies were presented with and in continuation of colonialist ideas of inhabitants of places “where time stood still.” The time of the freak show is thus not that of capitalist progress; there is no modern temporality of any “meanwhile” possible here that would ensure that the unity of a nation or the ideal of capitalist economy would be processed in various places at the same time (Anderson 2006; Bhabha 1994: 199ff.). Corresponding to Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, we could also speak of a “heterochrony”: of a time that is not independent of the power relations that structure our understanding of time – for instance of “backwardness” in the colonies – but that nonetheless establishes its own rules that intervene in the dominant temporality. freak theory All of the methods presented here – of a dubious production of knowledge; of shifting the rules of what is intelligible; of non-identitarian, non-unified, and staged embodiments; of experimenting with economies; and of interventions in space and time – inspire a theory that pro171

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duces interventions in norms and normalities. Freak theory is thus not a theoretical practice that stands outside social power relations. Rather, it is a practice that co-produces inventions and images – that offers alternatives to social power relations that are more and different than critiquing, “reworking,” or subverting social norms. The freak theory of art is thus “in drag.” It uses the contemporary language of poststructuralism and queer theory and at the same time the language of the freak show. In this way, queer theory becomes a performer who takes up contact with an earlier language and sounds out its potentials for denormalization and dehierarchization – a practice that I designated in chapter 2 more precisely as “transtemporal drag.”

1 A queer-theoretical critique of identities such as “being-lesbian” or “being-gay,” “being-man” or “being-woman,” is well known. If an identity is claimed, the process of differentiating is halted, power relations associated with it are rendered unrecognizable, and the identity appears to be stable, coherent, and independent of everything that it is distinct from. Identities furthermore require criteria of who belongs and who does not. They are often naturalized by claiming that a person who belongs to a named group has certain characteristics. Yet, even critics of identity politics themselves constantly exhibit difficulties in addressing power differences and different experiences when the construction of groups is entirely rejected. 2 This citation comes from McRuer’s discussion of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957). The production of myths, according to McRuer, consists of “routinizing and making something seem ordinary” (McRuer 2006: 180). Barthes imagines the images saying: “Look at me: I am like you” (McRuer 2006: 180).

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Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1996): The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), Cambridge and Massachusetts: University of Minnesota Press. Gonzalez-Torres, Felix (2006 [1993]): “Interview mit Tim Rollins.” In: Julie Ault (ed.), Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Göttingen: Steidl, pp. 68-76. Gordon, Rae Beth (2009): Dances with Darwin: 1875-1910, Farnham: Ashgate. Haase, Matthias (2006): “Histories that are Written in the Night.” In: Diedrich Diederichsen, Christine Frisinghelli, Christoph Gurk, Matthias Haase, Juliane Rebentisch, Martin Saar, and Ruth Sonderegger (eds.), Golden Years. Materialien und Positionen zu Queerer Subkultur und Avantgarde zwischen 1959 und 1974, Graz: Camera Austria, pp. 173-83. Halberstam, Judith (1998): Female Masculinity, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Halberstam, Judith (2005): In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York and London: New York University Press. Haraway, Donna (1991): “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In: EDS,Donna Haraway: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge,. [1993],pp. 149-182. Hevey, David (1992): The Creatures That Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Imagery, New York: Routledge. Hickey-Moody, Anna, and Mary Lou Rasmussen (2009): “The Sexed Subject Inbetween Deleuze and Butler.” In: Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr (eds.), Deleuze and Queer Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 37-53. Hirschfeld, Magnus (1930): Geschlechtskunde auf Grund dreißig-jähriger Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeitet. Vol. 4, Bilderteil, Stuttgart: Julius Püttmann Verlagsbuchhandlung. Klöppel, Ulrike (2010): XX0XY ungelöst. Hermaphroditismus, Sex und Gender in der deutschen Medizin. Eine historische Studie zur Intersexualität, Bielefeld: Transcript. Kusser, Astrid (2008): “Cakewalking. Fluchtlinien des Schwarzen Atlantik um 1900.” In: Ilka Becker, Michael Cuntz, and Astrid Kusser (eds.), Unmenge. Wie verteilt sich Handlungsmacht?, München: Wilhelm Fink, pp. 251-81. Lambert, Gavin (1997): Nazimova: A Biography, New York: Knopf. Lauretis, Teresa de (1994): The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Laplanche, Jean, and J. B. Pontalis (1992): Urphantasie. Phantasien über den Ursprung, Ursprung der Phantasie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Leonard, Zoe (1997): “Zoe Leonard Interviewed by Anna Blume.” In: EDS, Zoe Leonard, Vienna: Catalogue Secession, pp. 7-23. Lorenz, Renate (2009a): Aufwändige Durchquerungen – Subjektivität als sexuelle Arbeit, Bielefeld: Transcript.

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List of Illustrations 13

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, N.O. Body, 2008, film (16mm/DVD) 15 min and 47 photographs, Performer: Werner Hirsch, Camera: Bernadette Paassen, still photography: Andrea Thal.

33

Wu Ingrid Tsang, The Shape of A Right Statement I, 2008, film (HD) 6 min; URL: Amanda Baggs, In My Language, film (published on YouTube), 9 min. 2007

47

Shinique Smith, Untitled (Rodeo Beach Bundle), 2007, Digital C-Print, 74 x 56 cm (29 x 22 inches), © Shinique Smith, Courtesy of the artist.

49

Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, theatre piece, 1992, director: Gregory Mehrten, performer: Ron Vawter, speech of Roy Cohn written by Gary Indiana, announcement card, pictured: Ron Vawter, photographs: © Paula Court.

51

Film stills, Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, docu-

87

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Salomania, 2009, film (HD) and 13 pho-

mentary film by Kirby Dick, performance: Bob Flanagan, Sheree Rose, 1997. tographs, performance: Yvonne Rainer and Wu Ingrid Tsang, camera: Michelle Lawler. 88

Henrik Olesen, Some Faggy Gestures, detail of installation view: “Some GayLesbian Artists and/or Artists Relevant to Homo-Social Culture Born between c. 1300–1870,“ Migros Museum Zürich, 2007.

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Henrik Olesen, Some Faggy Gestures, detail of panel no. III. , 140 x 600 cm, 2007.

91

Jack Smith, Gas Stations of the Cross Religious Spectacle, Copyright Estate of Jack Smith, Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

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Zoe Leonard, Strange Fruit, 1992-97. 297 orange, banana, grapefruit and lemon skins, thread, buttons, zippers, needles, wax, sinew, string, snaps and hooks, installed on floor, dimensions variable, photographs: Adam Reich, Zoe Leonard, Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

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Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled ” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991, Candies individually wrapped in multicolored cellophane, endless supply, Overall dimensions vary with installation, Ideal weight: 175 lbs, © The Felix GonzalezTorres Foundation, Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

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Sharon Hayes, I March In The Parade Of Liberty, But As Long As I Love You I’m Not Free, 2008, photograph: Andrea Geyer.

153

Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Contagious!, 2010, film (HD) and 11 photographs, performance: Arantxa Martinez and Vaginal Davis, camera: Bernadette Paassen, photograph: Andrea Thal.

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