Treading Across Lines in the Sand: Performing Bodies in Coalitional Subjectivity

Abstract

For all bodies, performance can be a site to untangle and grapple with one's place within hegemonic structures. Our bodies, the bodies of a WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY and a BROWN-DYKE-GIRL, come to the stage to negotiate possibilities of joining our differently situated queer subjectivities through the process of generating and performing collaborative personal narrative. Through understanding, grounding, and interrupting the politics of our relation we describe and assert a coalitional subjectivity that destabilizes intact representations/memories of our own experiences. We do this as a gesture toward reconfiguring notions of the individual as an always already relational (and potentially coalitional) subject.

Keywords:

• Collaboration
• Personal Narrative
• Queer
• Politics of Relation
• Coalition

Acknowledgements

The authors/performers worked together in the generation and revision of this essay, and would like to explicitly mark equal contributions, rather than offering a designation of a lead author. The authors/performers would like to thank Jennifer Linde, Jason Zingsheim, and Rae Langes for their feedback and support throughout this process.

Notes

1. As a textualizing strategy for this performance, how we label ourselves within the script and the discussion is continually shifting. Although we are always playing variations of ourselves, Dusty and Kimberlee, the staged performance forefronts differing elements of our identities, both in relation to broader discourses of identity and to each other. We begin the performance as BROWN-DYKE-GIRL and WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY, and at times we retreat to these identities. In other moments, we share identification through labels such as “queer,” “critical scholar,” or “nationalist,” or emotions such as “angry” or “paranoid.” We have made the choice of gendering each name, however, to offer clarity to the reader, but also to reflect the ways several audience members report audiencing the performance (commenting on a male body next to a female body). While gendered (except for the sections where we speak as US), our names are always in flux, mirroring the ways our staged narratives and the staging of our bodies in relation to one another alter and forefront different facets of our negotiated identities.

2. Within the text of Lines in the Sand, we continually play with undifferentiated and problematic identity categories to render hyper-visible the dangers and violences they reproduce. In the times when we self-label (white, female, gay, etc … ) or when we critique mediated discourse (Mexican, immigrants, etc. … ), these categories are intended to call attention to their shortcomings. However, the use of the category of “Christian” in the piece is invoked, in several instances, in a vilified construction. In our earliest performances, the unqualified label of “Christian” or even “Christian-stupid-fucking-asshole,” was meant to parallel and critique the ways homophobic discourse uses “gay,” “fag,” “sinner,” “sodomite,” and “dyke” in similar demonized ways. In latter performances, after reflecting upon this choice, we have experimented with qualifying the label (ex: “right-wing homophobic Christians”) or changed the label altogether (ex: “stupid-fucking-we-use-God,-race,-and-gender-to-justify-our-hate-assholes”). In the sections of the script where the category of “Christian” is not already qualified or complicated within the original text, we have changed the wording to “right-wing, fundamentalist Christians.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kimberlee Pérez

Kimberlee Perez is at Arizona State University, Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, Tempe

Dustin Bradley Goltz

Dustin Bradley Goltz is at DePaul University, College of Communication, 2320 N. Kenmore Ave., Chicago, 60614