Gender and Performance
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Gender and Performance General Education Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 26 (Formerly Women, Gender, and Sexuality 1133)
Harvard University, Fall 2009 Tuesdays and Thursdays 11am-noon
This course grants General Education credit in Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding or Core credit in Literature and Arts B
Professor Robin Bernstein Teaching Fellows: Email:
This course examines gender in performance and gender as performance. In other words, we analyze the meanings produced through already-gendered bodies on stage and in audiences, as well as the construction of gender through performances on stage and in everyday life. In the first week, titled “Introductions to Performance Studies,” we gain familiarity and dexterity with basic concepts in the field. After this introduction, we dig into three units of study. Unit 1, “Performing Preconstructed Gender,” examines performances in which the body is assumed to be always already gendered and sexed. In these performances, individuals reveal, celebrate, and critique their gendered lives and sexed bodies. In Unit 2, “Constructing Gender through Performance,” we engage with three major theorists—Erving Goffman, Judith Butler, and Laura Mulvey—each of whom offers a different account of how performance constructs gender norms and makes gender real. We apply the three theories in case studies of mainstream performances, including weddings and athletics. We end the course with Unit 3, “Reconstructing and Deconstructing Gender through Performance,” in which we examine feminist, queer, anti-racist, and post-colonial uses of performance to re-invent gender. We encounter visionary writers and performers who believe that performance can—and will, and must—change the gendered and raced world. Required Texts and Performances Books (all on reserve at Lamont; all except the Sourcebook for sale at the Coop): ● Robin Bernstein, ed., Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater ● Henry Bial, ed., The Performance Studies Reader (Second Edition) ● Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues ● Rena Fraden, Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women ● Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life ● David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly ● Chrys Ingraham, White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture ● Marsha Norman, ‘night, Mother ● Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf
1 ● Sourcebook (“SB”)
Films and television programs (all on reserve at Lamont) ● Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen ● Chicago ● The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey ● Murderball ● My Queer Body ● The Vagina Monologues ● Venus Boyz ● We Just Telling Stories ● The Yes Men
Live Performances All students are required to attend two live performances, for which you will receive free tickets. ● On the evening of Wednesday, November 4, our class will take a field trip to Theater Offensive in Boston to see Tim Miller’s live, one-man show, The Lay of the Land. ● Each student will attend either a Harvard men’s basket ball or Harvard women’s basketball game. Details of this event TBA.
If you miss Tim Miller’s or the basketball game, you must use your own resources to attend the same show or a different Harvard men’s or women’s basketball game on another evening. Exceptions will apply to students who cannot attend an event on the given night due to a documented, University-recognized conflict. Such students will receive free tickets to, and be required to attend, the play or a parallel game on a different night. Please speak to you TF as soon as possible if you foresee a conflict.
Web Resources The syllabus frequently requires you to view a video clip online or to peruse a specific website. The instruction to “peruse” means, first, that you should spend a significant amount of time exploring the website’s various levels (some of these websites are extensive, so it is not possible or desirable to read every page on the site). Second, you should think critically about the ways in which the individual or group chooses to self-represent on the site. How do the various individuals perform their identities on their websites? Useful Information
Course Requirements and Grading: Attendance (sections and lectures), productive participation, active listening, punctuality, respectful class citizenship 20% of final grade Lecture Quiz (2 quizzes given; lower score dropped) 5% of final grade Section Quizzes (4 quizzes given; lowest score dropped) 15% of final grade Performance Analysis Exercise (3-5 pages, due Friday, Sept. 18) 10% of final grade Performance Theory Exercise (5-7 pages, due Friday, Oct. 23) 15% of final grade Attendance at Lay of the Land AND a Harvard basketball game 5% of final grade Response to Harvard basketball game (1 page, due TBD) 5% of final grade Final Exam OR Final Paper 25% of final grade
2 Students will take collective responsibility for the success of every discussion. This responsibility involves three components. First, you are required to arrive in class having read and thought about all the reading. Merely gulping down the reading is inadequate; you should come to class having chewed and digested the material thoroughly. You are expected to prepare your own thoughts, opinions, and questions before every class. Second, you must listen actively to your classmates. Your contributions to our discussion should productively engage with your colleagues’ ideas. Third, you must express your thoughts in a respectful manner that advances our conversation. Practices that disrespect your colleagues (for example, texting, interrupting, hogging the floor, launching personal attacks, surfing the web, or answering cell phones) will hinder conversation; such practices, therefore, are unacceptable. Students must arrive on time for lectures and sections. Lectures start promptly at 11:07 a.m. All books (including the Sourcebook) and all films are on reserve at Lamont Library. The Sourcebook is also available in the WGS office (ground floor of Boylston Hall) and in the Women’s Center. Some of the required readings and viewings include nudity, profanity, and/or explicit sexual content. If you do not wish to engage with such materials, you should not enroll in this course. Each undergraduate student will choose between writing a final paper and taking a final exam. Most students will take the exam. You should pursue the paper option only if you are burning to work on a specific, relevant project. If you wish to write a paper in lieu of taking the exam, you must submit a proposal to your TF by October 29. If your TF approves your proposal, your paper will be due the same day and time that the rest of the class takes the exam. If your TF and professor decline your proposal, you must take the exam. All papers are due in the WGS office on the ground floor of Boylston Hall by 3 pm of the due date. Late papers will be penalized one third of a letter grade for each day overdue. Failure to complete any assignment can lower your grade in excess of the stated percentage. Attendance at Tim Miller’s performance and the basketball game is graded full credit/no credit. You must attend both events to receive full credit. Graduate students who take this course will receive different writing assignments and additional reading assignments. Grad students will also attend lunchtime or dinnertime meetings in which we will discuss the additional reading. Each graduate student must write a final paper rather than take the exam. Introductions to Performance Studies
Thursday, September 3. What is performance? What are some models for thinking about gender and performance? ● View in class: http://www.epica-awards.org/assets/epica/2005/finalists/film/flv/04005.htm
Tuesday, September 8. What is performance studies? How does it relate to gender and sexuality studies? ● Read pamphlet, “A Student’s Guide to Performance Studies”
3 ● View in class: excerpt from Venus Boyz (directed by Gabriel Baur, 2004) ● Recommended: view interviews with Richard Schechner and Barbara Kirschenblatt Gimblett, “What is Performance Studies?,” at http://www.hemi.nyu.edu/eng/archive/video.shtml
Unit 1: Performing Preconstructed Gender
Thursday, September 10. Gender in Performance ● Read Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf ● Read excerpt from Keith Antar Mason, for black boys who have considered homicide when the streets are too much, in Harry J. Elam and Robert Alexander, eds., Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Plays (NY: Plume, 1996), pp. 177-187 (SB) ● Read Keith Antar Mason, “Where do I want my theatre performed,” Left Curve Issue 21 (31 Dec. 1997), p. 90 (online at http://www.leftcurve.org/LC21WebPages/keithmason.html) ● Recommended: View For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf (directed by Oz Scott, with ensemble including Ntozake Shange and Alfre Woodward, 1982)
Tuesday, September 15: Gender in Performance ● Read Tim Miller, Introduction to My Queer Body in Miller, Body Blows (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), pp. 79-85 (SB) ● Read Tim Miller, “The NEA Four Case,” in Miller, 1001 Beds: Performances, Essays, and Travels (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), pp. 98-115 (SB) ● Read Tim Miller, “The Battle of Chattanooga” in Robin Bernstein, ed., Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 91-102 (hereafter “Bernstein”) ● View Tim Miller, My Queer Body ● Peruse http://hometown.aol.com/millertale/timmiller.html ● Recommended: View Tongues Untied (directed by Marlon Riggs, 1996)
Thursday, September 17. I’m Ready for My Close-Up: Sexed Bodies in Performance ● Read Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues ● View The Vagina Monologues (written and directed by Eve Ensler, 2002) ● Recommended: read Esther Morris Leidolf, “An Additional Monologue,” in Sojourner March 2001 (online at http://mrkhorg.homestead.com/files/ORG/AdditionalMonologue.htm) ● Recommended: view Beautiful Daughters, dir. Josh Aronson, at
Friday, September 18: PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS EXERCISE DUE to WGS office by 3 pm
4 Unit 2: Constructing Gender Through Performance
In this Unit, we engage with three major theoretical approaches to gender and performance. Erving Goffman, Judith Butler, and Laura Mulvey argue in different ways that gender is constructed—that is, made real—through performance. We intersperse our readings of these theorists with readings and viewings that help us to deepen and challenge our engagement with the theorists. We particularly focus on quotidian, normative performances of gender—that is, feminine women and masculine men engaged in ordinary activities and social rituals such as playing sports and getting married.
Tuesday, September 22. Gender as a Performance in Everyday Life ● Read Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959). “Introduction,” pp. 1-16; Ch. 1, “Performances,” pp. 17-76; “Conclusion,” pp. 238-255 ● Read Robin D.G. Kelley, “Confessions of a Nice Negro, or Why I Shaved My Head,” in Don Belton, ed., Speak My Name: Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), pp. 12-22 (SB)
Thursday, September 24. Gender as a “stylized repetition of acts” ● Read Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Bial, pp. 187-197. If you have already read this essay and feel confident that you understand it, you may substitute Butler, “Critically Queer,” from Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 223-242 (SB). If you are having trouble deciding which essay to read, you should read “Performative Acts.” ● Read Judith Halberstam, “Mackdaddy, Superfly, Rapper: Gender, Race, and Masculinity in the Drag King Scene,” in Social Text 52/53, nos 3 and 4 (Fall/Winter 1997), pp. 105- 131 (Access online through JSTOR) ● Read MilDréd Diyaa Gerestant, “Exposures of a Multispirited, Haitian-American, Gender-Harmonizing WoMan” in Bernstein, pp. 44-50 ● Recommended: view Venus Boyz (dir. Gabriel Baur, 2004) ● Assignment for Performance Theory Exercise distributed in class
Tuesday, September 29. Naturalistic Performances of Gender: Feminine Women ● Read Chrys Ingraham, White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1999). pp. 2-23 and 78-121 (SB) ● Recommended: Read Bree Coven, “There’s a Place for Us . . . Somewhere,” in Bernstein, pp. 140-149 ● Recommended: Read Victor Turner, “Liminality and Communitas,” in Bial, pp, 89-97
Thursday, October 1. Naturalistic Performances of Gender: Masculine Men ● View The Yes Men (directed by Dan Ollman, Sarah Price, and Chris Smith, 2003) ● Peruse http://www.theyesmen.org/
October 4-24: RECOMMENDED PEFORMANCE: 2.5 Minute Ride, by Lisa Kron, runs at the New Repertory Theatre. See http://www.newrep.org/minute_ride.php for details.
5 Tuesday, October 6. Geographies of Desire: Naturalistic Performances of Gender in Physical Space ● Read Maurya Wickstrom, “Making Americans: The American Girl Doll and American Girl Place.” Chapter in Performing Consumers: Global Capital and its Theatrical Seductions (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 97-153 (SB) ● Read John Preston, “The Theatre of Sexual Initiation,” in Laurence Senelick, ed., Gender in Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992), pp. 324-335 (SB) ● Read Kevin Winkler, “The Divine Mr. K: Reclaiming My ‘Unruly’ Past with Bette Midler and the Baths,” in Bernstein, pp. 60-76 ● Read Patricia Marx, “Do I Look Fat?” New Yorker, 23 April 2007, Vol. 83, Issue 9, pp. 27-28 (access online through Hollis)
Thursday, October 8. Looking and Being Looked At ● Read Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 14-26 (SB) ● Read Michael R. Schiavi, “Professional Spectatorship’s Queer Stages,” in Bernstein, pp. 124-139
Tuesday, October 13. Looking and Being Looked At: Nations ● Read David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly
Thursday, October 15. Looking and Being Looked at: Teams ● Read Erving Goffman, Chapter 2, “Teams,” in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, pp. 77-105 ● Read Katherine Liebe-Levinson, “Performing Spectators: The Pleasure of Mimetic Jeopardy,” in Strip Show: Performances of Gender and Desire (USA: Routledge, 2002), pp. 151-179 (access online through Hollis) ● View Murderball (directed by Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro, 2005) ● Read Petra Kuppers, “The Wheelchair’s Rhetoric: The Performance of Disability,” TDR 51.4 (Winter 2007), pp 80-88 (access online through Project Muse)
Thursday, October 15-Sunday, October 18: RECOMMENDED EVENTS The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy Street, is hosting an exhibition, “ACT UP NEW YORK: ACTIVISM, ART, AND THE AIDS CRISIS, 1987–1993,” which examines art, activism, and the history of AIDS. The exhibition kicks off with a conference featuring lectures and other events by Leo Bersani, Robert Vazquez Pacheo, Avram Finkelstein, Sarah Schulman, Jim Hubbard, members of the artists collective Fierce Pussy, and many other luminaries. See
Tuesday, October 20. Athletics ● Guest lecture by Erin Dwyer ● Read all of Part IV in Bial (introduction plus essays by Johan Huizinga, Gregory Bateson, Brian Sutton-Smith, Allan Kaprow, and Barry Jean Ancelet, pp. 135-164) ● Read Carlo Rotella, “Good with Her Hands: Women, Boxing, and Work,” Critical Inquiry 25.3 (Spring 1999), pp. 566-598 (access online through JSTOR) ● Read Leger Grindon, “Body and Soul: The Structure of Meaning in the Boxing Film Genre,” Cinema Journal 35.4 (Summer 1996), pp. 54-69 (access online through JSTOR)
Thursday, October 22. Of Bicycles and Gender
6 ● Read Judith Butler, “Athletic Genders: Hyperbolic Instance and/or the Overcoming of Sexual Binarism,” Stanford Humanities Review, volume 6, number 2 (1998), online at http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/6-2/html/butler.html
Friday, October 23: PERFORMANCE THEORY EXERCISE DUE to WGS office by 3 pm
Unit 3: Reconstructing and Deconstructing Gender Through Performance
Tuesday, October 27. Feminism and Realism ● Read Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Research Press, 1988). Ch. 2, “Feminism and the Canon: The Question of Universality,” pp. 19-40 (SB) ● Read Marsha Norman, ‘night, Mother ● Instructions for final paper option distributed in class
Thursday, October 29. Brecht’s Challenges to Realism and Expressionism ● Read Bertolt Brecht, “The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre,” “The Literalization of the Theatre,” “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction,” and “A Short Organum for the Theatre,” in Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. by John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), pp. 33-47, 69-77, 179- 205 (SB) ● Read Bertolt Brecht, “A Dialogue About Acting,” in Bial, pp. 219-222 ● Proposals for final paper due for all students who wish to pursue this option
Tuesday, November 3. “Gender” and other Quotations ● View Chicago (directed by Rob Marshall, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renee Zellweger, Queen Latifah, and Richard Gere, 2002)
Wednesday, November 4 ● Field trip to Theater Offensive in Boston to see Tim Miller’s live, one-man show, The Lay of the Land!
Thursday, November 5. Camp ● Guest lecture by Stephen Vider ● Read Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,” in Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1961), pp. 275-292 (SB) ● Read Robert McAlmon, “Miss Knight,” in The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day, edited by Byrne R.S. Fone (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 629-639 (SB) ● Read Esther Newton, “Role Models,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, edited by Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 96-109 (SB) ● Read Andrew Ross, “Uses of Camp,” in Cleto, pp. 315-329 (SB)
7 Tuesday, November 10. Identification ● Read Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror (NY: Anchor Books, 1993). “Introduction,” “Background Information,” and “Chronology,” pp. xxiii-liii (SB) ● Read Anna Deavere Smith, “The Word Becomes You: An Interview by Carol Martin.” In A Source Book of Feminist Theatre and Performance, ed. Carol Martin (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp.185-204 (SB) ● View Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror
Thursday, November 12. Disidentification ● Read José Esteban Muñoz, “Sister Acts: Ela Troyano and Carmelita Tropicana,” in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 119-141 (SB) ● Read Alina Troyano, a.k.a. Carmelita Tropicana, “Author’s Introduction” and “Performance Art Manifesto,” in I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing Between Cultures (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), pp. xiii-xxv, 177-178 (SB) ● View interview with José Esteban Muñoz, “What is Performance Studies?,” at http://www.hemi.nyu.edu/eng/archive/video.shtml ● View in class: Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen (directed by Ela Troyano, starring Alina Troyano, 1994)
Tuesday, November 17. Nation, Gender, Sexuality, Race, History ● Read Caroline Vercoe, “Agency and Ambivalence: A Reading of Works by Coco Fusco,” in Coco Fusco, The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp.231-246 (SB) ● Read Coco Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” in Fusco, English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: The New Press, 1995), pp. 37-63 (SB) ● Read Guillermo Gómez-Peña,Gulturas-in-Extremis: Performing Against the Cultural Backdrop of the Mainstream Bizarre,” in Bial, pp. 345-356 ● Peruse http://www.thing.net/~cocofusco/ ● Peruse http://www.pochanostra.com/#Scene_1 ● Recommended: view interview with Diana Taylor, “What is Performance Studies?,” online at http://www.hemi.nyu.edu/eng/archive/video.shtml ● View in class: The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey (video by Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia, featuring performance by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, 1993)
Thursday, November 19. Can Performance Save Lives? A Case Study: Incarcerated Women ● In class: guest lecture by Dr. Sara Warner, Assistant Professor of Theatre, Cornell University ● Peruse
Tuesday, November 24. Can Performance Save Lives? A Case Study: AIDS Activism ● CLASS MEETS AT THE CARPENTER CENTER! ● Read Michael Kearns, “Heaven and Home,” in Bernstein, pp. 205-209
8 ● Read Catherine Saalfield and Ray Navarro, “Shocking the Pink: Race and Gender on the ACT UP Frontlines,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 341-369 (SB) ● Read Doug Sadownick, “ACT UP Makes a Spectacle of AIDS,” in High Performance 13:1 (1990): 26-31 (SB). ● BEFORE CLASS, you must visit the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy Street, and view the exhibition, " ACT UP NEW YORK: ACTIVISM, ART, AND THE AIDS CRISIS, 1987–1993”
Thursday, November 26. THANKSGIVING. NO CLASS.
Tuesday, December 1. Hope ● Read Jill Dolan, “Feeling the Potential of Elsewhere,” in Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005), pp. 1-34 (SB) ● Read Peggy Shaw, “How I Learned Theatre,” in Bernstein, pp. 25-29 ● View http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vvPvaDkIUo&feature=fvw ● Read http://www.nytimes-se.com/ ● View http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO6Oi3XUYgg ● View http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8I4fFLqfXg&feature=related ● View CNN video of Nikki Giovanni’s performance at the convocation after the Virginia Tech massacre, April 2007 at http://youtube.com/watch?v=0cSuidxE8os
Thursday, December 3. Heroism ● Read Cherríe L. Moraga, “And Frida Looks Back: The Art of Latina/o Queer Heroics,” in Bernstein, pp. 79-90
FINAL EXAM: date to be announced by Harvard University FINAL PAPERS are due Teaching Fellows’ mailboxes on the same day as the exam to the WGS office, Boylston Hall
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