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Performing Desire Jill Dolan and Stacy Wolf

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Performing Desire Jill Dolan and Stacy Wolf Peggy Shaw, publicity poster for Must: The Inside Story. (Photo by Manuel Vason) Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00393 by guest on 29 September 2021 Performing Desire Jill Dolan and Stacy Wolf The trope of “desire” has long been generative in performance theory, especially to mark femi- nist and queer engagements with live art. Broadly configured as an entry into language through Lacanian paradigms; as an expression of yearning and sexual identification between spectator and performer; as a process of potential objectification but also of pleasurable liberation; and as a motivating force and process that was assigned a great deal of power from many critical and theoretical quarters, “desire” was, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, one of the cornerstones of feminist and queer performance studies. But the marketplace of ideas the academy represents constantly renews and rewrites theory and, in that process, “desire” lost some of its originary power as a concept. We returned to it with this TDR Consortium issue because of our own attachment to its original promise, and because it continues to motivate our spectatorship, our scholarship, and our criticism. On a very basic level, our desire — to see performance; to experience ever new and transformative produc- tions of musicals or plays, both new productions and ones we’ve seen before; to witness inno- vative theatrical objects with fascination, provocation, confusion, and delight; to appreciate how performance calls and thwarts our own very particular affective, intellectual, and political investments; and to understand how other spectators and publics make use of and experience performance — compels our engagements with performance. Our invitation to the authors whose essays are collected here was simple. We asked them to write about “desire” in whatever way that term now strikes them. This issue represents, as a result, an eclectic but powerful reminder of how desire, for these writers as well as for us, remains an optic through which we see, feel, and think about performance. Judith Hamera reads Osman Khan’s installation Come Hell or High Water, part of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit’s show (in)Habitation: A Reconsideration of Domesticity, as a synecdoche for a city she sees as “anti-desire,” because it is under water with debt and structural abandonment (Hamera 2014). Jill Dolan is the Annan Professor of English, Professor of Theatre, and Director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of many books and articles, including The Feminist Spectator in Action: Feminist Criticism for Stage and Screen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (University of Michigan Press, 2005). She has received a career achievement award from the American Society for Theatre Research, an outstanding teaching award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for her blog, The Feminist Spectator (www.TheFeministSpectator.com). [email protected]. Stacy Wolf is Professor of Theatre at Princeton University, directs the Princeton Arts Fellows. She is the author of Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (Oxford University Press, 2011) and A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (University of Michigan Press, 2002). She is the coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (Oxford University Press, 2011). [email protected]. TDR: The Drama Review 58:4 (T224) Winter 2014. ©2014 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 9 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00393 by guest on 29 September 2021 By contrast, Susan Bennett and Marlis Schweitzer see Disneyworld’s “brandscaped” retail envi- ronment on its Main Street as a site that constantly manufactures consumerist desires, consid- ering, as they write, the “signature Disney performance — the princess makeover — to articulate the interplay between the production of a desiring subject and the commodification of expe- rience” (2014:xx). Brian Herrera continues this theme in his discussion of Billy, Carlos, and Tyson, three dolls created as gay male characters, marketed in the 1990s as what Herrera calls “symbols of whimsical resistance” that “went mainstream as commodities of conspicuous con- sumption before finally being interred as debris within the archive of popular culture.” Herrera argues that, “In their quick transformation from highly visible objects of gay desire to forgotten detritus of the recent gay past,” the dolls “also score the cartoonishly abrupt historical turns in the legibility of gay male desire within mainstream US popular performance during in the 1990s” (2014:xx). Moving from cities and objects of consumption to the physical bodies of live performers, Maurya Wickstrom and Fintan Walsh consider how performance art builds a complex desire between performer and spectator, charting more personal, intimate interactions in exchanges that they report as nearly private. Wickstrom details her own contact with a performance by the transgender artist Cassils to begin a larger meditation on “innovations in desire and temporal- ity” (2014:xx). Walsh looks at three very different European performances to suggest how per- formance seduces us with flirtatious intimacy. Jaclyn Pryor, on the other hand, in her discussion of Peggy Shaw presenting her aging butch lesbian body in performance for a younger genera- tion of genderqueers, sees desire exchanged through different iterations of time, within the performance and across the audience. Mary Jo Watts and Sara Warner venture into the archive of revolutionary persona Valerie Solanas and assess what they call her “defiant desire” to thwart adulthood, adopting instead a “SCUM-my” child’s play to cultivate political desire in girls (2014:xx). Deborah Paredez analyzes musical performances by Lena Horne and Judy Garland as divas defined through the trope of desire. Sarah Myers and Holly Hughes read desire through performance pedagogy: Myers con- sidering the complicated exchanges of the Austin-based Rude Mechs’s GRRL Action, a pro- gram for which at-risk teenaged girls narrate their lives in performance; and Hughes reporting on the transhistorical transactions of desire present when her students from the University of Michigan mounted a revival of her infamous dyke noir radio play, The Well of Horniness, and toured it to New York. Deb Margolin and Daniel Alexander Jones think through the opera- tions of desire in relation to their own performance work: Margolin in her play about basket- ball; and Jones in his alter-ego, the global superstar diva Jomama Jones. Sharon Bridgforth and Omi Osun Jones perform, in language, the ways their desire as African American women moti- vates their working relationship and their art. Finally, Kim Marra extends personal desire into scholarship and art practice, describing her love for her horse, Mylo, and reading that attach- ment into and through the friezes depicting the homoerotics of men riding bareback that adorn the Parthenon. Desire, in other words, now seems freed from the constrictions of a particular theoreti- cal language into a more fluid, resonant practice, strategy, and tactic, as well as a metaphor, an affect, and a movement between and among bodies in performance, across time and space. This new elasticity makes us hopeful for and curious about how desire will continue to morph use- fully and unpredictably, across the embodiments of performance. References Bennett, Susan, and Marlis Schweitzer. 2014. “In the Window at Disney: A Lifetime of Brand Desire.” TDR 58, 4 (T224):23–31. Bridgforth, Sharon, and Omi Osun Joni L. Jones. 2014. “Black Desire, Theatrical Jazz, and River See.” TDR 58, 4 (T224):136–46. Hamera, Judith. 2014. “Domestic(-ated) Desires, Tanked City.” TDR 58, 4 (T224):12–22. Dolan/Wolf 10 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00393 by guest on 29 September 2021 Herrera, Brian Eugenio. 2014. “Billy’s World, or Toying with Desire in the Gay 1990s.” TDR 58, 4 (T224):32–45. Hughes, Holly. 2014. “Left Wanting.” TDR 58, 4 (T224):120–25. Jones, Daniel Alexander. 2014. “The Radiant Desire of Jomama Jones.” TDR 58, 4 (T224):129–35. Margolin, Deb. 2014. “Basketball and Desire.” TDR 58, 4 (T224):126–28. Marra, Kim. 2014. “Queer Aging Bareback: A Ride with the Parthenon Sculptures.” TDR 58, 4 (T224):147–57. Myers, Sarah. 2014. “The Trouble with Tears: Excess and Desire in Austin’s Grrl Action.” TDR 58, 4 (T224):68–79. Paredez, Deborah. 2014. “Lena Horne and Judy Garland: Divas, Desire, and Discipline in the Civil Rights Era.” TDR 58, 4 (T224):105–19. Pryor, Jaclyn. 2014. “When Elephants Are in Must”: Peggy Shaw, Acts of Trans/fer, and the Present Future of Queer Desire.” TDR 58, 4 (T224):68–79. Walsh, Fintan. 2014. “Touching, Flirting, Whispering: Performing Intimacy in Public.” TDR 58, 4 (T224):56–67. Warner, Sara, and Mary Jo Watts. 2014. “Hide and Go Seek: Child’s Play as Archival Act in Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto.” TDR 58, 4 (T224):80–93. Wickstrom, Maurya. 2014. “Desire and Kairos: Cassils’s Terisias.” TDR 58, 4 (T224):46–55. Performing Desire 11 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00393 by guest on 29 September 2021.
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