ARTS & CULTURE Negotiating the Spectacle in Transgender Performances of Alexis Arquette, Zackary Drucker, DavEnd, niv Acosta, and Tobaron Waxman DORAN GEORGE Abstract This review looks at the work of five North American artists who tackle the prevailing social demand upon transgender subjects to make a spectacle of their bodies. They reflect upon the body as a social site in order to resist and redeploy the scrutiny under which transgender is drawn. In film, dance, and visual and relational performance, the artists contest conventional social construc- tions of transgender and articulate existential possibility in ways that contribute to and echo the development of new ideas about embodiment. he relationship between Alexis Arquette and the British television station that T funded her 2007 movie She’s My Brother is emblematic for contemporary 1 artists tackling the performance contexts in which they represent transgender. The celebrity family member substantiated her on-screen identity by achieving legal, medical, and cultural agency while confounding Channel 4 expectations for a Hollywood surgical transition story. Due to her concern about side effects, she procured a therapist’s letter for the right to vaginoplasty that precluded the usually compulsory course of hormone treatment. Yet Arquette denied the viewer a spectacle of surgical transition, which has come to dominate representation of transsexuality in mainstream culture. She achieved visibility for transgender bodily self-possession by fighting on camera for medical intervention on her own terms, and she insisted on her claim to female identity while keeping private whether she has undergone, is undergoing, or will undergo surgery. Arquette used TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 1, Numbers 1–2 * May 2014 273 DOI 10.1215/23289252-2400244 ª 2014 Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/1/1-2/273/485770/273.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 274 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly the spectacular conjunction of her gender identity and popular culture notoriety in a way that subverted the usual demands of performing reality television. Contemporary artists are engaging transgender subjectivity to reflect upon the body as a social site. In the twenty-first century, critical transgender perfor- mance has exploded into a challenging field as part of the emergence of com- munity, activist, and academic movements. Bodies from across the globe have 2 increasingly come into view configured through the term transgender. They are seen in focused festivals, the art world, and mainstream media. Artists are articulating a performing self that contests the conventional social construction of transgender and articulates existential possibility in ways that contribute to and echo the development of new ideas about embodiment. The terms by which such bodies achieve legibility are politically bound in ways that precede any perfor- mance intervention. But artists resignify the conditions under which their bodies come into view, stretching the significance that they are called upon to fulfill. I take a brief look here at how the conditions for performance are negotiated by a handful of American-based artists who critically embody transgender. Zackary Drucker, like Arquette, is a Los Angeles artist screwing with the burden of spectacle that attends transgender bodies. In her performance ‘‘The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See’’ (2008), Drucker 3 ritualizes and thereby exposes the misogynist construction of femininity. Her 4 ‘‘Live Art’’ context is wildly different from the one in which Arquette performs; Live Art practitioners are from various fields and push against any given genre, foregrounding sociopolitical concerns in performance staged as provocation; and like off-off-Broadway, they play to small audiences. If the transitioning 5 body is called upon to fulfill the demand for provocation, it becomes a spectacle. But Drucker averts this tendency by cultivating audience complicity: spectators standing around her gagged supine body becomeparticipantsastheyareledthrough an ironic New Age guided meditation. The audience is instructed to approach and pluck hairs from Drucker’s body using tweezers that surround her. Drucker’s recorded voice instructs them to direct their negative energy into her: ‘‘This body is a 6 receptacle for all of your guilt and shame and trauma.’’ The audience is prevented from anonymous consumption of a transgender spectacle, and through their col- laborative act they are called upon to embody transphobia. Even while they apparently collectively enact part of Drucker’s corporeal transition, her voice dis- misses the activity in which they are engaged: ‘‘You will never be a woman,’’ she 7 insists. Her voiceover suggests that her body is in a state of trauma, reflecting upon the social challenges of transition. Yet by implicating the audience in the process, 8 Drucker resists the construction of a spectacular-heroic narrative of overcoming. Beyond the glare of Tinseltown, San Francisco–based DavEnd also cri- tiques the spectacular construction of transgender. Gender variant identity and Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/1/1-2/273/485770/273.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 GEORGE * Spectacle in Transgender Performances * Arts & Culture 275 9 self-sufficient community are central concerns in her Bay Area art context. DavEnd argues that unpaid performing is inescapable for trans/queer bodies in heterosexual culture, but she insists that invisible labor can be culturally remu- nerated through conscious acts of performance. She recuperates self-possession through collective methodology in which intimacy is cultivated behind a veil of spectacle. In the 2012 project ‘‘Intimasew,’’ DavEnd staged an ideal vision of com- munity through the catwalk-like presentation of ostentatious hand-made gar- ments constructed directly onto queer/trans bodies, creating images of desirable 10 and self-desiring superheroes (see fig. 1). The spectacular construction of these bodies was made explicit and redeployed, yet it was underpinned for the subjects of DavEnd’s sartorial artistry by interpersonal value generated through the tailoring process. DavEnd insisted that there is a relationship between theatrical and exis- tential concerns by representing the creative process in the concert performance of ‘‘Intimasew’’: ‘‘I use collaborative garment construction to transform feelings of scarcity around style, options, intimacy, desire, time, and safety, into a world of 11 custom-made abundance.’’ She articulates as aesthetics the interpersonal practices through which trans/queer bodies negotiate their spectacular conspicuousness. On the other side of the country, spectacle seems like a handmaiden to the critique of representation staged by New York dancer niv Acosta. Experimental aesthetics define the postmodern dance community in which Acosta is choreo- graphing. Small, well-informed audiences typically attend the dance concerts, in which playful, risky, implicit, and veiled references to political identity are often 12 staged, while proselytizing is frowned upon. Acosta achieves explicit reference to his identity while averting polemics by insisting that his subject exists in the 13 relationship between subsequent works. Across his dancing body, the artist contemplates the intersections of race and gender by layering references from film, musical, song, and dance forms such as classical ballet and vogueing, which first came to broad prominence through the film Paris Is Burning (dir. Jennie Livingston, 1991). For example, in ‘‘I shot denzel,’’ Acosta juxtaposes dance and 14 conversation, camp and seemingly authentic acts of personal frustration. He refers to his masculinity and Black Dominican identity in ‘‘I shot denzel,’’ but questions linger that may or may not be answered by four other related ‘‘denzel’’ dances. Like Arquette, he limits access to his embodiment of transgender, because the answers to Acosta’s body and story are hinted at and obfuscated through references to absent performances and in the detritus of mainstream culture. Tobaron Waxman also points toward and obscures the legibility of his body- identity. Performing primarily in visual art contexts and declaring his address as unfixed, Waxman references his gender and religion-ethnicity through ritual acts such as shaving his hair and beard as well as singing in Hebrew. Conscious that he can become an ethnic-religious transgender spectacle, he draws attention to the Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/1/1-2/273/485770/273.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 Figure 1. Images from performance of ‘‘Intimasew.’’ Photograph by Robbie Sweeny Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/1/1-2/273/485770/273.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/1/1-2/273/485770/273.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 278 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly looking process. For example, in ‘‘Fear of a Bearded Planet’’ (2012), the artist commissioned street portraits in various cities, which when viewed together draw attention to the way in which his ambiguously raced Semite appearance signifies 15 in post-9/11 culture. Waxman foregrounds his transgender Jewish-diasporic mas- culinity to critique heteronormative Zionist masculinity, which he argues is under- pinned by the conventional idea of virility in nation building. At the same time, by exposing the multiple meanings embedded in