Critical Correspondence

MRPJ#3/Gender Performance: Extras

“But I think I’m right in my impression that dance criticism is not yet addressing major changes in the way dances are presented which challenge old concepts. Dance criticism continues to deal, primarily, with the formal and qualitative aspects of the medium: the way dances look, the way dancers dance, the themes of the works and so on, handled descriptively. Much good criticism is done here, but if criticism doesn’t address the central and assumed values—i.e. the political underlying content of every work—it is, I believe, operating in a holding pattern, not keeping up with and contributing to the social revolutionary changes of our time… If choreographers are promoting gender ideals, the critics should report this. If choreographers are challenging gender ideals, the critics should report this too. There is no such thing as a dance that isn’t committed to either approach, whether conscious or not. The formal properties of a dance, the movements, the gestures, themes, set, lighting, everything serves the interest of one approach or the other. The traditional which reinforces assumed gender identity, and the revolutionary which challenges it.” –from “How Dance Artists & Critics Define Dance as Political” by Jill Johnston.

In celebration of Movement Research’s 30th Anniversary, Critical Correspondence is reprinting monthly excerpts from each of the first 30 Performance Journals. We will be featuring representative and relevant articles as well as each of the issues’ editorial note. It is both enervating and challenging to look at the historical map that precedes our time – the continuity of mission, the diverse attempts to “word” a practice, the voices that have gone and the ones that keep returning, the ongoing development of discourse alongside political struggles.

The infamous third edition of the Performance Journal, Gender Performance features an Editor’s Note on the nature of gender presentation by guest editor and film artist Tom Kalin. We’ve also selected “In Praise of Drag” by John Kelly. The issue includes many ruminations on the profound possibilities of how we identify ourselves in relation to our sex and sexuality. From Jill Johnston’s extensive article (see quote above), which still reads relevant today, to photos of hermaphrodites, cross dressers, drag kings, to interviews with female-to-male transexual political activists, anonymous sex seekers, and playwrights (Kate Bornstein) to lesbian performers (Split Britches) and fiction writers, a full array of “gender disarray” is represented. Perhaps the spirit and urgency of these thinkers is best captured by the two quotes below.

Many of these Journal issues are available for purchase at Movement Research. As always, we welcome your comments at the end of each reprinted article, or at cc@movementresearch.org. We are also posting a table of contents for your reference.

“I know a lot of people who, through car accidents or meningitis or whatever, don’t have functional equipment. It doesn’t make them less of a man. Both of my parents were disabled, and I have dated people who where handicapped. You don’t stop being sexual because certain equipment doesn’t work, or because you stop looking like a GQ ad. We are sexual beings from cradle to grave, to deny this is to delude oneself. There is more to sex than orgasm. There’s human interaction, there’s a whole wealth of physical manifestations of personhood. (I can’t believe I said that.) There is physical stuff that doesn’t involve genital contact of a specific sort. Sex is about life and everybody wants to make it unrelated to the everyday. As if our genital life, our sexual life, our late night activities are somehow unrelated to the person who walks around on the street. As long as we keep this mythical dichotomy we are going to doom ourselves…fitting in is less work than dealing with the fallout from not fitting in. No one has been beat up in a subway for being an accountant.” — female to male transsexual Vern Bodkin from “World’s Greatest Cocksucker” by Chris Martin.

“We fight for information about contraception and abortion because we are women, not just mothers. We come out as gay men and lesbians, rejecting a sexuality we don’t feel. We put on tits and strap on dicks, slipping out of genders that restrain us. Our heroism is daring to imagine our bodies not as the machinery of reproduction, but as our theaters of pleasure. Our bodies should be playgrounds, not just battlefields.” — GANG