Unmarked: The Politics of Performance
Peggy Phelan
Language: English
Pages: 222
ISBN: B000P2XI0C
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Unmarked is a controversial analysis of the fraught relation between political and representational visibility in contemporary culture. Written from and for the Left, Unmarked rethinks the claims of visibility politics through a feminist psychoanalytic examination of specific performance texts - including photography, painting, film, theatre and anti-abortion demonstrations.
at what “cultural reproduction” actually means, and suggests something of what it might take to interfere with its labor. Under the ever-growing shadow of the politically powerful New Right in the United States, I am writing against the perpetual fracturing of disciplines, specializations, and identities progressive political and critical theory has wrought. These fractures make us easy targets for a relatively unified Right. These chapters seek to establish a different idea of mutuality,
and individual freedom from surveillance. Within these boundaries then, where does the power of Paris Is Burning lie? In framing the mimicry of all identity, Livingston’s film documents the impossibility of securing the authentic view of anyone or anything. The film mimes the performance; the performance mimes the images of women; the images of women mime the fantasies of men; the fantasies of men mime the “real” which underscores all fantasy and so on. The balls intervene in the smooth
patriotism—they aren’t even like coffee mugs. There’s nothing real there separate from our perception of them. (II.v.) Thus, The Real Thing disappears into Hapgood, but that disappearance is marked by the exact symmetry Stoppard creates between the two plays. Henry the playwright in love with the actress Annie stands behind Kerner the physicist in love with the spycatcher Hapgood. All four characters share a reality in which the inevitable (mis)perception of the real defines their work. Physics
of self/other, possession/dispossession, men/women which are increasingly inadequate formulas for representation. These binaries and their institutional upholders fail to account for that which cannot appear between these tight “equations” but which nonetheless inform them. These institutions must invent an economy not based on preservation but one which is answerable to the consequences of disappearance. The savings and loan institutions in the US have lost the customer’s belief in the promise
“Money Talks, Again” for a full discussion of the controversy. 13 See Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text: 106. 14 See her long meditation, “Plato’s Hystera,” in Speculum: 243–364, esp. 355–7. 15 See Kobena Mercer, “Looking for Trouble,” for an intriguing discussion of Mapplethorpe, race, and gay male sexuality. 16 Mira Schor points out this link in her essay, “Representations of the Penis.” 17 This fact was perhaps never more powerfully manifest than in the trial of Dennis Barrie, the Cincinnati