... on the Performance of the Politics of Shame Did the Supreme Court come out of the political closet in Bush v. Gore? By reading the opinion in Bush v. Gore as parallel to an open secret in a classic coming-out narrative, I...

...Bruce Robbins This essay argues that Étienne Balibar, in his essay on Althusser’s dramaturgy, uses the analogy between ideology and theatrical performance to defend the significance of politics as a performance that is anything but free—that is, rather, informed and invested with meaning by its...

... transgender representations in early modern China. Li Yu’s works demonstrate that the representation and performance of ambiguous or trans genders was linked to elite male consumption: that is, transgressive gender presentations were a prime form of entertainment, in fiction as in theater. However, his...

...Chengzhou He As an important representative of cross-dressing performance in Chinese popular culture, Li Yugang (李玉刚) is highly acclaimed both in and outside China for his impersonation of well-known beauties in Chinese history and literature. By interweaving Peking Opera with elements of popular...

... was a key component of Romantic reimaginings of language as a productive force. While the native informant guarantees the referential truth of colonial discourse, this essay details the simultaneous emergence of a figure termed the ``native performant,'' who dramatizes the performative power of...

..., Activists: Women in Contemporary German Theatre (1994) and Ethnic Drag: Performing Race,Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (2002, both with University of Michigan Press). She has published in the areas of contemporary German culture,theater, and feminist theory. Currently, she is completing a book on...

...Ariane Cruz This essay employs pornography to explore the politics of race, gender, and sexuality at play in mimetic performances of Bill Cosby’s The Cosby Show . Focusing on Not the Cosbys XXX (2009), a pornographic parody of the sitcom, pornography is shown to be a venue that lays bare the...

...Marissa Brostoff This article argues that Caitlyn Jenner’s failed performance as transgender spokeswoman can be best understood through the queer reading practice of camp. Camp’s subversive potential to denaturalize gender through the scene of its failed performance has often been celebrated within...

... performatively presence the actresses and singers who animate them, in other words morally charged acts for which such animators are held accountable. Drawing on linguistic anthropology and film theory, this article explores vision-image and sound-image as distinct modes of performative presence, noting the...

...Nick Seaver The American Piano Company, in the early twentieth century, built a reenacting piano that could automatically play back performances recorded by virtuoso pianists. This article examines the production, in the company lab, of that piano’s fidelity—the terms by which an original and...

...Figure 6 Peggy Shaw performing “These Rattling Bones” in front of The Skeleton Dance (1929). Must (2007) ...

... Foucaultian genealogy, an Irigarayan ethics of eros, and a new kind of synthesis of narrative and performative. Also important to the work is an emphasis on ethics understood in terms of desubjectivation and of the Foucaultian event. Rethinking the meaning of the performative in this context, this essay asks...

...Julia Bryan-Wilson From 1974 to 1976, artists in a range of contexts produced works that drew connections between performance and prostitution. This article examines how these projects, by artists such as Carlos Ginzburg and Suzanne Lacy, speak to the wider political discourses and feminist...

... second part of the essay tracks the rhetorical use of “children” in MacKinnon’s scholarship, the textual travails of MacKinnon’s little girls. Children perform two rhetorical functions for MacKinnon. First, the figure of the child allows MacKinnon to draw out innocence as an ideological formation that...

... ancient epic poem, not just of the Nordic sagas and of medieval epic, which are more immediately related, but, in fact, of Homeric epic. Understanding video games as an evolving art form, the essay turns to intertextuality and to Judith Butler’s analysis of “staged interpellation” and performative...

...Alanna Thain This essay explores the affective intensity of movement in a recent choreography by noted French Canadian choreographer Marie Chouinard. In bODY rEMIX/ gOLDBERG vARIATIONS , dancers perform with all manners of prosthetics and bodily extensions--crutches, ski poles, coat racks, pointe...

...Stefan Mattessich This essay builds on previous criticism highlighting the semiotic dimensions of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping to identify in its metaphors of spirit and spiritual haunting a performative logic of social implication. This logic appears within a metaphysics of subjectivity that...

... subjection and subjectivation in terms of interpellation and counterinterpellation offered by Judith Butler as early as 1997. In this essay, “performative” dimensions of Althusser’s critique of ideology are presented as a singular moment of crystallization within an open trajectory, leading from the...

... array of performatively accreted social subjects. It is a historical novelty. This essay universalizes a case rooted in Chinese- and Japanese-language archives and historical specificities, particularly the international advertising ephemera that presents a multiple (Badiou’s language for a set or...