[-empyre-] Queer *Is* Violent: Response to Part of Judith's Position/Statement

[naxsmash]

  Cutting/blows/kisses are sublated via montage in " yellow tahiti  
substation" piece and elsewhere ( http://www.vimeo.com/4189136) and  
also the differential is the sense of place,  it s not just anywhere,  
its a cutting/kissing of places together
short version on version http://version.org/videos/show/1 this matter  
of the real place, it's not theatre only but  the real world (west Los  
Angeles), i mean , here's the problem with Genet for me, leaves me so  
cold (probably as cold as
acorpse after being beaten in some alley), because in the end it's all  
about his f-ing freedom, I say, so what, so what next.  its convenient  
to hate the world and to hate the specific places and sense of place  
in the world-- hey like Palestine, sure, so specially glorious
that Gaza strip,  but only if it never becomes a state. A specific  
place and its familiars (the bus station mens room in the Back Bay  
1980 for example) must be ratted out, must be exposed as vulnerable,  
as a mere shadow-play, a theatre ( yes so its ok to kill, there).
Right. And then, in the handing out of treats (after or before the  
bloodbath).  Isn't it only ever ok to save the best meth for women and  
street kids because they look and act weak.   Us 'girlies' 'we' get  
the good stuff from the strong
protector- lurker in the dark- but watch out if we ever become other  
than 'women' or 'working kids' , that's when we become monstrous to  
Genet and he (like David's meth head) has to be the
only monster. No Caliban in love with Ariel, this one.   He cuts up  
the meth, or he will cut you, if you get too strong to move out of the  
shadows.   The  young women of Teheran  now rip and slash their  
chadors to pray in a new way, they burn them against the tear gas.
Bataille in Erotism elides the erotic with death and names such   
'transgression' to motivate all politics-- it's interesting (i was  
checking last night.. that central to the argument is that eros, gets  
down to being about reproduction, that's "all").  You end up with one  
man standing , the author (aka prick, who writes 'beautfully' and   
'scandalously' : reproduces himself through the violence of the text,  
and also dreams of same in the 'location' of cocks inside police  
trousers, that's where he'll write his next text)...)  Following this  
logic , the young beautiful women of Teheran 's 'divagations' (wow  
that s a cool word) has to lead to their destruction; in this Genet  
and the conservative ayatollahs are agreed.  It's only ever ok for  
them (the 'girls")  to enact beauty if they are going to be mowed  
down.  LIke the sissy boys in Stonewall eighties they gotta be stuffed  
back in the garbage dump, glorious compost.  In the Sotomayor hearings  
last week the ranking Republican oozes about how  the judge is a real  
american story of success and a real family person, etc etc, and then  
accuses her of racism (bullies always accuse others of exactly what  
they are doing and think no one else can see). That's just so no  
Puerto Rican woman in her mid fifties with the most extensive trial  
career of any potential Supreme Court judge in the last 100 years in  
America, can EVER have power over the folks who want to be in charge  
of who gets the really good crystal.  Tara Mateik s work- the  
performance replay/"docudrama"  of the Billie Jean King/Bobby Riggs  
match complete with replay of the TV commentary (old fart Cosell vs  
'cute' Rosie Casales) is pertinent here.  Tara does this series of  
inversions and replays that work more like montage , where you bring  
disparate elements together, sublating/cutting/melding- to produce a  
kind of direct address:  "look at this! watch me !" This to me is an  
antidote to the death cult of Genet and the Republican guard.  
Politically the twists and turns are so important because, as Tara's  
work shows, the powers who want to humiliate and torture the 'weak'  
must be confronted with a 'twisted' or torqued (twerk) display of  
largesse , even nonchalance (coolness),
and a slight smile at the edge. " RC: I just wonder whether Bobby  
would look better in a tennis dress . . . better than the shorts maybe."

-christina


Judith wrote,

"
>  I also read a really amazing account on
> one of the Tehran sites today of last Friday's prayers in which the
> raconteur details the divagations from the "proper" format of various
> religious practices: women doffing the chador and praying, sexes  
> praying
> together, burning chadors to mitigate teargas, etc.

David wrote
>
> he explained again for him it was a class thing--and gave me a great  
> many more examples of al kinds of things he had learned to work on  
> since he began chrusing the bus station bathroom  at age 15 to find  
> marks--some of the things he told me of were more sublte yet just as  
> vioent in other, more aesthetic ways--
>
> on the rare times our days off somewhat converged we wd work on his  
> autobio and i wd read Genet aloud to him and hims mangy dog--while  
> he cut up the meth--
> the cutting it was also a form of violence against the middle and  
> upper class customers-
> working kids and women like ourselves got the good stuff--
>
>
>
> Genet's fascaintion with the beauty of the vioent aspectsof State  
> and Men--Burroughs noticied with horr that while the two were  
> covering the Chicago 1968 Democtatic Cnvention for Esquire--that  
> genet was fascainted by the area of the crotch of the police men's  
> uniforms--and inhis pieceon the "pigs" genet finds an eroticism in  
> these violent State sponsored thugs--
> this attraction to viooence as an erotic imagery rather than acts-- 
> that is the fantasies of the cocksof criminals pasted to the  
> insideof lockers or tiny mirros i one's cell--islinked with the  
> fascation for the outer images which give evidence bybulgesof the  
> interior life of the trousers so to speak-
> itis the surfaces which indicate depths thatcontradict the surfaces  
> that genet enjoys pullingout fo the hat continually for the reader--)
>
>
>
>
> In life, the rebellions of the Black Panthers and Palestinians are  
> only aesthetic-erotic as long as they take place as a form of  
> theater--and when the play suddenly bursts in to life, it no longer  
> interests him, in fact he refuses it. he walks out just like any  
> other person leaving the theater, ironically "playing" on the "play  
> being finished,punkt, fin fine over-- having reached its end."
>
> leaving the theater "like any one else" yet bringing the vision of  
> the theater, a Queering vision, into the streets with him.as  
> himself, his living being.


Tara wrote

> In Putting the Balls Away, I reenact the 1973 tennis match between  
> Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in the famed battle of the sexes.  
> Formally Putting the Balls Away is executed in three distinct ways:  
> an interactive performance, a single channel video, and a video  
> installation. During the performance video of one player is rear- 
> projected opposite the live performance of the other. I perform both  
> Billie Jean and Bobby.  After each game the competitors "switch  
> sides" (contruction/deconstruction of gender). The match is enacted  
> shot for shot. It's is important so that the action can match the  
> commentary. The Battle of the Sexes was the most-watched live  
> sporting event of all time in 1973 that pitted chauvinist against  
> feminist when women tennis players demanded equal pay to that of  
> their male counterparts.  Excerpts from the sports commentators,  
> Howard Cosell and Rosie Casals, exemplify the spirit of the match:
>
>
> HC: There’s the velocity that Billie Jean can put on the ball and  
> walking back she’s walking more like a male than a female.
>
>
> RC: I just wonder whether Bobby would look better in a tennis  
> dress . . . better than the shorts maybe.
>
>
> HC: Billie Jean of course won the first set, to the absolute delight  
> of all of the women in the arena. They actually stood and gave her  
> an ovation and I suspect many in their living rooms did the same  
> thing.
>
> http://www.taramateik.com/index.php/projects/details/putting_the_balls_away_performance/
>
> This footage is from a performance at the Guggenheim. I also  
> performed it one other time, in Houston, the original site of the  
> match.
>
>
>
>

Davin wrote
>
> violwrite this, a pacifist), I wonder what
> the implications of an abstract pure violence would have for my
> opposition to the forms of violence that we are familiar with (from
> physical force to threats of force).
>
> Peace!
>
> Davin Heckman
> <www.retrotechnics.com>
>

Robert wrote
> ertain *violence* to/of queer(ing).  In
> > the words of Sedgwick, "'[q]ueer’ is a continuing moment, movement,
> > motive—recurrent, eddying, troublant. The word ‘queer’ itself means
> > across -- it comes from the Indo-European root -twerkw, which also
> > yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torque (to twist),  
> English
> > athwart” (_Tendencies_, 1993: xii).  This *speaks* of a certain
> > violence (*torque* can also be traced to torture, which is an act of
> > violence), and to queer (or queering -- which I want to also use  
> as a
> > transitive verb, which would violate/torture rules of grammar) *is*
> > violence against the normative (and queer _does_ do/enact more than
> > just this), and we can *see* a certain *queering* as a certain
> > *violence* when Derrida states, in a way that shows the slippage
> > between binary oppositions, *... a caress may be a blow and vice
> > versa. … And let us not exclude either that certain experience of
> > touching (of 'who touches whom') do
> > not simply pertain to blows and caresses.  What about a kiss?  Is it
> > one caress among many?  What about a kiss on the mouth?  What  
> about a
> > biting kiss, as well as everything that can then be exchanged  
> between
> > lips, tongues, and teeth?  Are blows wanting there?