[-empyre-] Queer Violence Trans-posed

[virginia solomon]

While I do agree that there is a certain aspect of a queer operation that is
violent, to the extent that it changes systems of knowledge and
meaning-making to the detriment of those who currently occupy a position of
privilege, I wonder what might happen if we find metaphors or images for
that violence that do not draw upon experiences as positionally differential
as, say, encounters with the state.

I admit to being unfamiliar with the passage from Derrida that Robert keeps
raising, outside of the context of this conversation, but in that passage
and how Robert has been using that passage it seems as if we go from the
kiss to the bite or the blow, and then it stays in the realm of the bite or
the blow and doesn't retain its oscillation back and forth between the two.
This oscillation is vitally important, I think, if we are to take up
violence as part of a queer operation without reproducing the problems
present within the sites from which we generate that image/metaphor.

I am slow with art, so Christina and Micha, though both of your work is
wonderful I want to engage this point through Tara's, only because I'm more
familiar with it.

I have seen the Men with Missing Parts performance twice, and each time I
was struck by the intertextuality of the performance, subverting norms of
many idioms of performance art and drag. I cite this piece in particular as
an example, too, because of the ways in which it offers the kind of
recuperative readings of a number of texts, simultaneously, that I think
also happens in Vaginal Davis' performances, and I look forward to hearing
Robert's thoughts on that. Hollywood, camp, Broadway, disco, all are
deployed but altered within this performance in a way that are pretty
amazing.

What happens there, I think, is a kind of queer violence of redefinition and
reposition, that happens precisely through cultural transvestism, by the
ways in which positions and texts continutally move in a way that highlights
the problems but through juxtaposition recuperates the political operations
of each - camp's classism and sexism, mainstream disco's homophobia, etc.



-- 
Virginia Solomon
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