Movement Research Performance Journal #60

“Read My Lips” is a phrase that will be familiar to longtime readers of the Movement Research Performance Journal—so familiar that the mere reference will bring to mind an image posted by the artist collective GANG, an image that lies at the heart of one of the journal’s most spectacular moments. Issue #3, with its focus “Gender Performance,” was published in 1991 amid that era’s Culture Wars, receiving almost immediately negative reception from government officials (the NEA threatened to withdraw funding from Movement Research) and many members of the dance community (who considered Issue #3 to be deliberately provoking the so-called “war,” intentionally taking a political position that some worried might comprise future funding of the field). In the thirty-three years since its publication, Issue #3 has developed a patina familiar to many artist-activist histories that are looked upon with romance and nostalgia, often by those for whom that history is only a fantasy (rather than a lived experience). For the current issue, Issue #60, we revisit Issue #3 attempting to move beyond this idealization by engaging critically with the original content. Under the direction of four contributing editors—Amalle Dublon, Kay Gabriel, Keioui Keijaun Thomas, and Anh Vo— we’ve assembled a new body of work by mostly trans and queer artists reflecting on the keyword “gender” and its relation to contemporary performance. Their work moves across multiple genres of writing, from analytic essays to poetry to performance scripts. While gender is a central topic for some, many more of the pieces in Issue #60 approach this keyword obliquely, almost evasively. Is this because of the punitive relation one nowadays seems to expect will result from direct political speech? Then again, there are more ways to understand what might, at first glance, seem like a refusal to speak gender directly. Perhaps gender as a concept can only be approached indirectly and in relation to other ways of knowing one’s body, identity, and their relation to social life. Perhaps it’s a way of defending against the demand to explain again and again the fallacy of gender as a biological binary, which is its own kind of political sabotage, a tactical exhaustion of momentum towards liberation through weaponized ignorance. Certainly, the need to explain how things are can get in the way of imagining how they could be. The works assembled in Issue #60 do both—explicating a contemporary impasse while also theorizing alternatives, opening up other ways of rehearsing a relationship between gender and contemporary performance of all kinds.