In my last post, I attempted to put language to why ecosexuality has become my research interest. I realized this morning that I’ve only articulated part of my motivation. It is certainly about falling in love with the world and experiencing intensities of pleasure derived from my interdependency (or perhaps more accurately, intradependency; see below). I think there are ethical and political implications for such an approach to the world, implications that I did not articulate in my previous post, and which I will not be articulating here either (that will have to be for another day). Suffice to say, I believe we might live in the world (as the world?) differently if our sense of self is always hinged on the [passionate, desirous] relation which constitutes both our sense of self and our sense of the world.
Implicit in this sense of subjectivity is an emphasis on relation. It resists the notion of pre-exisiting relata which then form relationships. It considers relationship as the fundamental unit of ontology. In other words, there is no “self” and “the world,” per se. Rather, there is a relation, an intradependency (a relation internal to itself rather than between pre-existing entities or territories), a process or assemblage or system, and from that flow, that relation, we then abstract parts. “Self” and “the world” do not pre-exist the relation; they are constituted by it, they are dependent upon it. This shift in the ontology of subjectivity carries radical implications for ethics/politics/how we live in the world. Part of my work, I believe, will be to consider/theorize/articulate these implications, not exhaustively, but specifically as they are concerned with sexuality.
That’s the other part of my motivation. It is not only about transforming our sense of the world through our understanding of sexuality. It is also about how this shifting from relata to relation, this transformation in how we think “ourselves” as fundamentally processional with the world (language is so difficult here; language resists this shift; this might become part of my project as well), affects how we think/understand/approach sex, sexuality, and even love. The deterritorialization of the subject, the emphasis of relation and the constitutive flow of intradependency, necessarily shifts the concepts of sex and sexuality. For one thing, the body is no longer a closed entity (it never was; this was a fantasy, probably of capitalism, maybe of agriculture, considering the body/self as private property). It cannot be clearly delimited, it can never be contained, and in this sense, it can never be fully possessed. This move towards disindividuation is not new in my work. For a couple of years, I’ve been trying to ground myself in theoretical frameworks that dislodge the notion of the subject as individuated and autonomous, bounded private property. What I want to emphasize here (for myself, for you) is that to no longer consider oneself as one self will affect how we consider/conduct sex, sexual identities, and even relationships. What if sex is not something that takes place between two (or more) people, but is instead a quality of relation, an affective register in which we understand and constitute relations (and thus “ourselves”)? I keep thinking about how practices and philosophies of polyamory might have a lot of sympathy with the “ecosexual subject.” What if love (specifically eros) is not a non-renewable resource? What if we cannot “belong” to one another, because we never truly “belong” to ourselves? What if one relationship does not preclude another? There’s a promiscuity to this kind of ontology, a being that is always becoming, a becoming that is enacted through ceaseless fundamental intra-relationships, of which sex and love are particular qualities.
What I’m trying to articulate here is that in the pursuit of an ecosexuality, there is a shift in how we understand ourselves, and in this shift, how we think and behave sex/sexuality/love changes as well. It doesn’t change in one way; it changes in many, and many more that are unforeseen/unforeseeable.
I have a lot more to consider/theorize/write (dissertation), but I thought it was important to articulate these motivations as well.
As I come to the end of my course work (only one more quarter) and move into the phase of my PhD program dedicated to preparing for my candidacy exams, I find myself constantly zooming in and zooming out—zooming in to examine the complexities and nuances of the theoretical frameworks with which I am engaging, frameworks like queer theories, ecofeminism, queer ecoogies, posthumanism, psychoanalytic theories of sexuality, etc., and how those frameworks function to illuminate the performance materials with which I am engaging; and zooming out to consider what the importance of this project might be, the ways in which I might clarify why I am drawn to theorize this notion of “ecosexuality” in various works of body based performance.
It is this second scale, zoomed out as it were, that occupies my thoughts tonight. These are some of the answers that occur to me:
-In opening to the possibilities of ecosexualities, the possibilities that sexuality might be a part of how we experience the world in which we are implicit, there is a necessary rethinking of the boundary between the human and the more-than-human. This rethinking allows value to become more pervasive. It is not my intention to depreciate what we consider to be human; nor is it my intention to expand what we think of as human, to colonize that which is not human under that category in order to ascribe it value. Rather, I’m interested in how the dissolution of that boundary might allow for a more pervasive value for the world in which we are always already implicit.
-Sexuality is a productive site at which to consider this expansion, this dissolution of the clearly human. Sexuality is central to subjectivity, in discourse, in politics, and often in the lived experience. We come into our subjectivity through our entry into the matrix of sexuality. Sexuality is a field in which lives and rights are actively articulated, legislated, contested, and protested. Sex and sexuality, amidst all their complexity and contestation, can be the sites of intensities of pleasure and even rapture, sites of profound interpersonal connection, sites of collective identities and communities. If sexuality is central to subjectivity and the subject is always implicit in the world, then sexuality pervades the world. In many ways, sexuality has been territorialized and restricted to a small set of experiences and encounters; to consider sexuality to be more pervasive in our experience of the world invites the world to becomes more central to our subjectivities, allows the world to be a site of intensities of pleasure and rapture, profound interpersonal connections, and even coalitional identities and communities.
I’m still talking in the language of theoretical discourses. I’m still working through the theories. I want to zoom out farther, make this project more legible outside of these specialized systems of language.
What I mean is: I want to be able to fall in love with the world. I want to be seduced by the world. I want to feel towards the world the bittersweetness of being both made whole (as by a lover), and the profound sense of partiality, lack and incompleteness that are revealed (produced?) by the desire for the lover. I want to allow for the possibility that in/through/with the world around me, I might experience the kind of dissolution that I experience in sex, a pleasure that blurs the boundaries of where I end and my lover begins. Ecology and ecosophy are already predicated on inherent interdependency; autonomy is an abstract fantasy, and the individual is never fully individuated. We (can) know this in/through sex, but in sex we know it through the intense rapture of sensation and pleasure of connection and exchange. An ecological consciousness is a recognition of one’s own interdependency, an interdependency that is only possible if no part is fully sufficient on its own. It depends on a necessary and productive lack. As long as I conceive of myself as separate, as autonomous, as a human who exists separate from but in the world around me, I lack. I must be completed by the world in which I occur in order to be whole. From lack springs desire, eros, the bittersweetness of longing to be complete in the recognition of one’s partiality and insufficiency, and we take pleasure in that bittersweetness of desire, that longing to be whole. Through ecosexuality, I’m looking to find that rapture, to live in the world in such a way that the pleasure of my interdependency, my implication in the world around me, is present, blurring my boundaries, dissolving my self. As long as I remain “myself”—individuated, autonomous, “human”—I lack, and in lacking, experience the pang of desire. I experience pleasure, fulfillment, and wholeness as I let go of the “I” who lacks and surrender to the necessary interdependency in which there is no “I,” only how what has been called “I” functions as part of a much larger system. With this recognition/surrender of “self,” I think there is then a different way to live in/as the world.
Performance is where I’ve seen this lived out, where I’ve seen these ways of living explored and practiced and re-presented. This is the world-making potential of performance, that in the creative act of doing things differently—something that is “allowed for” in performance in ways that are not allowed in other settings—we explore/practice other ways of being in/as the world. This comes with us back into other settings of living, beyond the performance, in small and big ways. I look to performance to see how ecosexuality is lived out.
These ideas are still only sketches, still only beginning to come together, but there is it. In the most basic sense, I want to fall in love with the world. I want to find profound pleasure in the recognition of how I am a part of the world around me, how I am necessarily interconnected, insufficient on my own, lacking without the world to complete me, and in that pleasure, I want to lose track of my edges, explode my boundaries and flow into my experience of being-in/as-the world.
Filed under: art, research | Tags: annie sprinkle, butoh, ecosexuality, elizabeth stephens, journal of a solitude, karl cronin, love art lab, may sarton, performance, queer porn
the last few months I have been bothered by an important question. actually, I will say that I have perhaps been plagued by this question in all my years of making and thinking and writing. it is a concern: how does my work contribute to the field/culture/world? for years, this quotation taken from May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude was a significant guiding force in my work:
“Millions of boys face these problems and solve them in some way or another–they live, as Captain Ahab says, with half of their heart and only one of their lungs, and the world is worst for it. Now and again, however, an individual is called upon (called by whom, only the theologians claim to know, and by what, only bad psychologists) to lift his individual patienthood to the level of a universal one and to try to solve for all what he could not solve for himself alone . . . not everyone can or will do that–give his specific fears and desires a chance to be of universal significance . . . one must believe that private dilemmas are, if examined, universal, and so, if expressed, have a human value beyond the private . . .“
-Erik Erikson, Robert Cole, May Sarton
times have changed, my work has changed, and my [shifting, mobile, fluid] beliefs about the world have changed as well. I no longer believe in universals, and producing work of universal value is no longer my intention. however, I still concern myself with producing work that has value beyond–however much it might be grounded in–my own interests and dilemmas. with each dance I make, each paper I write, each interest towards which I direct my attention and efforts, the question of, “how does this contribute?” arises. especially, as of late, with my primary research, that of ecosexuality as a framework for performance analysis.
one thing that I think is of value in the work I hope to accomplish is writing artists and art works that have not been given critical academic attention into the literature of performance scholarship. the work that interests me–Love Art Lab, Karl Cronin, queer porn, butoh, etc.–is work that has in some cases not been written into scholarship at all, and in most (if not all) cases, not been considered for their potential interventions in the formation/production of sexualities and environmental ecologies. this seems to be an accomplishment worth pursuing in/through my work.
but over the last couple of days, something more/larger has occurred to me. it might even seem obvious, but it has become central to how I understand the potential importance of what I am doing, beyond my own dilemmas or interests (and I am indebted to Maree ReMalia and Deder Gordon for talking through these ideas with me). the fundamental assumption/assertion of the work that I am doing seems to be: through performance we are given access to other possible worlds, other possibilities in/of our world, in ways that reconfigure the sedimented registers of meaning within our cultures and societies. performance is not [only] an act of representation or re-presentation, but is as act of doing the world differently, and that doing has radical potential on the physical level at which bodies are formed/deformed/reformed through the actions that they take (the potential for the performer), and on the level of perception, of the visual display (the potential for the spectator). performance (perhaps all arts, in their own ways), has the potential to operate within recognizable symbolic registers and systems of meaning attached to the body (such as gender, sex, sexuality, race, age, ability, nationality, etc. etc. etc.), but to do so in ways that go against the grain, reconfiguring familiar codes in ways that function in new/unfamiliar ways. this is what I mean by performance giving access to other possible worlds, or ways of world-becoming (yes, there are hints of deleuze and guattari here).
this may be obvious. my friend Deder actually responded by saying, “well, of course. isn’t that what we always do?” and my answer is yes, it is, on some level, but performance is not always considered in this way. too often performance (dance, theatre, performance art, porn, etc.) is approached with the expectation of representation, that the work is showing us something of or about the world, or (perhaps even worse) telling us something about the world. and it might be. but I am interested in what else the work might do, how it might provide as space in which we can both imagine and enact other worlds, other meanings, other bodies and beings and becomings. and I’m not opposed to representation/re-presentation, but rather than looking for representations of the [affirmed] actual, I’m interested in how performance works might actualize virtual landscapes of possibilities. that is (perhaps) the radical potential of performance, that is actualizes/physicalizes the virtual. it is never fully artificial; it is embodies and thus always to some degree actual.
this is how my work with ecosexuality began (I now realize/articulate). ecosexuality is a configuration of sexual and environmental subjectivity that emerged from performance work, specifically the work of the Love Art Laboratory (Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens). their performance work offers another possible world, a reconfiguration of the world in which we live and the way in which we live in/as/with it. it performs new possible sexualities that are not constrained by human organ-ization or global territorializations, and it has done so through reconfigured performatives such as the wedding, the vows, and the roles associated with the wedding ritual. it’s from this set of reconfigurations, this performance work that raises the very possibility of an ecosexuality, that I turn my attention to other performances to ascertain how they too might contribute to the expansion of what can be understood as sexuality, ecology, and the environment–shifting notions of humanity, personhood, ethics, and even love.
so I suppose how I answer myself today when I raise the question, “how does my work contribute to the field/culture/world?”, these are my answers. I am looking to performance works for the ways in which they configure other possible worlds, other possible sexualities as ways of relating not only to one another, but to the world in which we live. this shift in what “sexuality” and “environment” can mean carried with it a shift in possible ethics, the extent of which I cannot even begin to articulate (except to say that it is significant). in a larger sense, I hope I am modeling a way of attending to performance, not for its capacity to represent the world as it is, or to express some hidden feeling or belief about such a world, but for its capacity to enact different possible worlds. performance can never be fully artificial; it is embodied, and as such it is always fundamentally real. it is, in itself and in its display, a movement towards doing/perceiving/doing the world differently.
Filed under: creative process, research | Tags: anal ecology, deterritorialization, disindividuation, ecosex symposium II, ecosexuality, experiential anatomy, experiential geography, felix guattari, gilles deleuze, green porno, isabella rosselini, karl cronin, polyamory, post-humanism, serena anderlini-d'onofrio, somatic natural history archive, tessa wills
It’s been far too long since I’ve written anything productive here. As I’ve moved into my work this summer, starting with the Ecosex Symposium in June and into my summer reading in July (working through various texts by or about Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari), there has been very little time/space in which to generate thoughtful material for my blog. Between the symposium, my studies, and inspiration from a spectrum of different artists, I have been saturated/overflowing with ideas, just not the time to translate them meaningfully or articulately to this blog space. And I don’t really have time to enact that translation now. But in addition to this site functioning as a platform for (more) transparency in my creative and scholarly work, it also functions as a holding space for ideas, for snippets and scribbles of ideas and thoughts that may eventually evolve into something more developed and cohesive (or intentionally in-cohesive, as the case may be), and that is what I need today. The following is a series of scribbles that amount to mere hints at what I might develop further:
Intersections of landscape and body
Mapping (cartography) of bodies/spaces (need to read Henri Lefebvre on space)
Where are the overlaps of experiential anatomy and experiential geography, somatic physical practices and environmental sustainability projects, body politics and global/environmental politics? These intersections seem rich and worth exploring. I was profoundly inspired by a piece presented by Tessa Wills at the Ecosex Symposium II entitled Anal Ecology, which took as its premise the potential for queer bodies to provide information for sustainability projects (my understanding was that this piece was specifically concerned with issues of sustainability surrounded radioactive waste, waste deposits as places that are forbidden/toxic, and queer bodies as bodies of knowledge practiced in venturing into the “forbidden” within our own bodies). I’m also interested in the occurrences of experiential geography and experiential anatomy in Karl Cronin’s work, and how those two [fundamentally phenomenological] approached to experience might inform one another.
In my presentation at the Ecosex Sympsosium II, I suggested that a central project in my theorization of ecosexuality has been towards disindividuation, or the deconstruction of the discontinuous autonomous/self-sufficient individual subject. If there is a larger project or concept in which I think disindividuation might function, it is that of deterritorialization (this is a concept that is addressed by Deleuze, and I am interested in how his work with this concept might inform/enrich my own understanding). In my understanding, the territorialization of bodies is a process of organ-ization, the fragmentation of the body into a collection of organs, organs (especially where genitalia are concerned) that function as the foundation for oppressive regimes such as gender and sex. This organ-ization [territorialization] of bodies resembles the territorialization of the globe, and it is from this correlation of something like organs and nation-states, and the fundamental logic of territories that underlies both, that I see the possibility of a productive inquiry into the intersection of body and global/environmental politics.
Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio: she gave a truly inspired keynote address at the symposium discussing polyamory alongside ecosexuality, a discussion of love not as a need (a concept developed with notions of scarcity and lack), not as a resource that is non-renewable, but as something expansive and inclusive, this being inherent in polyamory, and this offering a model for relationships, human, more-than-human, and otherwise. Intersections of polyamory, ecology, and sustainability…
I am more convinced than ever before that post-humanism is central to ecosexuality. The category of “human” seems to me another act of territorialization, the production of an inside (human) and outside (non-human) that is necessarily binary and hierarchical. Post-humanism does the important work of deconstructing this category, and I think such a deconstruction is a necessary foundation for ecosexuality. I am interested in what performative productions of a post-human sexuality might look like. I curious about the ways in which various performance works move us beyond the human. And I wonder how sex/sexuality might provide avenues for movement into the post-human. It means changing how we understand sex (especially as it is entrenched in the Oedipal narratives of psychoanalysis . . .). In various discourses–especially psychoanalysis–sex operates as a central organizing principle in the development of subjectivity; I suggest that ecosexuality might provide a necessary intervention in how we understand sex that could in turn shift “human subjectivity” towards a “post-human intersubjectivity.”
The radical thoughts towards new choreographic/performance work:
Partially inspired by Karl Cronin’s Somatic Natural History Archive. I see Karl’s practice of learning/imitating the movement patterns of various plants and animals as a method for shifting the human towards the post-human. Movement/action are productive in that our bodies are literally formed, informed, deformed, and reformed by that actions we carry out (this is part of what is profound about dance, its role in the production of bodies). I see choreography as a profoundly intimate encounter: for the dancer to incorporate the choreographer’s movement is to literally allow the choreographer to participate in the formation of the dancer’s body. To the degree that the body is central to who we are, this constitutes a profoundly intimate exchange. When Karl looks to other-than-human sources for movement, I believe that the distance between the territories “human” and “non-human” are collapsed in the production of his body through other-than-human movement forms.
What I am inspired to consider is sourcing the sexual behaviors of other-than-human sources as choreographies for human bodies (I immediately think of Isabella Rosselini’s Green Porno). How might bodies be produced towards a post-human sexuality through the imitation of other-than-human sexual behaviors? An important question would be how to assess “sexual behavior” other than reproductive sexuality. For instance, what would constitute non-reproductive sexual behavior for plant life, and how might such behavior function as choreographies or scores for movement/behavior of “human” bodies? I don’t have an answer to that question, but it suggests itself as a site of investigation, and I feel like the possibilities of the piece(s) such an investigation might produce could be transformative.
those are the scribbles and jots towards new ideas/concepts.
we’ll see where they go . . .
Filed under: creative process, research | Tags: biopolitics, candice breitz, factum, mair culbreth, phenomenology, twins, wexner
This week has involved several new insights into potential shifts in my creative/research processes and practices, alongside a stream of personal revelations, many of which were artwork-inspired.
Of particular note was a profoundly affecting experience with work recently introduced at the Wexner Center for the Arts. the pieces are entitled Factum, by Candice Breitz. On display are three of Breitz’s two-channel video portraits of identical twins. I spent about an hour with this work, and it is my intention to revisit it throughout its time at the Wex. The basic form of the work are videoed interviews/portraits with identical twins, dressed and styled identically, interviewed separately in the same seated locations. When I first approached the work, I thought the two screens displayed the same person; when I realized that they were twins, a lifetime of experiencing assumptions about the sameness of twins came rushing up, and I myself was implicated in these assumptions by my encounter with the visual display. On a formal level (which carried a weight of emotional significance for me), an interesting component of the pieces are how the individuals begin to register in their differences as time passes. After having spent almost forty-five minutes with the piece Factum Misericordia I realized that the sisters no longer looked anything alike to me. I’ve experienced this with twins I’ve known (and frequently been informed of this process as people knew my brother and I for longer durations, especially when we looked more alike): the gradual differentiation that takes place, the recognition of asymmetrical details in facial features, mannerisms, patterns of speech, etc., but this usually takes place over longer stretches of time. To have the recognition of this content condensed into a matter of minutes (facilitated by the concentrated looking, reinforced by the exactly identical attire and setting), had a shocking quality to it, one bolstered by my own emotional content (calling up experiences in which I felt that I was or was not being seen clearly because I am a twin).
There were so many poignant moments in the narratives being shared in the interviews. There were specific experiences with which I could identify acutely, but also just a general sense of familiarity with the kinds of lives being told. The tendency for people to assume that twins are the same person; the shift when people begin to differentiate and impose/inscribe polar qualities to each twin (the dominant v. the passive, the light v. the dark, the happy v. the brooding one, etc.); the powerful anxieties surrounding death–not particularly around one’s own mortality, but the weight of knowing that two came into the world together, but will not leave the world in the same way; the inevitable sense of losing that connection.
In watching the Factum Misericordia piece, I was struck by a particular resonance. Both sisters used very clear language distinguishing between being “a twin” or “a single” in the world, and periods of their lives in which they were apart and were living in the world as “a single.” I brought up notions of passing, a certain historical (not so pervasive in our present moment) stigma of being a twin (particularly a conjoined twin), and the differences in the existential experience of being in the world as one rather than two. Right now my twin brother and I live in two different cities. For all practical purposes, we live in the world as “singles” rather than “twins.” This distinction (and the recognition that even if we live as “singles,” we are still twins) has made me ponderous. I’m curious how this sense of a shared history, shared life, shared flesh/fluids/body has impacted my particular research interests (the loss of the subject/object binary, the fluid boundaries of the self, intersubjectivity, etc.). It’s a curiosity, one that may not come very much into play, but I am curious how a particular “twin subjectivity” might come to bear on these areas of interest in my research.
Also of note was a rather important conversation I had with my friend/colleague Mair Culbreth. We were discussing the development of our areas of candidacy for our exams in our doctoral program. I mentioned that I keep questioning whether or not phenomenology will be one of those areas for me. Phenomenology might be the research paradigm/methodology that makes the most sense to me in the investigation of dance as a site of knowledge. What I view as the real potential significance of our field is the experience of dancing, the experience of being inside of physical practices and choreographies and creative processes and performance situations. This is not to say that the spectatorial experience of viewing dance is not of any use; I don’t believe that to be the case. But it functions differently, more into the realm of signification and kinesthetic empathy. I am interested in analysis of dance works/practices from “the outside,” as it were, because those performance events circulate in the production of culture. I am fascinated by projects like Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced that conducts an analysis of choreographic structures, as if from the outside, but developed from the insider accounts of dancing inside of the work. This hybrid inside/outside analysis interests me. But of even more interest is the research developed from the phenomenological experience(s) of being inside of the work. I see the practice of dance to be a practice in forms of biopolitics, learning and unlearning, forming, unforming, reforming bodies (thus subjectivities) through the acts of doing, the practice/rehearsal being the space of reiteration, where new bodies with new potentials and new knowledge are formed. Most significantly to me is that these practices and bodies have the potential to subvert the dominant biopolitical discourses in our culture, the various ways in which bodies are regulated, produced, and normalized within society. My interest (it seems) is broadly in a phenomenology of biopolitics, and particularly how dance/body-based practices participate in these biopolitical discourses. More particularly, my interest seems to be a phenomenological account of the biopolitical potentials and effects of the lived experience of dance practices. Most particularly, I am interested in the production of an ecosexual subjectivity through the lived experience of various body-based/dance practices, and giving an account of these.
As I gradually move towards candidacy exams and dissertation, and attempt to understand what it is that my project is/might be, I have been considering the development of a theory of ecosexuality (drawing from studies in ecofeminist philosophy, ecology, queer theories, psychology, phenomenology, sexology, etc.), and then applying this theory as a system of analysis for various historical/contemporary body-based performance work (such as Rudolf Laban’s movement practices, Butoh, Anna Halprin, the Love Art Laboratory, Karl Cronin’s Somatic Natural History Archive, etc.). This has felt like a rewarding pursuit, but it struck me that I would still be offering an outsider account, an analysis of work based on viewing, documentation, conversation, etc. This is where Mair connected a dot for me: she was discussing research from embodied knowledge, researching from a place of practice and the knowledge produced by the body, and it occurred to me:
why would I not engage with these performance works as practices, “re-staging” them as it were, in order to experience them myself, to encounter the lived experience of Laban’s practices, writing from Butoh on the inside, marrying the earth, sky, sea, moon, mountains, snow, etc., embodying the kinetic patterns of various species of flora and fauna and holding those as a corporeal archive, all in the production of a different body, an ecological body, and researching the potential production of an ecosexual body.
Last year I wrote a paper giving a phenomenological account of learning and dancing Trio A from Labanotation score. This project has felt adjacent, off the map of my primary research interest (ecosexuality). Now it feels as if that paper could function as a kind of model for how I might engage with this work. It could of course be paired with outsider analysis, but it introduces embodiment as a methodology for research, a methodology that I see as germane to the field of dance. Our practices are those of physicalizing movement, particularly movement patterns generated by others. We are practiced in taking “the other” in/on/as ourselves, in technique class, in choreographic processes, in various improvisational techniques. This feels like a potential shift in where I thought this work might go. It will of course be grounded in the development of a theory of ecosexuality, which will involve a grounding in critical theories, BUT it centralizes a embodiment as a mode of engagement, the body as the site of knowledge, the body as a practice in knowing the biopolitical potential of body-based performances, rather than only offering an external account.
I’m excited about this potential development.
Filed under: creative process, Grad School, research | Tags: ecosexuality, pleasure
I had two amazingly inspiring meetings yesterday, one with my advisor Norah Zuniga Shaw, and the other with artist/collaborator/friend Karl Cronin. Lots of ideas finding echoes and raising questions and organizing thoughts. Focusing on ecosexuality; building a pillar of “what is sex [and how does it construct bodies]” to support my work (likely looking more at Foucault, keeping it grounded in queer theories, maybe bringing in Tantric paradigms of sexuality, using queer porn as an archive/index of queer performance, probably keeping Bataille in the mix, and possibly drawing on work by contemporary sexologists working at the borders of sex–people like Annie Sprinkle and Joesph Kramer, etc.); building a “pillar” out of sex+”nature” (drawing on ecofeminism, queer ecology–which might mean giving myself more of a focused crash course in ‘traditional’ ecology, Donna Haraway as a useful destabilizing force for ideas about “nature, etc.); the application of these frameworks to body-based performance, their relational constructions of “nature” and the human subject (looking at folks like Rudolf von Laban, Anna Halprin, Butoh artists (TBD), Love Art Lab, Karl Cronin, twincest, etc.).
There might be something there . . .
In the mix of all of this is the relational formation of the choreographer/dancer/dance. That might be a separate project entirely. I do think that ecosexuality as a framework might reveal something about this relational production of bodies/dances, so I haven’t let go of it yet . . . it just might be a different project.
There’s this book I want to read by Linda Williams. I skimmed part of it yesterday; a primary discussion in the text is about making “sex speak through the visual confession of bodily pleasure” (Linda Williams Hard Core: power, pleasure, and the frenzy of the visible). As I’m considering what it might be to do an analysis of how queer bodies are performed in queer porn, this gave me something to consider, especially as the queer porn genre (alongside/mixed in with feminist porn) has identified itself considerably by citing the “real” pleasure of its performers.
Rambling thoughts:
performing pleasure as the construction of erogenous corporeal landscape; performances of pleasure as forming bodies; performances of pleasure as a topography of erogenous zones, especially those zones that extend beyond the binary of man/woman and reproductive organs; could performances of pleasure function as a topography of sex/bodies beyond the borders of a heterosexual reproductive economy of signification?
how is pleasure materialized? movement, sound, fluids
fluids as confession; fluid as evidence of pleasure; pleasure as demonstrative of the “truths” of bodies, thus constituting the possibilities of bodies for the spectator [Norah kept mentioning the "wetness" of ecology, and there's something to that . . . how do ecological systems function differently from other systems (computer networks, etc.)? it might be something in the wetness (which makes me want to look at biotechnologies at some point . . .). there seems to be an echo between fluid as a form of confession, fluid as demonstration of pleasure (which might be a total hegemonic construction, built up around cum shots and female ejaculation . . . and if I want to read bodies beyond biology, read bodies in prosthetics, in silicone and latex, in dildos and condoms and gloves (all as sexual technologies grafted into the sexual body) then does lube function as a fluidic signifier of pleasure? I don't know yet) and the "wetness" of ecological systems.
fluids. membranes. border crossing. border dissolving. loss of [discontinuous, discrete individual] self in the mingling of fluids . . . or the management of membranes. safe-sex as environmental management, “wilderness preservation”?
Things I want to learn more about:
Beatriz Preciado
dildonics
contrsexuality
trans bodies
[the way I'm writing ideas here feels like it's getting messier . . .]
Filed under: creative process, research | Tags: courtney trouble, madison young, pornography, queer porn, sex education, shine louise houston, sketches of shame, theorizing performance
Different new projects/potential projects in the works.
This week I start rehearsals with Daniel Holt. I am restaging/recreating Sketches of Shame, a piece I made with Clara Underwood in 2007. I already know there are things that are changing. From the “original,” I think I am retaining Clara’s solo, which will be performed by both Daniel and me simultaneously. It is not set to counts, and the timing is not necessarily precise. I’m interested in the fluctuation of drifting in-and-out of unison, how the aligning and misaligning of bodies/actions/pre-determined gestures articulates something about the shame experience as one predicated on the sensation of falling out of line/out of synch with the/a regulatory normality. Here the choreography functions as that regulation, we are both approximations, but there is no absolute measurement; we are each variables being treated as constants in the assessment of the other . . . this seems to me to be central to the production of bodies, genders, sexes, sexualities, etc. It is also my intention that a significant portion of the piece be done watching one another. That might enhance the analogy (observation and the sensation of being observed are central to the shame experience), or it might break the analogy in that watching one another without falling into perfect unison will be difficult. Or maybe not. Perhaps the deviations will become much more subtle, but the remaining disparities are would be more acutely analogous to the slippages of bodies/genders/sexes/sexualities that are attempting to adhere to regulations. Maybe.
There is another section that will be new material, added at the front end of the piece. It’s still very new, and I’m a bit guarded about discussing it. We’ll see how it goes and how much makes it onto the blog.
Another project that occurred to me yesterday that I might consider as a study for my Theorizing Performance course this quarter is an analysis of queer bodies and queer sex in a survey of queer pornography. This is building from earlier ideas about pornography as non-sanctioned sex education and an archive of human sexual behavior (there is a recent wealth of research on pornography as a source of sexual information in adolescent development, and it is at this intersection of development along with developing sexual identities–which might take place beyond adolescent development–that I see pornography as a relevant line of inquiry into the socialization and education of [sexual] bodies), and queer pornography as a radical intervention for expanding the range/scope/possibilities of such an archive (and thus, in effect, the range/scope/possibilities of bodies/identities that are educated and circulated back into culture/society). My interest is in developing a lexicon for the bodies and relationalities demonstrated in this media, particularly in the work of pornographers such as Madison Young (who has specifically addressed fluid sexuality in a series of docu-porns), Shine Louise Houston (crashpad), and Courtney Trouble, among many others. I’m thinking of something like a survey of 20-30 performers in 2-5 films by each director. I don’t know what I’m looking for yet . . . that’s the nature of developing a lexicon, allowing it to be emergent from the data sources considered. Things to consider might be: self-identification (do these performers identify as queer, genderqueer, female, male, trans, etc. etc. etc.); bodily configurations in sex acts (parts of the body involved, how they are involved, etc.); performance of roles within these configurations; inclusion of extra-bodily components (dildos, condoms, gloves, etc.); number of participants; and whatever else comes up. Maybe.
Those are two projects that are in my mind right now. We’ll see where they go.
Filed under: creative process, research | Tags: butoh, ecofeminism, ecology, ecosexuality, laban, queer ecofeminism, Synchronous Objects
This morning my mind was spinning with ideas and questions. I needed to get them down somewhere. I put them here:
What are forms of analysis in dance studies that might function as methodologies for ecological analysis?
Synchronous Objects as an instance of analyzing the internal functionality (choreography?) of a dance(ed) system by way of aggregate data derived from interviews with dancers and choreographer, correlating the accounts to produce a description of the dance’s dependence on the dancers’ interdependence by way of the cueing system.
How else might choreographies demonstrate interdependence (an ecological structure)? And is this a description of the functional interdependence (how it actually works on the inside) only, or does it also include the perceived interdependence, the perceived gestalt of the work (something like the visual composition and the interdependence of formal elements to constitute the overall “effect” or “specular”(?) experience of the piece? In SO, I would classify the analysis of the cueing system as the former (the internal functionality) and the analysis of counterpoint and alignments (particularly those annotated in the project videos) as the latter (compositional devices/effects).
Partnering
. . . the entire spectrum of compositional devices/elements/effects could be analyzed for their interdependent potentials . . . how elements are put together and the effects of those compositions . . .
Props (object theatre)
Symbiotic relationship with the audience
Something about the relationship between the work and external cultural objects (I’m thinking about work that appropriates or cites or quotes other existing work—music, choreography, text, etc.)
Still the ongoing question, how might ecological analysis function as a methodology for choreographic analysis? Further, how might this “ecological analysis” be inflected by ecofeminist and queer ecofeminist critiques, producing a queer eco(feminist)logical analysis of choreographies?
Ecofeminism: correlating mutually reinforcing systems of oppression between feminism and ecological struggles
Queer ecofeminism (which may in fact be the starting point for what I have eventually considered ecosexuality/sexecology): extends the correlation to other master narratives and apparatuses by which “Others” (nature, female, queers, the erotic, etc.) are alienated in order to constitute the normative (the natural, male, heterosexual, logical, etc.); where this seeps into ecosexuality is the point at which all bodies become permeable and inter-penetrable
Can there be a Sexecological analysis of choreography (I believe sexecology, as I have theorized it, is necessarily queer)?
Questions about how different choreographers/dance practices (practitioners)/performance artists have constructed “nature” and their relationship to it. Right now Laban and his “nature cults,” his assertion of the correlation between natural forms and human movement as one potential object for analysis; Butoh suggests itself immediately as another. Karl Cronin, Love Art Lab, etc.
Filed under: creative process, Dance, research | Tags: battleground states conference, butoh, clara underwood, daniel holt, domestic matters: a performing installation, eco-sexuality, ecosexuality, erin paun, eroticism, georges bataille, ICKL, jp stanszel, mair culbreth, marriage, nicole bauguss, purple wedding to the mountains, re-membering the mountains, sketches of shame, tantric philosophy, trio a, urban arts space
Where to begin? My dear friend Mara commented to me the other day how long it has been since I’ve posted things here. Partly, if I’m honest, it’s that I have a difficult time right now spending any more time in front of a computer than I have to. But there’s also something to do with the scope of ideas. I feel like my ideas of too big at the moment, and the bundle of threads knotting them together feels just out of reach. I wrote another term paper this autumn quarter exploring/theorizing ecosexuality, this time drawing correlations between my previous explorations of a theory of ecosexuality, Tantric philosophy, eroticism (as discussed by Georges Bataille), and Butoh. It was a culminating point in one sense, in that I finally articulated how these ideas/lines of inquiry live in and alongside one another in my thinking/understanding. But it was also a big start of something, of finally putting these various paradigms in the context of one another to really see what it is I’m getting at. I don’t know if the paper itself is entirely successful, but I do want to share it here:
pulsing through and between, I am that
I’m not sure what the next steps for these ideas will be. I do know that the next quarter is going to be intense in its creative/research output, and I feel certain that those projects will be related to these ideas.
I am performing my solo “Re-Membering the Mountains” twice more in the months to come: In February, I have submitted this piece to the Annual Battleground States Conference at Bowling Green University. The conference is entitled “Collapsing Cultures and Darkened Dreamscapes: Societies and Imaginations in a State of Disorder,” February 25-26, 2011. I am presenting the piece as part of a panel address the Purple Wedding to the Mountains and performative ecosexuality. I was invited to present on this panel by two colleagues who also performed as part of the Purple Wedding, Erin Paun and Jp Staszel:
Erin and Jp at the Purple Wedding to the Mountains
I will also be performing that solo as part of OSU’s Winter Concert (details forthcoming).
Another performance project with which I am involved is a solo entitled “Marriage,” originally choreographed and performed by Mair Culbreth in 2005. Mair Culbreth and Nicole Bauguss are having a month-long exhibit at the Urban Arts Space entitled “domestic matters: a performing installation.”
domestic matters: a performing installation
More details for this project will come later (I hope to write a bit about the process from the inside of the choreographic/rehearsal practice). The dates for the show are March 1-31, with performances throughout. Already I find the process fascinating: Mair and I spent time discussing the original context and content of the solo, then together devised a score for the piece based on the original. From this score, I choreographed movement to function within it. We will begin to rehearse/revise/edit/etc. in the new year. I’ll keep you posted.
I am also rehearsing my own reconstruction during the winter quarter, a piece entitled “Sketches of Shame” that I choreographed in 2007 with myself and Clara Underwood. The new version will retain the intention and some vocabulary from the original, reworked and recontextualized in my current situation and research. You can see the original vocabulary from which I’ll be working here:
I will be working with Daniel Holt, reconstructing this original material, and developing additional material exploring the corporeal situation of shame within a context of sexuality and sexual expression. Again, more details will be forthcoming, but that will hopefully offer a sense of the spectrum of what I’ll be working on.
I have also submitted a paper I wrote last year entitled “The Phenomenal Conflation of Dance/Dancer/Author/Reader/Text/Trio A/and Me” to the 27th Biennial International Council of Kinetography Laban/Labanotation Conference being held at the Institute for Musicology, Budapest, Hungary August 1-6, 2011. I will hopefully find out in January or February if the proposal is accepted.
That is a sampling of work that is both recently completed and forthcoming. I think I might make a separate post sharing some other ideas/inspirations that I am considering right now.
Filed under: research | Tags: avatar bodies: a tantra for posthumanism, eco-sexuality, ecosexuality, tantra, tantric philosophy
I just posted this on our blog for Laboratory of Independent Scholars. I thought it could live here as well:
These are not wholly cohesive ideas.
But that actually seems appropriate for the line of inquiry.
I am continuing to theorize and work through my understanding of ecosexuality. I find myself really solid in my explication of an ecological consciousness or modality, a blurring the the self/other along trajectories of desire/eroticism, the transgression of borders, boundaries, and taboos, etc.
If you’ve had any time to look at the papers I posted in which I am working of establishing something like a theory of ecosexuality (grounded in and indebted to the Love Art Laboratory), then discussions of porosity and permeability will be familiar. Desire that denotes lack as constitutive of an erotic eco-logic when considered in the conditions of collaborative arts communities.
But again and again I keep finding myself looking for the sex in all of this. I have posited that an ecosexual paradigm employs (queer) sexual epistemologies in the recognition of/engagement with the environment/more-than-human, but here is where I run out of language. I brush against it in the “Fluid Bodies, Liquid Communities” paper when I state: “I argue that in the formulation of an Ecosexual identity and a Sexecology, sex and sexuality function as epistemologies, perhaps even methodologies, for recognizing the conditions of such an identity and ecology. The permeability, the fluidity, the blurring of boundaries during sex—at the edges of flesh, fluids, pleasure, penetration, ejaculation, for example—function as perceptual schemas for an erotic eco-logic, whereby we experience what it means to lose clarity of our individual boundaries and borders at the site of intimate exchange.” It does have something to do with perceptual schemas. It has something to do with the self-annihilating force of pleasure, feeling fluids permeating flesh, tasting “an-other” inside of “your-self,” and losing clarity between “you” and “I.”
But that’s as far as I can get.
Today I am finishing an amazing text called Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism that I hope to use to support my development/mobilization of Tantric philosophy as a critical theory. In delving into Tantra, posthumanism, and deconstructivism, I am again situated within a discussion of bodies far beyond corporeal morphology, selves that are multiple and trembling amongst (infinite?) potentialities. I’ve elsewhere discussed the bigness of bodies, bodies that are flesh and blood and bone, but also regimes of power, sites of political inscription, sites of oppression, resistance, and liberation, bodies that produce knowledge, etc. My new thought today is that if bodies are inclusive of and extended beyond corporeal morphology (the biological systems that we recognize as “the body”), then how might sex be both inclusive of and extended beyond these biological frames? What is the spectrum of sex, sexual acts, sexual roles, sexual modes of knowing? And how might that all take on relevance/extension/application beyond the (bounded, limited, biological) body into the realms of the “big body” (in all its posthuman, poststructural, Tantric, ecosexual contexts) WITHOUT it no longer being sex?
I think it’s an issue of abstraction.
I am trying to find how far sex as an epistemology extends without it becoming only metaphor, only abstract analogy (not that these aren’t modes of epistemology . . . but my interest is in the question of IF bodies are all of these things beyond the reduced biological body, and IF sex is a certain mode of the body, a mode of encounter between bodies, THEN what are the limits of sex?) From that last past it feels as if it might be worth revisiting Butler’s Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ . . .
I am wide open to feedback on this (sexual episteme?). Any insight, perspective, reference, challenge, question, etc. that might help develop this thought further is highly welcome.
