Where is the performance in Joseph Roach's "Culture and Performance"?
I’d like to ask for some help, both in sorting out an essay, and in answering the question, “What is performance theory for?” I’ve been struggling with Joseph Roach’s essay in Performativity and Performance . At first reading, it seemed to be a clear tracing of three funeral performances as examples of social memory. Stepping back from it, though, I feel like it wanders over lots of territory, and I’m having difficulty finding the main point he is arguing. I believe one of his main theses is that literature and orature are interrelated, “that these modes of communication have produced one another interactively over time” (45). Another thesis is that performance allows culture to change. I don’t see how these arguments are supported with the analysis of different funeral performances, though. The literature he refers to is the libretto of an opera (an obvious aesthetic performance form) or a newspaper. How is performance related to what has traditionally been considered literatu...
The most interesting aspect of this weeks class for me was about Peggy Phelan's application of marked/unmarked. How she begins with men as marked an women as unmarked, but then later explores marks for racial-gendered people. I want to understand better her theory here. Regardless, I am in awe of her interdisciplinary approach, and I enjoyed hearing about art projects in her text that I was unaware of prior.
ReplyDelete-"Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather it it is an identity constituted in time--an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts" (p. 519)
ReplyDelete-Gender is not a starting place it is an identity repeatedly constructed over time
-You do not have gender first and then choose to perform it; rather, gender is created by the act of your performance. This performance is informed by what is already historically constituted as gender and is performed by the individual through acts of the body.
-Because gender identity is constructed through acts, there exists a possibility to construct a different gender by any other act.
-Performative acts which construct gender may appear ostensibly as a personal choice, but always work within the existing framework of cultural sanctions and proscriptions, of a “shared social structure (522)”.
-Butler rejects gender as coming from any internal essence or predetermined structure of being.
-The legacy of sedimented acts includes both the habitual performative acts of the individual and the accumulation of gender norms that produce the effect of a natural sex.
laura