In Between Subjects
A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance
1st Edition
Published on 10. November 2020
Book
Hardback
384 pages
978-0-367-53375-5 (ISBN)
Description
This volume is a study of the connected ideas of "queer" and "gender performance" or "performativity" over the past several decades, providing an ambitious history and crucial examination of these concepts while questioning their very bases.
Addressing cultural forms from 1960s-70s sociology, performance art, and drag queen balls to more recent queer voguing performances by Pasifika and Maori people from New Zealand and pop culture television shows such as RuPaul's Drag Race, the book traces how and why "queer" and "performativity" seem to belong together in so many discussions around identity, popular modes of gender display, and performance art. Drawing on art history and performance studies but also on feminist, queer, and sexuality studies, and postcolonial, indigenous, and critical race theoretical frameworks, it seeks to denaturalize these assumptions by questioning the US-centrism and white-dominance of discourses around queer performance or performativity. The book's narrative is deliberately recursive, itself articulated in order performatively to demonstrate the specific valence and social context of each concept as it emerged, but also the overlap and interrelation among the terms as they have come to co-constitute one another in popular culture and in performance and visual arts theory, history, and practice.
Written from a hybrid art historical and performance studies point of view, this will be essential reading for all those interested in art, performance, and gender, as well as in queer and feminist theory.
Addressing cultural forms from 1960s-70s sociology, performance art, and drag queen balls to more recent queer voguing performances by Pasifika and Maori people from New Zealand and pop culture television shows such as RuPaul's Drag Race, the book traces how and why "queer" and "performativity" seem to belong together in so many discussions around identity, popular modes of gender display, and performance art. Drawing on art history and performance studies but also on feminist, queer, and sexuality studies, and postcolonial, indigenous, and critical race theoretical frameworks, it seeks to denaturalize these assumptions by questioning the US-centrism and white-dominance of discourses around queer performance or performativity. The book's narrative is deliberately recursive, itself articulated in order performatively to demonstrate the specific valence and social context of each concept as it emerged, but also the overlap and interrelation among the terms as they have come to co-constitute one another in popular culture and in performance and visual arts theory, history, and practice.
Written from a hybrid art historical and performance studies point of view, this will be essential reading for all those interested in art, performance, and gender, as well as in queer and feminist theory.
Reviews / Votes
"Amelia Jones has written another essential book. In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance deftly traces post-WWII theories, practices, and poetics of relationality and queer performativity across a globally diverse range of performance-based artworks. The back-stories she brings to the fore, and the genealogies she illuminates for readers are punctuated by movingly visceral and highly local accounts in which the author performs her relations to the art works she summons to account. This book will be a vital companion not only for art historians and performance theorists but for all whose inquiries into art making, life making, and world making congregate under or otherwise gesture toward capacious, critical, and affirmative queerness."Rebecca Schneider, Brown University
"Deftly moving between the personal and historical, Amelia Jones dives into the concept of queerness such that its conjunction with performance unfurls into the fraught territories of race, coloniality, and the nature of presence. Jones anchors these unruly genealogies with meditations on performances so that the question of betweenness hovers in the air, always moving between what has already been done and what can be done. How have we learned to think about performance and how can queerness help us undo that?"
Amber Jamilla Musser, George Washington University "Amelia Jones has written another essential book. In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance deftly traces post-WWII theories, practices, and poetics of relationality and queer performativity across a globally diverse range of performance-based artworks. The back-stories she brings to the fore, and the genealogies she illuminates for readers are punctuated by movingly visceral and highly local accounts in which the author performs her relations to the art works she summons to account. This book will be a vital companion not only for art historians and performance theorists but for all whose inquiries into art making, life making, and world making congregate under or otherwise gesture toward capacious, critical, and affirmative queerness."
Rebecca Schneider, Brown University
"Deftly moving between the personal and historical, Amelia Jones dives into the concept of queerness such that its conjunction with performance unfurls into the fraught territories of race, coloniality, and the nature of presence. Jones anchors these unruly genealogies with meditations on performances so that the question of betweenness hovers in the air, always moving between what has already been done and what can be done. How have we learned to think about performance and how can queerness help us undo that?"
Amber Jamilla Musser, George Washington University
"In this remarkable study, Amelia Jones critically examines the genealogy of the concepts of "queer", "performance", and "performativity". The author mobilizes-in a non-hierarchical way-multiple sources, such as art history and pop culture, performance, gender, and postcolonial studies, as well as her individual experiences of queer and queer-related topics, seeking to question and problematize the dominance of Western-centrist and mostly white discourses around these concepts."
Sasha Pevak, Critique d'art
"Jones's book plunges right into the fault lines that exists between queer and performance, self and other, viewer and viewed, and stands as a resource for how to stay aware of, if uncomfortably, our own implication within scholarship."
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Bulletin, 106:2.
"Carefully juxtaposing works from disparate "temporalities, energies, sites, and historical frameworks" (332), Jones invites the reader to inhabit the productive "discomfort of finding ourselves in between."
Fabien Maltais-Bayda, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 30:1.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Illustrations
43 s/w Photographien bzw. Rasterbilder, 25 Farbfotos bzw. farbige Rasterbilder
25 Halftones, color; 43 Halftones, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Weight
870 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-367-53375-5 (9780367533755)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
11/2020
1st Edition
Routledge
€83.70
Shipment within 15-20 days
E-Book
11/2020
1st Edition
Routledge
€47.49
Available for download
E-Book
11/2020
1st Edition
Routledge
€47.49
Available for download
Person
A feminist curator, theorist, and historian of art and performance, Amelia Jones is the Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Academics and Research at the Roski School of Art and Design at University of Southern California.
Content
Prologue; 1. Introduction: performing (queer) art and theory, relationally; 2. Performativity; 3. Relationality; 4. Theatricality; 5. Queer; 6. Other; 7. Trans