Ethics, performativity and gender: porous and expansive concepts of selving in the performance work of Gretchen Jude and of Nicole Peisl
Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: Situated knowledge theories that focused on processes and contexts for knowing were developed by women in response to finding that what they knew was unspoken or unspeakable not only in various disciplinary fields but also in their lived lives. And it is not surprising that the performativities that sustain knowing rather than knowledge are often the focus of women performers attempting to give form to those not-saids to make living worthwhile. This article discusses the gendered contexts of two women performers for making performative forms and for carrying those forms into performance. Yet the primary focus is on what their work does, and how it generates a felt sense of the somatic complexity of becoming through performative practices and rehearsals. The dancer/choreographer Nicole Peisl and musician/multimedia artist Gretchen Jude are from quite different parts of the Anglo European West yet in practising for non-individual porous and expansive selving, and for collaborative differences that generate emergent form, the work is remarkably similar. In their focus on ethico-poetic politics rather than the politics of social ethics, they offer ways to sustain an engaged situated ethics in the performativity of gender in lived lives as well as in the performance of gender as necessarily multiple. This paper is published as part of a thematic collection dedicated to gender studies.
Author: Lynette Hunter
Institution: University of California, Davis
Language: English
Topic: Arts and Performance Studies
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,890
OpenAlex ID: W2298900334