The Rise and Phall of Working out in a Dress

Abstract

This essay discusses the performative potential of genderqueer body in the solo work The Rise and Phall of Working out in a Dress. First, focus is set on contextualizing the study of gendered shapes, which is my research that delves into the different ways of how bodies take shape in a gendered manner, and how we can exit the feminine-masculine binary understanding of shapes. The study of gendered shapes is further divided into three parts: extensions of the body, breaking of the shapes, and the sexed body (the phall), and together they stand for the different ways that genderqueer dancer can work against the twofold understanding of bodily shapes.The relation between the creative process, and the word ‘labor’ is then emphasized, to limelight the fundamentally queer nature of the combination. To work on a performance about queer identity, is to work on the identity itself, which is to work. Reaching the end of the paper, the political potentiality of staging the piece is evaluated, and the meeting points of the performer and the audience is acutely investigated.José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications & Cruising Utopia, Sara Ahmed’s Orientations, Mira Bellwether’s Fucking Trans Women, and Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie all have been fundamental sources for this paper. All of this theoretical framework helps the essay to reach a point, where to not-yet-here of queerness is dislocated from the rational and conceptual, and relocated into embodiment: perhaps since we’re not enough in our bodies, we’re not yet queer.In the final stages of the paper, the sights are set into the future, but all temporalities of queerness remain in the limelight: “The past dances on my skin, while I move my body in the present moment towards genderless shapes, in order to provide futures for my own and others’ genderqueerness.”