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Ex-Chromosomes: Contemporary Performance and the End of Gender
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2020
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In the 1915 novel Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman imagined a utopian society, populated only by women, that has been flourishing in the absence of men for more than two thousand years. When Gilman's narrator—one of three male explorers to “discover” this much-mythologized wonderland—discusses gender distinctions with the Herlanders, he quickly learns that these utopians have long shed any consciousness of what a society with two genders would entail. “And there are two of you—the two sexes—to love and help one another,” a Herlander exclaims, in one of the novel's many ironic flourishes. “It must be a rich and wonderful world.”
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Notes
1 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland, serialized in The Forerunner 6 (1915; entered public domain, 1935); digital edition at Hathitrust.org, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015029837609&view=1up&seq=7, chap. 5 on 123–9, quote at 129, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015029837609&view=1up&seq=137, accessed 25 January 2020.
2 Ibid., 128.
3 Ibid., 128.
4 See Lepore's, JillThe Secret History of Wonder Woman (New York: Vintage Books, 2015), 86–7Google Scholar; for a 1917 example of radical feminism, 92–3. I am grateful to Jacob Gallagher-Ross for directing me to this book.
5 I use the term “Anthropocene” with qualifications, noting that, as many scholars have pointed out, climate justice discourse has tended to ignore questions of racial justice and the racialized effects of climate change. For further information, see, e.g., Critical Philosophy of Race 7.1 (2019), special issue, “Race and the Anthropocene and Race, Immigration, and Refugees,” ed. Nancy Tuana and Robert Bernasconi—particularly Axelle Karera's “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics,” 32–56.
6 Zylinska, Joanna, The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 14–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 This might also be described as a reemergence: as David Getsy points out in Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 31, trans artistic and activist perspectives flourished in the 1960s (and long before), but the cultural conservatism of the 1970s and 1980s worked so hard to erase them that the acknowledgments of the 2010s appeared new to many.
8 Schechner, Richard, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Edelman, Lee, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Ibid.
11 Johnston, Jill, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 258Google Scholar.
12 Ibid., 256.
13 Hay, Harry, “Our Third Gender Responsibilities,” in Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder, ed. Roscoe, Will (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 294–300Google Scholar, at 299, emphasis in original.
14 See James Davis Nicoll's 25 July 2018 Tor.com post, “What's with Sci-Fi's Fixation on Single-Gendered Planets?,” for an overview of this genre, www.tor.com/2018/07/25/single-gender-planets-in-science-fiction/, accessed 25 January 2020.
15 Case, Sue-Ellen, ed., Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance (New York: Routledge, 1996), 185–224Google Scholar. Text by Deb Margolin in collaboration with Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw.
16 Much appreciation to Janine Rogers for alerting me to this important distinction.
17 For a useful history of the dialogue around ecofeminism, see Gaard's, Greta “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism,” Feminist Formations 23.2 (2011): 26–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An excerpt of Rosenthal in Gaia, Mon Amour may be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTVerDGHLKg, accessed 5 January 2020.
18 Rachel Rosenthal, Gaia, Mon Amour (Buffalo, NY: Hallwalls, 1983). PDF available for download at www.hallwalls.org/pubs/16.html, accessed 29 January 2020.
19 Maureen Dowd, “Incredible Shrinking Y,” New York Times, 9 July 2003, www.nytimes.com/2003/07/09/opinion/incredible-shrinking-y.html, accessed 00 MONTH 2019.
20 Hanna Rosin, “The End of Men,” The Atlantic, July/August 2010. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/, accessed 28 January 2020.
21 Hanna Rosin, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women (New York: Penguin, 2012), 15.
22 Dowd.
23 See, for instance, Lee Edelman's assertion that the “Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention” (3).
24 I saw each of the works discussed in this article live. Many of the citations and quotations refer to performance texts and videos that I consulted afterward, with permission of the artists and/or presenting organizations, for further study. In the case of Preparation for the Obsolescence, the journal Contact Quarterly published brief excerpts of Ellsworth's text in a 2017 portfolio about her work, accompanying Nancy Wozny's article and interview with Ellsworth. Where possible, I cite this published text, and where my citations refer to portions of the performance not available in the published (partial) text, I cite Ellsworth's unpublished production notes and video recording, both provided courtesy of the artist.
25 Michelle Ellsworth, Preparation for the Obsolescence of the Y Chromosome, unpublished production notes provided courtesy of the artist, 4.
26 Michelle Ellsworth, Preparation for the Obsolescence of the Y Chromosome, excerpts published in Wozny, Nancy, Rotkin, Joanna, and Ellsworth, Michelle, “Michelle Ellsworth: Performance Engineer—Essay, Interview, and Performance Texts,” Contact Quarterly 42.2 (2017): 40–69Google Scholar, at 42. PDF available for download at https://contactquarterly.com/cq/article-gallery/view/michelle-ellsworth-performance-engineer#$, accessed 28 January 2020.
27 Ibid., 43.
28 Ellsworth, unpublished production notes, 10, 13, 15.
29 Gilman, 128.
30 Ellsworth, unpublished production notes, 7.
31 Michelle Ellsworth, Preparation for the Obsolescence of the Y Chromosome, performance video (Tulsa PAC, March 2016) provided courtesy of the artist.
32 Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona and Erickson, Bruce, “Introduction: A Genealogy of Queer Ecologies,” in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature Politics, Desire, ed. Mortimer-Sandilands, and Erickson, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 1–47Google Scholar, at 5.
33 Schiebinger, Londa, “Taxonomy for Human Beings,” in The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, ed. Kirkup, Gill et al. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 11–37Google Scholar, at 15–16.
34 Ibid., 24–5.
35 Johnston, 187.
36 Abram J. Lewis, “Trans History in a Moment of Danger: Organizing within and beyond ‘Visibility’ in the l970s,” in Trap Door: Trans Visibility and the Politics of Cultural Production, ed. Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 57–89, at 62. I have spelled TAO's name with one “s” (“Transexual”) following the spelling employed by Lewis and by TAO in the materials included in Trap Door. However, TAO also frequently spelled “Transsexual” with a double-s.
37 Ellsworth, unpublished production notes, 2.
38 In a 1983 report describing a panel about lesbian separatism, for instance, Karen Mudd noted that the panelists “acknowledged the belief that women will always sleep with men and we needn't worry about losing touch with men and male culture.” Mudd, Karen, “Lesbian Separatism: History & Theory,” off our backs 13.8 (1983): 10Google Scholar.
39 Muñoz, José Esteban, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 84Google Scholar.
40 Bernstein, Robin, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text 27.4 (2009): 67–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 Ellsworth, excerpts in Contact Quarterly, 41.
42 Robert O'Hara, Mankind, unpublished press script, 2018, 65.
43 Miriam Felton-Dansky, “Mankind Playwright Robert O'Hara Talks the Challenges of Creating Timely Satire,” Village Voice, 12 January 2018, www.villagevoice.com/2018/01/12/mankind-playwright-robert-ohara-talks-the-challenges-of-creating-timely-satire/, accessed 25 January 2020.
44 Ibid.
45 Ahuja, Neel, “Intimate Atmospheres: Queer Theory in a Time of Extinctions,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21.2–3 (2015): 365–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 371. PDF available at https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.ucsc.edu/dist/f/396/files/2016/09/Ahuja-GLQ.pdf, accessed 27 January 2020.
46 Robert O'Hara, “From the Playwright,” Playwrights Horizons playbill for Mankind, January 2018, n.p.
47 Felton-Dansky.
48 Dolan, Jill, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 1Google Scholar.
49 Anna Gallagher-Ross, “In Progress: An Interview with Alexandro Segade of Future St.,” “We're Watching” blog, Bard College, 8 March 2017, https://blogs.bard.edu/wearewatching/2017/03/08/in-progress-an-interview-with-alexandro-segade-of-future-st/, accessed 25 January 2020.
50 See Hancock, Eleanor, “‘Only the Real, the True, the Masculine Held Its Value’: Ernst Röhm, Masculinity, and Male Homosexuality,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 8.4 (1998): 616–41Google Scholar, at 616–17.
51 Segade, Alexandro, Future St., published script, Theater 48.1 (2018): 91–111Google Scholar, at 92.
52 Ibid., 93.
53 Hay, Harry, “This New Planet of Fairy-Vision,” in Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder, ed. Roscoe, Will (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 253–64Google Scholar, at 263.
54 Jarcho, Julia, “Cold Theory, Cruel Theater: Staging the Death Drive with Lee Edelman and Hedda Gabler,” Critical Inquiry 44.1 (2017): 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 12. Emphasis in original.
55 Segade, 95.
56 Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 13.
57 Segade, 103.
58 Ibid., 99, 110, 100.
59 Zylinska, 51.
60 Segade, 111.
61 Ibid.
62 Lydia Mokdessi, “In Conversation with Vanessa Anspaugh,” Culturebot, 7 June 2016, www.culturebot.org/2016/06/25910/in-conversation-with-vanessa-anspaugh/, accessed 25 January 2020.
63 Muñoz, 112.
64 Age & Beauty Part 3 can be viewed online at www.miguelgutierrez.org/age-beauty-part-3-dancer-or-you-can-make-whatever-the-fuck-you-want-but-youll-only-tour-solos-or-the-powerful-people-or-we-are-strong/we-are-powerful/we-are-beautiful/we-are-divine-or-, accessed 28 January 2020.
65 Jaime Shearn Coan, “The Evolution of the Queer Dancer,” Brooklyn Rail, 5 November 2015, https://brooklynrail.org/2015/11/dance/the-evolution-of-the-queer-dancer, accessed 25 January 2020.
66 Vaughan, Brian K. and Guerra, Pia, Y: The Last Man—Book One (Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2014), 100Google Scholar.
67 Ibid., 246.
68 Zylinska, 29.
69 Ellsworth, Preparation for the Obsolescence of the Y Chromosome, unpublished production notes, 28.
70 O'Hara, 79.
71 Ibid., 81.
72 Ahuja, 365.