A Queer Contemporary Mini-Syllabus

Week 1:

“Queer Phenomenology” by Sarah Ahmed

“A paradox of the footprint emerges. Lines are both created by being followed and are followed by being created. The lines that direct us, as lines of thought as well as lines of motion, are in this way performative: they depend on the repetition of norms and conventions, of routes and paths taken, but they are also created as an effect of this repetition. To say that lines are performative is to say that we find our way and we know which direction we face only as an effect of work, which is often hidden from view. So in following the directions, I arrive, as if by magic.”

p. 41

“A direction is also something one gives. When you tell someone who is lost how to find their way, you give them directions to help them on their way. When you give an order or an instruction (especially a set of instructions guiding the use of equipment) you give directions. Directions are instructions about ‘where,’ but they are also about ‘how’ and ‘what’: directions take us somewhere by the very requirement that we follow a line that is drawn in advance. A direction is thus produced over time; a direction is what we are asked to follow. The etymology of ‘direct’ relates to ‘being straight’ or getting ‘straight to the point.’ To go directly is to follow a line without a detour, without mediation. Within the concept of direction is a concept of ‘straightness’.”

-p.40

Week 2:

The Black Dancing Body by Brenda Dixon GottsChild

"The real story in African dance is the manifestation and presence of the dancing body. It doesn't mean something else. It is what it is!

Bare feet in solid contact with the earth; the ground as a medium to caress. stomp, or to make contact with the whole body (whether with serpentine, supplicatory, or somersaulting movements); a grounded, "get-down" quality to the movement characterized by body asymmetry (knees bent, torso slightly pitched forward so that, in its quintessence, the dancing body looks like Yale art historian Robert Farris Thompson's concept of "African art in motion"); an overall polyphonic feel to the dance/dancing body (encompassing a democratic equality of body parts, with the center of energy, focus, and gravity shifting through different body parts—polycentric; as well as different body parts moving to two or more meters or rhythms—polymetric and polyrhythmic); articulation of the separate units of the torso (pelvis, chest, rib cage, buttocks); and a primary value placed on both individual and group improvisation: All these are elements drawn from the Africanist aesthetic and perspective.

The traditional and classical Europeanist aesthetic perspective for the dancing body is dominated and ruled by the erect spine. Verticality is a prime value, with the torso held erect, knees straight, body in vertical alignment; a diatonic feel to the dance, with a primary rhythm dominating and resolving the dancer and the dance. The torso is held still (and sometimes purposefully rigid), the limbs moving away from and returning to the vertical center, with a privileging of energy and gestures that reach upward and outward.”

-p. 15-16

Once the category has been established there is little room for free movement and self-definition…

[and a few lines later she includes this quote from Alvin Ailey: "I want very much not to be pegged.”]

-p. 16

"APPROPRIATION leads to APPROXIMATION leads to ASSIMILATION. This applies not only to performance, but to other sectors of society as well. What it means is that manners, behaviors, styles, trends, phrases, motifs—tropes from a given cultural realm are appropriated by another culture but are obliged to go through a transformation in the process. They must be made to approximate a look and texture, feel and shape, that will meet with the aesthetic approval of the appropriating culture before they can be assimilated. This is a natural process. Cultural arenas manage to keep themselves alive and well by frequent injections of new blood from Other cultural arenas. However, those outsider injections must measure up to the reigning aesthetic in the host culture in order to be recognized as ‘one of us’; they must tally with the host comfort zone, if even at its outer limits."

-p. 21

Week 3:

Butting Out by Ananya Chatterjea

“The finely chiseled kinesthetic intelligence of a performer, while refining technique as defined in particular training systems, also inflects the same movement with the particular ‘nuance’ that is as much individual stylization as the stuff of cultural specificity. I think of transitions in the work of these artists: sliding from a balletic rond de jomb to a grounded and turning kick influenced by Capoeira; from a floored spinal stretch from yoga into a quick step footwork pattern from Bharatnatyam; often embodying them simultaneously, the body negotiating through different energies and centers.”

-p.25

"This politics of coalition among communities of color is exciting to me: it spells hope. Specifically, it reminds me of Cornel West's prophetic articulation, a decade ago. about the 'new cultural politics of difference' that 'affirms the perennial quest for the precious ideals of individuality and democracy by digging deep into the depths of human particularities and social specificities in order to construct new kinds of connections, affinities and communities across empire, nation, region, race, gender, age, an sexual orientation,... This connectedness does not signal a homogeneous unity or a monolithic totality but rather a contingent, fragile coalition building in an effort to pursue common radical libertarian and democratic goals that overlap.' West's concept works through a balance of individual endeavour and community reinforcement, a politics of self-determination and coalition, very differently from the success stories of hardened individualism propagated by capitalism.”

-p. 6

“I want to mark the articulation of postmodernism in the fields of Indian and African American dance through crisscrossing journeys, to read them as moments of rupture engaged paradoxically in articulating practices marking continuity: disruption yet suture. Typically, postmodern aesthetics in these contexts seem to be constituted through continuities, not rejections, of specific dance/performance traditions that have been reimagined and reframed […]. Such postmodern practices, marked by a critical distance from unproblematized notions of 'tradition,' are also characterized by intensive self-reflexivity and analysis of the historical constructions of cultural and political practices, ultimately reaching towards rearticulations of existing relationships from the perspective of contemporary political, economic, and social realities." 

-p.128

WEEK 4:

Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes

“The studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste: I like/I don't like. The studium is of the order of liking, not of loving; it mobilizes a half desire, a demivolition; it is the same sort of vague, slippery, irresponsible interest one takes in the people, the entertainments, the books, the clothes one finds ‘all right’.”

-p.27

“In this habitually unary space, occasionally (but alas all too rarely) a ‘detail’ attracts me. I feel that its mere presence changes my reading, that I am looking at a new photograph, marked in my eyes with a higher value. This ‘detail’ is the punctum. It is not possible to posit a rule of connection between the studium and the punctum (when it happens to be there). It is a matter of a co-presence, that is all one can say...”

p.42