Performing Excess: Special Issue of Women and Performance (journal;
10/15/04)
Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory Special Issue
Performing Excess
TOO MUCH: eating, drinking, fucking, drugging, talking, erotic dancing,
protesting, shopping, yelling, swearing, gorging, binging, purging,
confessing, gambling, plastic surgery, working out, botoxing, tv
watching, marrying, puking, piercing/tattooing, limping, raving,
ranting, writing, dieting, trendy bariatric surgery, makeup, energy,
difference.
MAKES ONE: too fat, too skinny, too plain, too freaky, too girlie, too
mannish, too light, too dark, too ugly, too perfect, too plastic, too
promiscuous, too outspoken, too visible, too poor, too rude, too hairy,
too old, too gossipy.
"Conventionally identified with the feminine," Della Pollock writes, "
'too much' ostensibly describes both intrinsic characteristics of
unacceptable 'others' and their proper place on the moral/political
gridwork of everyday social life: they are excessive, excluded,
superfluous, at best marginal." Nonetheless, excessiveness also
functions as a resistant practice, what Pollock describes as "flooding
determinant gridworks with excluded and as yet unimagined
possibilities." We thus propose in this special issue of Women and
Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory to address performances in
and beyond theatre (mostly beyond) that assert excessiveness as a
radical alternative to overdetermined structures of social, cultural,
and political meaning. We also invite papers that examine how
performative excessive behaviors (perhaps especially, though not
necessarily, dieting, shopping, and plastic surgery) affirm the status
quo and reinforce false notions of "normalcy," rather than subvert or
disrupt the concept of the "normal."
While earlier theoretical treatments of excess by literary theorist
Mikhail Bakhtin, sociologist Alfonso Lingis, Georges Batailles, Luce
Irigaray and other French feminists, queer theorists such as Judith
Butler, and phenomenologists including Merleau-Ponty offered treatments
of excess as culturally subversive, these theorizations also obscured
actual embodied and performed acts of excess. And while Bakhtin himself
often focused on actual cultural traditions of performed
excess--notably during Carnival--the theoretical deployments of
Bakhtinian concepts often remained overwhelmingly abstract. In order to
move beyond earlier, abstract theoretical treatments of excess, as well
as to redress media excoriations of excess and the people who perform
it, this issue of Women and Performance will explicitly address actual
performed instantiations of bodily excess, such as eating, drinking,
fucking, drugging, aging, talking, as well as how fat, disabled, queer,
or aged bodies themselves mark out a kind of cultural excess or social
terrain of "too much." Just as Leo Bersani urges graphic discussions of
sex acts as a means of redressing overly theoretical approaches to
queer identities, we also hope to highlight both these theoretical
approaches, and also insist on actual performed embodiments of excess;
in other words, treatments of excess that do not remain purely
theoretical.
Seeking to document and historicize performance practices that
constitute excess, we invite papers that probe excess within a range of
embodied moments and behaviors. We also, of course, welcome papers on
well-known excessive types such as Tammy Faye Baker, Coco Fusco, Nao
Bustamante, Courtney Love, Anna Nicole Smith, Bessie Smith, Camille
Paglia, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Tracey Ullman, Janis Joplin,
Roseanne Barr, Queen Latifah, Christina Aguilera, Lil Kim, Pamela
Anderson, Liz Taylor, JLo, Marilyn Kroker, Kathy Acker, Pat Califia,
and Annie Lennox.
We encourage contributions from a variety of fields, including (but not
limited to) Anthropology, Communication, Comparative Literature,
Disability Studies, English, Film or Cinema Studies, History, Media
Studies, Musicology, Sociology, Theater, and Women's Studies. Essays
should be approximately 5000-6000 words in length and should adhere to
the Chicago Manual of Style. Please send completed essays as MSWord
attachment to both of the editors at [log in to unmask] and
[log in to unmask] by October 15, 2004. Expressions of interest prior
to the deadline are encouraged.
Kathleen LeBesco is Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Chair
of the Humanities Division at Marymount Manhattan College. She is
author of Revolting Bodies? The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity, and
co-editor of The Drag King Anthology (published simultaneously as a
special double issue of Journal of Homosexuality). Jana Evans Braziel
is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. She
is co-editor of Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. LeBesco and Braziel have
previously collaborated on the editing of Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness
and Transgression.
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