Elisavet Pakis

In this article I discuss a collective theater performance called Lesbian Blues that took place in Athens, Greece in 1998. It was an experimental performance, directed by feminist director Christiana Lambrinidis. The piece was devised collaboratively with the women who took part in the project, through improvisation drawing on their lives, bodies, and writings. Drawing on Judith Butler’s framework (1993, 1997), and on scenes from Lesbian Blues, I argue that this performance was staging a melancholic landscape in a (national) Greek imaginary, i.e., “workings of gender that do not ‘show’ in what is performed as gender” (Butler 1997:144). I examine how the women were writing and performing their queer selves, bodies, and desires, making rifts in the silence. I explore the atmosphere of embattlement, conflict, and the “blues” that informs the theatrical images. I argue that, drawing on their lives, bodies, and experiences, the women were questioning and contesting a Greek order of gendered belonging.

In Cruising Utopia José Muñoz develops a critical methodology of hope to question a stultifying, deadening, capitalist present, and to open up the future. He draws on Ernst Bloch's Marxist inspired analysis of hope, temporality and utopia, and looks at ...

Drawing on Avery Gordon’s framework of ghostly matters, haunting, and race, I address the queer autobiographical performance by Julie Tolentino, Mestiza – Que Bonitos Ojos Tienes (1998), as an act of unsettling the boundaries of white western subjectivity and belonging. I argue that the artist mobilizes haunting by turning to autobiography, memory and the site of the body. Drawing on Anzaldúa’s ‘mestiza’ vision, on Mestiza performance scenes, on correspondence with Tolentino about the work, and on Muñoz’s work, I argue that the performance stages a lesbian of colour, mestiza subjectivity and imaginary located at the crossroads between worlds, and this act questions the racialised boundaries of social belonging. I discuss the melancholic atmospheres of the performance as structures of feeling and signs of this subjectivity.

This thesis explores how a number of artistic performances stage (im)possible queer and lesbian subjects and how these acts question the boundaries of gendered, sexualised and racialised belonging. By (im)possible I mean that such lesbian subject positions are rendered unthinkable in the dominant regimes of heteronormativity, misogyny and whiteness. I use the terms ‘playing in the dark’ or ‘dark play’ to mark the social and symbolic death that these lesbian subjectivities negotiate and to address what might be unspeakable in the symbolic order. In addition, dark play also maps the transformations that the performances effect and the unknown quality of the queer horizons and imaginaries that they open up.

Drawing on Muñoz’s concept of disidentifications, the thesis maps impossibility across two registers. Part I maps impossibility through feminist and queer theory, and explores the transformations of dark play, boundaries and subjectivity in two lesbian performances: Split Britches’s Dress Suits to Hire, and Lesbian Blues, in Athens, Greece. By looking at these two very different social sites, I trace how the emergent lesbian subjectivities in these performances contest regimes of heteronormativity and misogyny.

In Part II, I address queer and lesbian subject positions playing in the dark of a white western imaginary. I also map impossibility through postcolonial theory and explore dark play, boundaries, and subjectivity in Julie Tolentino’s Mestiza – Que Bonitos Ojos Tienes, and in Sphere’s Dreamz performance installation. I look at how these two queer acts of dark play and haunting bring into existence new diasporic queer subjects and alliances from the borders of the nation and belonging. These queer acts question regimes of whiteness and the racialised boundaries of national belonging alongside heteronormativity, and open up new queer horizons, imaginaries and possibilities.

Dark play in this thesis maps the transformations of queer and lesbian subjectivity, boundaries and belonging in performances from impossibility and social death into possibility. Such a transformation also involves a disidentification with a white western feminist and queer imaginary; a disidentification which is effected in the move of the argument between Part I and Part II. I conclude with a call for feminist and queer performance studies and practices to address whiteness, westernness and racialised boundaries in performance, and to engage with the emergent, queer horizons that might lie beyond or across these boundaries.