Centerfold

Issue #3 of the Movement Research Performance Journal was published the year after Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, though both grew out of a burgeoning scene of queer performance practices in the 80s and 90s. In reimaging MRPJ’s Issue #3 “Gender Disarray,” we wanted to honor its focus on queer and trans performance artists pushing against policing of the gender binary through their embodied practices. We also wanted to recognize that these both definitions of gender and the barriers constructed in the name of gender’s supposed “binary” have shifted since the 90s when Issue #3 was published and will continue to shift well beyond the publication of Issue #60. With past and future ideologies of gender collapsing into the “now,” this centerfold holds the work of three artists of a new generation. Each artist has shared a statement and visual component extrapolating on gender as a central, fundamental component in their work and lives. At the same time, placing this overt reflection on “gender” at the centermost point of this publication, we recognize that Issue #60 will never speak to the totality of gender. To that end, we invite the reader to imagine what the construction of gender as centrifugal to this issue might do to obfuscate other ways of thinking, knowing, and sensing what this centerfold is all about, what the work of these three artists is all about, as an invitation to let gender come in and out of focus, as it so often does in daily life.