Headnote: A guide, a warning, a trigger

On page 48 of this issue you will find a reproduction of an image that was first printed in the Movement Research Performance Journal, Issue #3, 1991. The image is of a poster created by the artist collective GANG titled, “Read My Lips.” It includes a closely cropped and detailed image of a vulva, along with text and graphics related to the ongoing battle over reproductive rights and women’s bodily autonomy. Consider this your invitation, dear reader, to navigate that page in whatever way you must and by marshaling all the creativity that goes into the way you, like so many of us, guide ourselves through the potentially injurious landscape of a world that is still so structured around gender norms and gender-based violence every level.

“Read My Lips” will be familiar to some—so infamous that the mere citation will be enough to call it to mind for many longtime readers of the MRPJ. Published amid the Culture Wars, a scandal centered on “Read My Lips” when the NEA threatened to withdraw funding from Movement Research for using government money for “lobbying.” The direct link between aesthetics and politics instigated government backlash. But that same link also drew outrage from many members of the performance community who considered Issue #3 to be deliberately provoking the so-called “war,” intentionally taking a political position that some worried might comprise future funding of the field. Several editors associated with the production of Issue #3 recall only Bill T. Jones and Arthur Aviles publicly coming to the journal’s defense. The mere fear of retaliation and its easy mutation into a pressure to remain silent remains all too relatable today in what feels like an increasingly regressive and conservative cultural sphere. 

In the thirty-three years since its publication, Issue #3 has developed a patina familiar to many artist-activist histories that are looked upon with romance and nostalgia, often by those for whom that history is only a fantasy (rather than a lived experience). For the current issue, Issue #60, we revisit Issue #3 attempting to move beyond this idealization by engaging critically with the original content. Under the direction of four contributing editors—Amalle Dublon, Kay Gabriel, Keioui Keijaun Thomas, and Anh Vo— we’ve assembled a new body of work by mostly trans and queer artists reflecting on the keyword “gender” and its relation to contemporary performance. Their work moves across multiple genres of writing—from analytic essays to poetry to performance scripts. While gender is a central topic for some, many more of the pieces in Issue #60 approach this keyword obliquely, almost evasively. Overseeing the editorial process, I can’t help but feel this is somehow connected to the punitive relation one nowadays seems to expect will result from direct political speech—as though it were just common sense, as though expecting anything but backlash would be hopelessly naïve. 

Then again, there are more ways to understand what might at first glance seem like a refusal speak to speak to gender directly. Perhaps gender as a concept can only be approached indirectly and in relation to other ways of knowing one’s own body, identity, and their relation to social life. Perhaps it’s a way of defending against the demand to explain again and again the fallacy of gender as a biological binary, which is its own kind of political sabotage, a tactical exhaustion of momentum towards liberation through weaponized ignorance. Certainly, the need to explain how things are can get in the way of imagining how they could be. The works assembled in Issue #60 do both—explicating a contemporary impasse while also theorizing alternatives, opening up to other ways of rehearsing a relationship between gender and contemporary performance of all kinds.  

In that sense, I hope the following triggers something for the reader. Not in the way that word is often associated with a warning but rather with a release, the unleashing of an energy in its full force that exists in the field of contemporary performance and in the fabric of the world around all of us, that existed thirty-three years ago, and has existed and will exist long before/after now. This issue doesn’t follow the line of history: it is not an attempt to ask what has changed, to compare then and now, to comment on the way things have progressed or regression. Issue #3 and Issue #60 fold into one another, part of an ongoing body of work that is bigger than any one image, contribution, or issue could possibly hold.