Let’s Get Loud!

Clad in a neon yellow and black zebra print form-fitting catsuit and high heels, Ayana Evans cuts a striking figure. Amid a sea of people dressed in more conventional (and less shocking) colorways, her presence as a Black woman registers as an exclamation point, giving us an occasion to think about loudness as a variation of Kate Bornstein’s concept of a “gender troublemaker.” In the 1991 third issue of Movement Research Performance Journal, Caroline Palmer describes Bornstein’s investment in deconstructing gender in relation to famous tricksters, writing, “Bornstein views herself as a sort of gender troublemaker, identifying herself with such characters as the native American trickster coyote and uncle Remus’ brer rabbit whose exploits provide learning experiences for others.” Reading Evans’s public “Operation Catsuit” performances into this lineage by virtue of loudness adds other layers toward thinking about gender, performance, race, and labor.  

By making herself stand out from the crowd, Evans’s performance tableaux produce similar affective dynamics as Kara Walker’s (in)famous silhouettes. Evoking the violent interracial eroticisms of plantation slavery, Walker’s works of intricately cut paper invite viewers to latch onto stereotypes as part of their practice of reading the images. Since the figures are all black, the viewer constructs their own narratives of what they are seeing based on their own projections. Likewise, Evans’s insistence on marking the presence of a Black woman illuminates the projections and fantasies that surround her. In part, I emphasize the “loudness” of Evans’s catsuit because the word highlights the conflation between Black women and noise and Black women with excess (sounds, bodies, desires) more generally. This is not a neutral set of associations, but ones that have been met with the criminalization of behavior and the demand for Black women to be respectable and to take up less space. I am reminded here of the Black women who were escorted from a wine tasting tour by the police for their boisterous conversation.(1) In this way, through their mere existence, Black women already inhabit the position of troublemaker. 

Thinking further with Bornstein, however, we might see Evans’s claiming of loudness (rather than letting it be hurled as an accusation) as its own enactment of “gender trouble.” Beyond her catsuit, Evans’s performances make unsubtle demands for attention. The ongoing set of performances that comprise “Operation Catsuit” find Evans performing acts of endurance, doing jumping jacks or chair dips, for example, or interacting with strangers in public. In each of these actions, Evans refuses to mute herself and instead demands that she be seen and interacted with  —  not as spectacle, but as person in the world. For Catsuit Gardening, a 2017 performance, Evans wore her catsuit to garden in the Bronx, handing out tiaras and neon feather boas while pruning plants, digging in the dirt, and chatting. In this performance of relaxation and connection with the earth and community, Evans tends to her own joy. 

Evans describes this form of speaking for herself as a necessity in an interview with the New York Times. She says, “Especially for the femme-presenting people in the audience, I was like, ‘People don’t expect you to ask for what you need, and I’m here screaming for it in front of you. Take that with you, remember that, because sometimes you need to demand what you need.’”(2) In Evans’s telling, being loud is actually part of the labor of femininity in that it redistributes resources (of attention and material) to those who are often overlooked. Here, hypervisibility blinds others to actual desires and needs. Being loud, however, is just one component of the labor of Black femininity that Evans makes visible. The catsuit’s non-casualness is complemented by make-up and hair, which are part of the spectacle that Evans is producing, but which are also part of the labor of gender. This is especially apparent when make-up runs and hair shifts during the durative aspects of the performance. In an acknowledgment of this, Evans describes the ways that her sartorial choices play into this aspect of her performances. Referring to herself in the third person, she writes: “Evans frequently performs in high heels and an eye-catching outfit to represent the perseverance needed to be a woman in this world (and look good while doing it.) Humor, longing, pain, and endurance blend in her performance art while notions of social judgment, and claiming/taking up space are recurring themes in her work.” (3) By showing her work, Evans is making a comment on the work that Black women perform (and, for her, in heels!) and the work of gender itself.  

It is this foregrounding of Black femme labor that gets at the heart of the matter. Not only does it emphasize the additional effort Black femmes undertake to navigate the world, but Evans shows the effects of this labor by allowing us to see her fatigue and sweat. Further, by asking us to look at what happens when things come a little undone, when one is exhausted, Evans breaks the tacit social contract that gender performance is effortless, a cornerstone of “cis normativity.” Evans’s focus on labor also initiates questions of the material dimensions of gender. What are the objects — catsuit, heels, make-up, tiara — that make femininity apparent? These material questions are not just about the work put into adding these items to the body, but their material costs as well. How do these questions of effort map onto current valorizations of “quiet” luxury, which contrasts with Evans’ performance of “loud” gender? Evans’ reminder insists that gender takes work and performs work complicates much, making us aware not only of the labor of appearing feminine but also the ways that all gender requires work — a message very much connected to Bornstein’s discussion of troubling gender itself.