Issue #03
Fall 1991
Gender Performance
This journal takes as its point of departure a vision of troubled gender of gender disarray (if you will ) as it is mapped out in contemporary visual and written work. Rigid cultural assumptions about sexuality and gender are under attack in both dominant and emergent culture reflecting the war that continues to be waged over control and surveillance of the individual and collective body. Both pop cultural expressions and much recent artwork debates and challenges unified notions of identity as they are based in gender, class, race, and sexuality (to recite the well-worn mantra). This challenging collection of work invites an expanded consideration of both "gender" and "performance," spotlighting, among other things, the artifice of "normality” and the seriousness of affectation.
Editorial team
Contributing Editor
Tom Kalin - Cathy Edwards - Guy Yarden
Ad Layout
Christopher Caines
Design
Tom Kalin
Assistant Editor
Jaime Ortega - Carolyn McCrory
Articles
Gender Performance
Discusses the theme of "gender disarray" and how contemporary cultural and artistic works challenge traditional notions of identity, gender, and sexuality.
Update from Movement Research
Movement Research has its roots in the Judson Church movement of the 1960s, which generated new and different kinds of dance. In 1978 the artists who founded MR established it...
How Dance Artists & Critics Define Dance as Political
A survey of contemporary dance criticism, "reading the lines and between the lines," for the gender politics inherent to contemporary dance discourse.
May Interviews June
An interview between the main characters in Peggy Shaw and Lois Weavers' work in process "Lesbians Who Kill" (1992).
World’s Greatest Cocksucker
My intention in researching the gender community (transvestites, cross-dressers, transgenderists, and transsexuals), is not to make sense of it, but rather to disturb current models and categories of sexuality; gay...
Read My Lips Before They’re Sealed
Media work by GANG, demanding to reverse Supreme Court's ban on abortion.
The Dawns We Shanghied in Each Other’s Arms, Exhausted
Combination stench of darkness, silt. Pious mob hysteria. The faraway voice of my mother screaming, "Lazarus ... Lazarus! ... " Her ears dripping into the soaked rag she uses to...
Vicki and Daphne
Being given a lover's key is an intimate gesture: without it one can figure what course the relationship will take; with it, trust is a temptation. Blood of the cut...
Crash Body in Three Performative Fragments
Analyzes the transition from physical to digital activism. Advocates for disrupting systems of power through performance and media art, emphasizing the evolving role of resistance in a networked society.
Untitled
Donald Woods writes about gender and aging through an encounter of viewing a woman through his sixth floor window.
She Killed A Deer
Before the word “fag” turned sour in my mouth, I had dreams of girls turning into boys beneath a pillow whose fabric blurred into a kiss. A woman's face would...
Gender Dismember: An Interview with Kate Bornstein
Kate Bornstein shares her thoughts and theories on gender and gender expansiveness in an interview with Caroline Palmer. Bornstein speaks on how gender plays into her writing and performance work,...
In Praise of Drag
John Kelly reflects on early memories of gender and drag expression; returning constantly to both inward and outer expressions as he shares and describes his experiences in and of his...