Sarah Lucas
Self Portrait with Fried Eggs 1996
© Sarah Lucas
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Session 4: You
Cannot Be Serious!: Gender Performance and Queer Authenticity
Speaker: Gavin Butt, Senior Lecturer in Visual
Cultures at Goldsmiths College
Performance has often been approached
as a sign of non-serious or value-less activity in the 20th and
21st century. For instance, in speaking pejoratively of someone
as 'theatrical', we can see how performance is sometimes
associated with a lack of authenticity, in this case by implying
that they are exaggerated or affected, 'too much' to
be taken seriously. Gavin Butt argues that this lack of seriousness
refigures our relationship to so-called serious culture and 'authentic'
acts and expressions. By considering the queer cabaret of New York
duo Kiki and Herb and the pop performance of Antony and the Johnsons,
he explores how such work refashions authentic expression and serious
attention precisely through the supposedly non-serious forms of
hyperbolised performance - of expressly artificial, 'unnatural',
and theatrical forms sex/gender presentation.
Session 4 Webcasts:
Gavin
Butt 56k (Real Media stream)
Gavin
Butt 256k (Real Media stream)
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Suggested Further Reading
- Susan Sontag, 'Notes on Camp',
in A Susan Sontag Reader, Penguin, 1982, pp. 105-119
- Judith Halberstam, 'Drag Kings: Masculinity
and Performance', in Female Masculinities, Duke University
Press, 1998, pp. 231-266
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