퍼포먼스 트러블: 퀴어적 전환과 퀴어 공연미학

Abstract

This article’s aim is to examine the aesthetics of queer performance ring under a new paradigm of queer turn and suggest the concept of ‘performance trouble’ for the politics of identification figured by the aesthetics. Queer can be defined as an umbrella term for abnormal sexuality, bodies and positions of desiring subjects. To the end, this paper deals with the works of the third Queer Theatre Festival such as The Salon of Freedom, Hongen Villa, one of the first Feminism Theatre Festival, Art Theatre of Miari Hill, and drag queen performance in transgender bar in Itaewon. The trend of queer studies attempts to eliminate the distintion between sex and gender, focus on sexuality, and foreground the unstable identification. Because of these points, it is different from feminism studies that emphasizes masculinity and feminity as categories of a historical analysis and understanding tool or gay-lesbian studies that stresses sexuality, nevertheless, pays attention to establishing the identification of homosexualist. In Queer Theatre Festival, queers become actors and audiences. They form their own solidarity community, stage their respective performances, and see the theatrical works together. They seem to build their own small exclusive community for the theatres. Therefore, in terms of aesthetics, the Festival seeks to perform outside belonging for those who could not belong to any territory of normal heterosexuality. However, Art Theatre of Miari Hill tries to describe that, in the world of regarding heterosexuality as normal, they could not have their own house where they dwell comfortably. They are here, at the same time, they momentarily haunt there as ghost. Hence, their bodies suffer from the loss of sense of direction, orientation, and place. The body of dragqueen is a man’s and woman’s body. His body spans from a reading body as a man’s body and a read body as a woman’s body. This drag body displays the unstability implicit in gender representation. In patriarchal system, it is very difficult for one man not to appear as a man. Also, for him not to do behaviors of manliness causes him many dangers. As a result, we can observe the aspects of a pitiable victim, resentful shaman and collapsed angel from the drag queen who wear female clothes, despite of the risks and damages. Gender trouble can be explained as a trial for questioning a solid identification conventionalized through heterosexual normativity. Thus, gender trouble links to that gender slips into queer, that is, to denaturalize the heterosexually repeated bodies’ styles via abnormal sexual practices. However, theatrical stages should be requested to complete another fortuitous aspects of this repetitive bodily practices in the historical accumulated situation. In sum, if gender trouble is queer practice, it is another name of performance trouble. relevant to theatrical behaviors. The deconstruction of gender identification with gender trouble, performance trouble does not mean to negate the politics of gender. Rather, the perspective of the deconstruction of identification triggers to establish the politics of gender practice, because ender trouble, performance trouble testify that our world consist of the flexible border that the familiar heterosexuality and the strange queer sexuality. Thus, the aesthetics of queer performance becomes the politics of it with dissensus tracing the redistribution of heterogeneous senses.