Cruising the Performative: Interventions Into the Representation of Ethnicity, Nationality, and Sexuality (Unnatural Acts)

"Cruising the Performative" explores those social codes that regulate performativity, that constitutes 'performance' and 'performer.' These essays offer expansive new concepts of performance: Ellen Brinks on issues of class identity acted out in the film "Single White Female"; Cynthia Fuchs on the cultural anxieties over race and sex embodied in Michael Jackson; Ellis Hanson on our modern obsession with the telephone; Ricardo Ortiz staging an alternative reading of John Rechy's 'pornographic' textual effects; and Richard Rambuss on the homodevotional orientation of metaphysical poetry. Essays on 'inter-national' subjects include Katrin Sieg on the socialist and anti-class ideology that enforced homophobia in the German Democratic Republic; Parama Roy's analysis of the gender politics of 'master' and 'disciple'; Marta Savigliano's tango with postmodernist strategies exported to the 'Third World'; and Jennifer DeVere Brody on ethnic and sexual 'passing.' Essays on notions of community and performance include Brian Currid on the 'house music' of gay bars; Michael Davidson on the Black Mountain poetry movement and its exclusion of gays and women; Jane C. Desmond on Sea World's Shamu; and Michael McClellan on elephants and musical performance during the French Revolution. This collection crosses the boundaries set by cultural practice around performance, addressing issues of communal identity, its fragility and transitoriness, as well as its endurance.