Acting Queer: Gender Dissidence and the Subversion of Realism [1 ed.] 9783030293178, 9783030293185

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Acting Queer Gender Dissidence and the Subversion of Realism

Conrad Alexandrowicz

Acting Queer

“This rich and stimulating volume is an absolute must-read for any actor trainer working today. Alexandrowicz provides rigorous, compelling and accessible analysis of how to understand and negotiate questions of gender, identity, and power in teaching studios and in the creative process. Theoretically sound and practically oriented, this book is essential and timely reading.” —Dr David Fancy, Professor, Department of Dramatic Arts, Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts, Brock University

Conrad Alexandrowicz

Acting Queer Gender Dissidence and the Subversion of Realism

Conrad Alexandrowicz University of Victoria Victoria, BC, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-29317-8    ISBN 978-3-030-29318-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29318-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The idea for this book arrived as the result of a series of conference proceedings on matters concerning actor training in Canada. I thank those individuals who invited me to participate in the first of these conversations, including Diana Belshaw, Dr Virginie Magnat, and Dr David Fancy, who also assisted with valuable support and feedback on the book. I also thank the other individuals who participated in these round tables with me. I first explored these subject areas in an article entitled “‘StraightLooking, Straight-Acting’: Countering Effemiphobia in Acting Training,” published in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Volume 8, Number 1, March 2017. ©Taylor & Francis, available online: https:// doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2016.1246381 I received support and useful advice from Dr Allana Lindgren, who was Chair of the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria during the time I was developing the manuscript. I am grateful to Dr Aaron Devor for his time and insights. My friend and colleague Sandra Guerreiro also offered me useful advice and welcome encouragement. And finally, thanks to my students, whose work regularly inspires me, and from whom I continue to learn. This book is dedicated to young actors and their teachers, who together are finding their way forward. And to the memory of Kim Renders (1955–2018), fast friend and frequent collaborator, fearless actor and theatre-maker, and wise and compassionate teacher. “I want everyone to have the chance to tell their story.”

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Contents

1 Introduction: Why Write This Book Now?  1 2 ‘You’re Soaking in It’: The Socio-Cultural Bath 27 3 The Influence of Hollywood 49 4 Gender Dissidence 73 5 Gendered Movement and ‘Physical’ Acting113 6 ‘Queer-Looking, Queer-Acting’: The Subversion of Realism141 7 Acting Queer Ecology: Extensions and Excursions167 Works Cited191 Index205

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About the Author

Conrad Alexandrowicz  holds a BFA in Dance and an MFA in Theatre (Directing). Over a decades-long career in performance he migrated from dance to theatre, and has been a dancer, choreographer, writer of texts for dance, a playwright, actor and director. For many years he was the artistic director of Wild Excursions Performance, the company he founded to present his work. To date he has created over fifty dance- and physicaltheatre works, some of which have been presented across Canada, in New York City, France and the U.K. An associate professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria, he specializes in movement for actors and physical theatre creation, and continues his explorations into that mysterious territory where movement and text overlap. His writing has been published in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, the Canadian Journal for Practice-Based Research in Theatre, Studies in Theatre and Performance, and Objectives, Obstacles, and Tactics in Practice: Perspectives on Activating the Actor. He is currently developing a co-edited collection of essays and other interventions on the topic of reimagining theatre education in response to the climate crisis.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Why Write This Book Now?

In act three, scene five of Tony Kushner’s Perestroika, the second play of the Angels in America diptych, there is the following extraordinary exchange between Belize, the African-American nurse and erstwhile drag queen, and his patient Roy Cohn, the ferocious Republican lawyer, mover and shaker, now in the final stages of AIDS:       Belize: And everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion.      (Roy laughs softly, delighted.)       Belize: And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers.      (Roy laughs again.)       Belize: Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain’t there.      Roy: And Heaven?      Belize: That was Heaven, Roy.      Roy: The fuck it was. (76)

One’s notions of heaven and hell are clearly matters of perspective: for Belize, aka, Norman Arriaga, gay and often flamboyantly feminine, gender confusion is a function and feature of godliness, while for Roy Cohn, deeply closeted, profoundly racist and sexist and aggressively masculine, it’s a hellish nightmare. That such deep divisions represent moral, ­political, © The Author(s) 2020 C. Alexandrowicz, Acting Queer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29318-5_1

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and aesthetic codes worth fighting and dying for is evidenced by thousands of years of oppression, strife, and violence, often lethal, that has arisen from conflicts over matters of race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender, the core building blocks of subjectivity. These are, of course, fundamental categories of being: what is the first question we ask on hearing of the birth of a baby? I am a gay, white, natal male, able-bodied, middle-aged theatre artist and academic who has no experience whatsoever of many forms of discrimination, such as those suffered by members of racialised minorities. However, growing up as a queer child and youth in Canada in the 1960s entailed a powerful shaping of the psyche. My recollections of those painful years chime consistently with the pioneering work of various scholars in the area of queer studies, which I acknowledge and with which I engage in this book. “Ideas are not bloodless,” proclaimed a memorable professor of mine from my undergraduate years. It is thanks to the work of scholars such as Judith Butler, David Halperin, D.A.  Miller, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick that I am able to make sense of my experience—to rescue it from chaos and accident, and to connect it to larger spheres of consideration. With scarcely a word being uttered on the subject, it was nonetheless thoroughly understood in my childhood and youth that being a homosexual was among the worst misfortunes that could befall one, so thoroughly binarised were gender expressions in the social world of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, in the 1960s. It was an ‘open secret,’ as anatomised by D.A. Miller in his essay on Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, a paradoxical condition of simultaneous knowing and unknowing: “one couldn’t be sure whether homosexuality was being meant at all, but on the chance it was, one also learned, along with the codes that might be conveying it, the silence necessary to keep about their deployment” (125). As Foucault claimed, regarding the nature of silence, “there is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; … There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses” (27). In Ottawa in the 1960s, most gay and lesbian people were, I believe it is safe to say, locked firmly in the closet. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick noted that this condition itself necessitates a kind of “performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence” (3). Diana Fuss wrote, in her introduction to Inside/Outside: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, published one year after Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, “any identity is founded relationally, constituted

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in reference to an exterior or outside that defines the subject’s own interior boundaries” (2). The paradox of this condition is that any articulation—never mind enforcement—of reliable boundaries in such matters is doomed to failure: “The homo in relation to the hetero, much like the feminine in relation to the masculine, operates as an indispensable interior exclusion … a transgression of the border which is necessary to constitute the border as such” (3, emphasis added). Heterosexuality and homosexuality thus mutually and internally demarcate and exclude one another; the latter is the shadow of the former, the reverse to its obverse, proscribed, forbidden, existing only as a dark, fleeting ripple, barely breaking the surface of consciousness. Perhaps every exploration of an artistic discipline, including its pedagogy, requires one to do some basic groundwork in philosophy. In order to frame this condition, wherein a set of social codes is both made possible and enforced by means of its implied opposite, one invokes metaphysics, “the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things or reality, including questions about being, substance, time and space, causation, change, and identity” (“Metaphysics”), and that may be traced all the way back to Plato. Much closer to our own time one encounters theorising on this subject by such figures as linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure and philosopher Jacques Derrida. According to Saussure, “the units of language have value or meaning only in terms of opposition to another unit; each unit is defined against what it is not” (115). However, in Margins of Philosophy, Derrida argued that “an opposition of metaphysical concepts (speech/writing, presence/absence, etc.) is never the face-to-­ face of two terms, but a hierarchy and an order of subordination” (195). Homosexuality is thus not merely the opposite term of heterosexuality, but the negative by means of which it is in part defined, its subordinate and proscribed reversal. Like every other work on matters concerning sex and gender, this one is consistently informed by the foundational work of Judith Butler, who proposed in Gender Trouble that in a regime of compulsory heterosexuality, gender and desire must line up in a coherent relationship of causality, where the first term produces and necessitates the second, and the second the third (30–31). In the tyranny of this system, one can not only not be ‘masculine’ if one is not heterosexual; one’s claim to being ‘male’ is itself in doubt. (It is important to note in passing that the concept of gender to refer to a psychological construct distinct from biological sex was

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‘invented’—as Terry Goldie argues—by controversial psychologist and sexologist John Money [6].) While this is not a work of ‘auto-ethnography,’ I need to note the visceral investment I have in this project. I spent many hours in high school classrooms trying to concentrate on the subject matter at hand while being assailed by paralysing thoughts: why had this devastating fate befallen me? I recall having the impression that a huge boulder—an asteroid, I suppose—had plummeted from the sky and crushed the work in progress, so recently begun, that was the framework of my life. It all seemed enormously unfair. I could see nothing but darkness ahead and made a pact with myself: if I could not somehow become ‘normally’ heterosexual I would commit suicide. In one memorable conversation with my distressed parents, I tearfully demanded to see a psychiatrist. I remember that our family doctor, who had to refer me to a specialist, actually said that there was probably nothing to worry about, that these irregularities were the result of the ‘chemical imbalances associated with puberty.’ (Every cliché it seems has its basis in the actual uses of language.) The psychiatrist to whom I was referred, of a Neo-Freudian persuasion, concurred with my fifteen-year-old self that homosexuality was a serious aberration, but he believed that it might be a curable condition. I recall that in some of the conversations we had—alarming and lamentable in retrospect—I tried to frame a different view of the matter. When I proposed at one point that, when it came down to it, it didn’t matter whom one loved, anticipating one of the slogans of the marriage equality movement, ‘Love is Love,’ the good doctor emphatically disagreed, and stated plainly that homosexuality was—and I recall these were his exact words—“psychologically destructive.” My early experiences with discovering the predictable consequences of my sexual and affective preference, and with my proscribed psychosexual identity in general, marked me indelibly, like many others of my generation. In addition to a personal investment in this topic, I have considerable experience of and interest in matters of gender-based difference and bias, having spent my career in the realms of professional dance and theatre, as a dancer, choreographer, and maker and performer of ‘physical theatre,’ writer and director, in which themes of gay identity and sexuality, in particular in response to the AIDS epidemic, were frequently addressed. Wild Excursions Performance, the company I founded in 1995 and of which I was artistic director for many years, described itself by means of this mission statement:

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Our productions address subjects that are central to the human journey: issues of relationship, gender and power, and the nature of the performance event itself. They often address issues of relevance to a particular constituency, the community of gay men. The company’s work is often subversive, interrogating conventional theatrical procedures and forms. These include works that are dance-based but make significant use of theatrical elements; works that are theatre-based but contain significant movement or other non-naturalistic components; and works adapted from the standard play repertoire and staged in innovative ways. The company employs dancers and/or actors, depending on the nature of the creative project. (Alexandrowicz, About Us)

And since the early 2000s, I have worked in the academy as an instructor in the problematic pedagogical area called ‘movement for actors.’ I became a faculty member in the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria, in Victoria, BC, Canada, in 2008, and an associate professor in 2014. Hence the particular and personal investment I have in this topic, which led me to the writing of this book, in which I explore the troubled and intriguing subject area where matters of sex and gender emerge within the discourses that comprise the training of actors in post-secondary education.

‘Straight-Looking, Straight-Acting’ This book originated in the research for and writing of an article entitled “Straight-Looking, Straight-Acting: Countering Effemiphobia in Acting Training,” which appeared in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training in March 2017. It focused on the predicament of the ‘effeminate’ actor in North American training for theatre, film, and television. I argued that addressing this problem in a meaningful way would entail radical transformations in our approach to the training of actors, and, by extension, in the way we engage with the art of theatre in department productions. I speculated about how such transformations in training might produce reverberations in the way our graduates go on to practise theatre, and to make particular demands on the theatre culture into which they were attempting to insert themselves. But in the course of developing this essay, it became clear to me that its topic was much larger than what I could shoehorn into that journal’s word limit. What about female actors who are lesbian and cannot convincingly

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portray the terms of conventionally configured ‘femininity’? What about trans actors? What about actors of any sexual orientation or self-­ identification who, due to whatever incongruent markers of gender, are perceived as ‘difficult cases’ within the regimes of post-secondary theatre education? And should I not consider the whole social stew in which this set of linked topics is cooking? Hence the need to expand the project to book-length. However, one might ask: why write this book now, when so many extraordinary gains have been made, when the number of countries in which same-sex marriage is legal is nearing thirty?1 When there are scores of gay politicians and other high-profile public figures?2 As I will have cause to note more than once, it is important to keep in mind that this topic is replete with complications and contradictions. For example, Boys Don’t Cry, released in March 2000, was a hugely successful film, grossing US$11,533,945 by 19 May 2000,3 although the star who won an Oscar for it is not a trans man.4 One might say we have made some progress since that film was made: the transgender character in the highly successful television show Orange Is the New Black is played by actor Laverne Cox, who is a trans woman.5 Transparent is an Emmy Award–winning television series, dating from 2014, which focuses on a Los Angeles family in which the father is transgender.6 There have been many high-profile cases of people making this radical transition, such as those of Caitlin Jenner and Chelsea Manning. However, either because of or despite the fact that transgender people seem to be coming out with increasing frequency, they continue to suffer dire discrimination, including sometimes lethal violence. Or else they internalise this violence: a 2017 British Columbia study found that “65% of transgender 14- to 18-year-olds seriously considered 1  On 1 January 2019, Austria became the latest country to legalise same-sex marriage: https://www.theguardian.pe.ca/news/regional/austrian-court-rules-that-same-sex-couples-can-marry-167491/ (accessed 11 March 2019). 2  See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/14/leo-varadkar-formally-electedas-prime-minister-of-ireland (accessed 5 July 2017). 3  See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0171804/ (accessed 5 September 2016). 4  Hilary Swank did a magnificent job with the role of Brandon Teena, winning an Oscar for her performance, and while the main argument of this book is that competent actors of any and all demographic features ought to be able to play the widest possible range of roles, attempts to redress discriminatory patterns must be carefully considered. There is much more to be said on this topic in subsequent chapters. 5  See https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1209545/ (accessed 6 September 2016). 6  See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3502262/ (accessed 6 September 2016).

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suicide in the past year compared with 13% in the BC Adolescent Health Survey” (Veale et al. 44). These observations are made solely with reference to the North American situation: in ten countries around the world, homosexuality is still punishable by death.7 One step down from this in terms of levels of extremity is the appalling predicament of gay men in Iran, who are either coerced into marrying women or who may be pressured into having sex reassignment surgery.8 In what I must refer to unreliably as ‘the West,’ by which I mean, roughly speaking, the countries of the European Union, those of the British Isles, Australia and North America, we are relatively privileged in very many things, including in the area of tolerance for gender-based differences. But to me this is simply one way of saying that on a continuum of bias, discrimination, and violence, we are at the end where one is less likely to lose one’s job, dwelling, family members, or life, than at the other. As noted earlier, same-sex marriage is now legal in a multitude of countries. But de jure and de facto are terms clearly distinguished in legal discourse9: what is framed in law is not guaranteed on the street, or in any other social space one cares to name. Laws notwithstanding, I suggest that North American society is not much less divided on the subject of gender—and the relative values of gender confusion, to quote the character Belize—than it was in the early 1990s, when Kushner’s visionary, prize-­ winning plays were published and were being performed around the world. And, as Jill Dolan observes in Theatre and Sexuality, “presuming the power of ‘arrival’ can be a trap … Political history demonstrates how easy it is for dominant culture to backslide into normativity as its default mode” (82–83). Who knows what is to come?

Aren’t We There Yet? Let us imagine that in the spring of ______, when auditions are typically held for university acting programmes, a young woman, in a medium-­ sized city somewhere in the US or Canada, had just completed her ­monologue, sample scene, and interview for a place in such a programme. 7  See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/06/13/here-arethe-10-countries-wher e-homosexuality-may-be-punished-by-death-2/?utm_ term=.07a7ce9bcfe0 (accessed 7 July 2017). 8  See http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29832690 (accessed 7 July 2017). 9  See https://onlinelaw.wustl.edu/blog/legal-english-de-factode-jure/ (accessed 7 July 2017).

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The members of the audition committee, composed of acting, voice, and movement instructors, those also responsible for directing department productions, concurred that, while she clearly possessed ability, drive, potential, and a keen sense of ensemble, they would have to decline her application. ‘How do you cast someone like that?’ one of them asked rhetorically, as the others nodded regretfully. What they were really thinking—but what no one actually said—was that she failed to perform successfully those socially sanctioned features of ‘femininity’ that we are supposed to find reassuring; that, to use the vernacular, she was butch; too butch to play Juliet, for example, a kind of litmus test of requisite femininity in terms of casting. If the applicant had been a young man, equally dissident in gender terms, they would have said he was effeminate, a thoroughly pejorative term that, as Ramsay Burt has observed, is a code word for homosexual, and that “has often been used against gay men in a derogatory and injurious way to suggest their failure to behave like proper men” (12). What reasons might be given to these young actors regarding the failure of their applications? Perhaps they would intuit its actual reasons, given the frequency of such discrimination in their experience. Or, as in cases with which I have been acquainted, such students might be accepted into acting programmes only to find that they are indeed ‘hard to cast,’ given the realist paradigm that governs much, if not most, post-secondary approaches to theatre. What to do with them? It never seems to occur to performance faculty to review and reconsider the strategies of representation themselves, rather than the matter of ‘problem’ actors. And that, essentially, is the task I have set for myself here—to attempt to answer some of those fundamental journalistic questions: who, what, why, and how.10 Who gets to be an actor? How ought we to engage with their training? Of what will such training consist, and to what goal will it lead? How will it denominate with or disrupt the what of contemporary theatre practice? Why are we doing theatre at all in the midst of a digitised mass culture that seems to point at theatre’s irrelevance? It is my own humble contribution to an accumulating critique not only of theatre pedagogy, but of theatre practice itself, that uses the predicament of the gender dissident actor—please see below for a consideration of lexical choices—as a point of departure. 10  Who, what, when, where, why, and how—W5 + H—have been attributed to the English rhetorician Thomas Wilson (1524–1581). See http://www.people.vcu.edu/~nsharp/ wilsint1.htm (accessed 22 March 2019).

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In this book, I argue that, despite the aforementioned social and legal gains made on behalf of various sexual minorities, discrimination with reference to gender dissident student actors is alive and well and operating in the training institutions that feed professional theatre, film, and television in Canada and the US. I focus on the English-speaking North American context, acknowledging but putting aside for the moment the sometimes subtle and sometimes radical cultural differences between Canada and the US, as that is the geographical limit with which I am familiar. (I make the language distinction because I do not want to lump Quebec into the picture, a move that would ignore its particular history and culture. I note the contributions of Quebec’s distinct theatrical expression in Chap. 6.) I propose that university theatre departments are, to greater or lesser degrees, engaged in the practice of reinforcing normative performances of gender, valorising a presentation which accords with current conventional constructions of the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.’ This discrimination is pervasive, largely unquestioned, and expresses itself in every detail of the culture of theatre departments, from the candidates who audition for acting programmes, to the way students are evaluated, to the selection of plays and the assignment of roles. Do I overstate my case? Perhaps. But, as David Eulus Wiles argues in Beyond Race and Gender: Reframing Diversity in Actor-Training Programs, university theatre departments have understood their commitment to diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality, and sexual orientation, while at the same time continuing to use and validate the norms of the commercial world of theatre, film and television when it comes to ways actors are ‘supposed’ to look and present themselves. (123)

In this work I am concerned in part with the relationship of influence that operates between film and television on the one hand and theatre on the other. As I will argue further the practices and attitudes that govern the film and television industries exert a powerful influence on the way we train actors for theatre, even though the latter art form need not abide by the terms of the kind of photographic realism in which cinema has historically been—and continues to be—invested. And this is the second reason why my focus is on the North American scene, where I believe that this pattern is especially prevalent. Young, queer, Toronto-based theatre artist and filmmaker Jordan Tannahill has this to report about the state of gender relations in North

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American society in the early years of the twenty-first century: “I turn heads in small towns with my limp wrists and sibilant s’s. Groups of bros shout ‘Faggot!’ at me out their car windows. My inability to conform to gender norms has subjected me to violence, which demonstrates to me the continued necessity of these subversions” (121–122). My concern in writing this book is that while yelling slurs at gender dissident individuals is less likely to occur in university settings, the animosity contained in such overt actions may abide silently and may exercise harmful effects that are even harder to address precisely because they are hidden from collective view. I aim to identify and anatomise these patterns of discrimination as they apply to gender presentation, and to point to specific pedagogical approaches that may offer a set of remedies to them. I teach actors in the sub-discipline of acting training commonly called ‘movement,’ a field that is particularly revealing of the features of gender inscription. As Simon Murray and John Keefe have written, “an understanding of gender as something ‘made,’ mutable, produced and performed through relationships of power is a particularly salient paradigm for physical theatre practices to play with and make strange” (29). I am offered a particularly revealing view of this matter for, as Ramsay Burt observes, “it is through our bodies that we are allocated our gender” (6). As a consequence of this I focus on the ways that physically based approaches to acting training can provide a set of tools to counter discriminatory patterns, and thereby support actors of diverse gender expression. And ‘training’ includes, most particularly, the performance activity that theatre departments present to the public. I argue that the paradigm of psychological realism, which continues to exert a powerful influence on the way we practise theatre in North America, simply perpetuates the exclusion and/or ghettoisation of gender dissident actors. Judith Butler wonders, “what kinds of cultural practices produce subversive discontinuity and dissonance among sex, gender, and desire and call into question their alleged relations?” (Gender Trouble… xxx). My desire in writing this book is that we make acting training one of these cultural practices: I propose that as part of our pedagogical practice we embrace a revivified, reinvented version of the approaches of Bertolt Brecht, one informed by the contributions of feminist scholars such as Elin Diamond and Jill Dolan, as well as the performance theory of Richard Schechner. (I note a paradox here: my subject is particularly volatile since it is concerned with the ‘liveness’ of cultural practices, its shifts occurring with the accelerations afforded by digital media, and therefore I have been at pains

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to find the most current sources with which to engage. But much of the work of the theorists to which I refer dates from the latter decades of the last century. My rationale for these choices is that such work, much of it activist in nature, either has not been superseded or has not been widely realised and tested.) This book emerges from new platforms for discussion that have been established in recent years among theatre educators at universities across Canada and in the US round-tables on the politics of actor training took place at the annual conferences of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research between 2012 and 2016. In March 2015, I organised a national symposium on actor training, which included more than thirty acting teachers from universities and conservatories across Canada, in which ‘diversity’ was our keyword: of race, gender, ability, aesthetic position, and pedagogical approach. But the individuals who launched these discussions began their work some years before, at the 2011 iteration of the now-­ defunct Magnetic North Theatre Festival in the nation’s capital. The Fall 2014 issue of Canadian Theatre Review was given over to matters of actor training, and included edited transcripts of the Magnetic North seminars and round-tables, and included the following in its summary article: Actor-training programs have an ethical and professional obligation to create training spaces that permit the exploration and promotion of gender diversity. While training must at once recognize and explore the reality and effects on actors’ bodies/minds of current fixed and binarized notions of gender circulating in the dominant culture, providing students with the opportunity to move away from the simple re-inscription of patriarchal norms in the exploration of character is essential. Cultivating solidarities with gender-diverse performers, theorists, and playwrights dealing with these issues can provide useful ways forward in this area. (Belshaw and Fancy 44)

This provocation is at the heart of my objectives in writing this book. Radical re-considerations of post-secondary theatre education—discussions about what we are teaching, how, to whom and for what purposes— have been underway for many years in the US. A landmark volume in this subject area is The Politics of American Actor Training, whose co-editors, Ellen Margolis and Lissa Taylor Renaud, recall that the book had its origins in a panel session at the 2004 Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) conference in Toronto (1). A number of these essays

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are of particular interest. To cite Wiles again: “It is in the selection of students for training, and the training of students … that a deeply problematic set of practices concerned with physical appearance and self-presentation … have taken root and continue to dominate decision-making” (127). Such biases are at odds with the values and precepts of the academy in the twenty-first century. How can we discriminate against student actors who deviate from the codes of normative gender presentation while operating within institutions that explicitly forbid discrimination of all kinds? Gender-based bias is actualised through three linked functions which have been operating for decades within both the professional theatre and the pedagogical regimes that feed and support it. I believe that they remain operative within institutional bodies, even though they may be concealed by words and gestures that, in response to the shifting social and legal terrain, seem to acknowledge, support, and promote gender diversity: First, in a patriarchal, heterosexist culture, the bias against ‘gender dissidence’ is magnified in the intense scrutiny that is placed on the performing body: the actor is inescapably an eroticised object in the gaze of the audience, and is required to purvey heteronormative gender performances in order to vindicate mainstream definitions of attractiveness, glamour, and success. Second, gender dissident narratives and characters have historically been suppressed, marginalised, or erased because of their power to disturb, destabilise, and subvert hegemonic ideas about the ways that gender ought to cohere with sex. By means of this logic, actors whose sex and gender presentation are incongruent are superfluous: they have no stories to embody, because the only stories they could embody are proscribed, according to the precepts of heteronormativity and heterosexism. The irony of this, as Jill Dolan points out, is that although “it has provided refuge for people who deviate from heterosexual norms, theatre has also long been a site for dominant cultures to … censor representations that suggested relationships or characters that weren’t staunchly heterosexual” (Theatre and Sexuality 5–6). While this has begun to shift in significant ways—into which I delve below—I believe that conventional notions about whose story may assume centrality, and who may play certain roles, remain stubbornly in place. Third—and most important in terms of my argument—because of our profound fealty to psychological realism in the marketplace of representations, we cannot imagine performers playing roles to which they do not correspond point for point. We are still very much in the grip of the notion

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that actors are either ‘right for the part,’ or not, and abide by the terms of a process whereby the character is laminated to the body of the actor, a core belief and practice in film and television. As I argue in the pages that follow, the notion that the gap between the two might be both a source of aesthetic pleasure, as well as forming the primary driver of representational strategy itself, is a minority viewpoint. Therefore, young actors-in-training who are unable to be consistently convincing in terms of their gender expression are likely to selected out—or to select themselves out—of recruitment for acting programmes and casting procedures for the plays that form the seasons of post-secondary theatre programmes. Despite the fact that matters of pedagogy are of significance to a growing body of instructors, who may also be writers, one cannot fail to note the relative lack of peer-reviewed scholarship about them. The September 2015 issue of Theatre Topics was devoted to “theatre and/as education,” for which Matt Omasta and Drew Chappell contributed “Theatre Education in the Academy: Major Impacts of Minor Differences.” While this is a cognate area—it is concerned mainly with drama instruction in elementary and secondary schools—I believe it has bearing on my subject. It points to a bias in favour of practice, both historical and contemporary, and against the pedagogy that makes practice possible. In this article they report the results of a survey they conducted regarding the disposition of leading journals towards subject matter related to pedagogy: We (the authors of this essay) reviewed all articled published in the official journals of the American Society for Theatre Research and Association for Theatre in Higher Education (Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey and Theatre Topics) [from 2012] up through early 2015. We could not locate any references to K-12 theatre education in TJ or TS; several articles discussing theatre pedagogy in higher education contexts appeared in TT, but only two discussed theatre with young people, and both of these were applied theatre projects outside of school contexts. (189)

While a number of journals officially welcome submissions on topics of performance pedagogy, there is only one in English that is dedicated to it, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, based in the UK. It is ­curious— and many would say unfortunate—that the theatre academy pays such scant attention in the way of research to matters of pedagogy when, as Alison Hodge observes, “the centrality of actor training is evidenced by the fact that many of the innovators in this field have been responsible for

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both unique training techniques and for some of the landmark theatre productions of the twentieth century” (1). The celebrated makers of the twentieth century—all male, of course—were also some of its greatest pedagogues: Stanislavski, Chekhov, Meyerhold, Copeau, Grotowski, and Brecht. If we attend to critical problems in the way theatre is taught and practised in educational contexts we cannot but exert effects, albeit hard to measure, on the professional practice of the art form, and the culture of which it is a part. That pedagogy leads to and is a model for practice is literally true, given that production is both part of our pedagogical plan and its culmination. But it is valid in a more subtle and pervasive sense: what we teach, and therefore what our students explore, create, and embody is profoundly inscribed in their bodies and souls. They will go on to be the actors, playwrights, designers, and directors of the future, as well as those who combine or defy those conventional descriptors. They will also be the critics, scholars, and members of the audience for theatre and performance. Therefore, while I will focus largely on matters of training, I will have reason to extend my observations to the professional practice of theatre, as training and practice are vitally linked; they are essentially situated on the same social field.

“Words, Words, Words”: Some Attempts at Definition Having laid out the basic terms of my argument I must now retrace my steps and engage in the usual difficult attempt to clarify, as writers in these topic areas must, decisions made regarding lexical choices. One must acknowledge the extraordinary difficulty of deploying language accurately and appropriately in this discussion, given that one is attempting to plant flags on shifting ground. One must lay down all the caveats that seem to apply and hope for readers’ indulgence, given that the intention was to be both specific and respectful. The most salient of these terms is gender, or rather gender versus sex, a conundrum that must be considered carefully, for the sake of both rigour and accuracy, and also because of the productive effects that result from such consideration. In popular parlance, the two terms tend to be conflated; or rather it may be more accurate to say that the former is frequently used in instances when the latter ought to be. I concur with

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Cordelia Fine, who complains that this substitution “has therefore robbed the word ‘gender’ of its original meaning and function” (Testosterone Rex… 26). Why has this happened? Using the word ‘sex’ to denote ‘male’ or ‘female’ perhaps produces some discomfort given that ‘sex’ is used to denote ‘sexuality’ and ‘sex acts,’ and so the term ‘gender’ has been recruited to take its place. But I believe that there is an additional reason for this substitution: the notion that gender is to a large extent culturally constructed is still a subversive one in the popular consciousness, as well as in certain institutional contexts, depending on various ideological factors that may be at play. This tendency to substitute gender for sex has even invaded the discourse of the biological sciences, as the writers of an editorial in the Journal of Applied Physiology noted in 2005. Seeking to clarify appropriate usage for their colleagues, they argued for this distinction: The term sex should be used as a classification according to the reproductive organs and functions that derive from the chromosomal complement. … [while] the term gender should be used to refer to a person’s self-­ representation as male or female, or how that person is responded to by social institutions on the basis of the individual’s gender presentation. (Minson and Torgrimson 786)

I invoke once again the work of Judith Butler, who considers that this “pre-feminist” substitution is naïve (Gender Trouble 29), and who cautions that if “gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way” (10). Therefore I will, in the main, use sex to denote the physical fact of male or female—with the understanding that this too is an unstable category—and gender in reference to a socially and culturally constructed category of being and expression—that is, “the words, gestures, appearances, ideas, and behavior that dominant culture understands as indices of feminine or masculine” (Diamond 83). This distinction is validated by no less a body than the World Health Organization: “Gender refers to the socially constructed characteristics of women and men—such as norms, roles and relationships of and between groups of women and men. It varies from society to society and can be changed” (“Gender, Equity and Human Rights”). A similar definition may be found on the website of the American Psychological Association (APA):

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Sex is assigned at birth, refers to one’s biological status as either male or female, and is associated primarily with physical attributes such as chromosomes, hormone prevalence, and external and internal anatomy. Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for boys and men or girls and women. (Answers to Your Questions)

But before I go any further, I must take emphatic exception to the near universal description of sex as that which is “assigned at birth.” Human beings are sexually dimorphic, and as Cordelia Fine observes, in 98–99% of cases sex does not need to be assigned but is plainly evident. She quotes neuroscientist Daphna Joel, who “refers to the three core markers of maleness and femaleness as genetic-gonadal-genitals sex: or 3G sex, for short” (Testosterone Rex… 85). I make this point in part because I believe such usage actually diminishes the predicament of the 1% or 2% of babies with disorders of sexual development (DSD) for whom this is not the case, where sex is indeed assigned on the basis of particular criteria, a practice against which activists for those with DSD—also called intersex (see Standards of Care 95 on the debate regarding terminology)—have argued vehemently. Anne Fausto-Sterling proposes “that there is actually half a dozen or so sexes” (86), but these markers of difference are nonetheless contained within that 1% or 2%. When we hear of the birth of a baby we do not inquire whether it was ‘assigned male or female.’ Is it not more accurate to state that sex is observed or recognised at birth and that it is gender which is assigned? The widespread conception of sex as a socially assigned category seems to have arrived as a result of the enormous influence Butler’s work has had, not only in academia, but in institutional discourse and public policy. As she writes in her Preface to the 1999 edition of Gender Trouble, “I did not know that the text would have as wide an audience as it has had, nor did I know that it would constitute a provocative ‘intervention’ in feminist theory or be cited as one of the founding texts of queer theory” (vii). Although her overall project in Gender Trouble seems to be to analyse sex, gender, and sexual orientation as discrete elements, in accordance with established feminist theory, she goes further, proposing that sex itself is produced as an effect of gender: It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. Gender ought not to be conceived

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merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pre-given sex … gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. (11)

In assessing this position Sarah French writes, “Butler insists that sex is a discursive and politicised identity category that is one of the primary effects of gender” (22), and to me such insistence flies in the face of both logic and observable physical reality. (I take up this subject again in Chap. 4, “Gender Dissidence.”) The constitutive gearing of sex to gender may be understood more readily in the work of queer studies pioneer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In her ground-breaking text Epistemology of the Closet, she reminds us that feminist analysis arose in consideration of material conditions that may render any distinction between sex and gender meaningless, given that the empirical evidence of bodies ultimately outweighs the speculations supplied by theory: “Indeed, the intimacy of the association between several of the most signal forms of gender oppression and the ‘facts’ of women’s bodies and reproductive activity has led some radical feminists to question … the usefulness of insisting on a sex/gender distinction” (28–29). Putting the matter aside without laying it to rest, she concludes that sex/gender can only “delineate a problematical space rather than a crisp distinction,” and elects “to denominate that problematized space of the sex/gender system, the whole package of physical and cultural distinctions between women and men, more simply under the rubric ‘gender’” (29). The difficulty of trying to proceed with a consistently workable distinction between sex and gender in hand is brought into a different kind of focus in the discussion of transgender matters: particular challenges await any writer attempting to deal justly with the range of individuals who defy the long-established binaries we use to distinguish male from female and sex from gender. I quote again—at length, given my wish to capture the difficulty of making denotative statements at all in this regard—from the APA website: Transgender is an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression, or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth. Gender identity refers to a person’s internal sense of being male, female, or something else; gender expression refers to the way a person communicates gender identity to

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others through behavior, clothing, hairstyles, voice, or body characteristics. “Trans” is sometimes used as shorthand for “transgender.” While transgender is generally a good term to use, not everyone whose appearance or behavior is gender-nonconforming will identify as a transgender person. The ways in which transgender people are talked about in popular culture, academia, and science are constantly changing, particularly as individuals’ awareness, knowledge, and openness about transgender people and their experiences grows.

Therefore, in order to respond to the multiple definitions of the word gender in current usage, and its considerable overlap with the meaning, strictly speaking, of sex, I must contend with the term gender identity, as described earlier, even though this really ought to denote ‘a person’s internal sense of being feminine or masculine,’ the headings of two culturally constructed lists of features that are defined solely in opposition to one another. The term I would have preferred to use, and whose accuracy aligns perfectly with the sex/gender distinction which I attempt to sustain, is psychosexual identity. But the meaning of this term has shifted in problematic ways: as can be seen from any search it links readily to the word ‘disorder,’ and therefore to pathology. To elucidate this further, I invite the reader to enter their responses to The Open Sex Role Inventory (OSRI), an updated version of the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI), developed by psychologist Sandra Bem and published in 1974 (see https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/OSRI/). The OSRI is composed of forty items to which one responds on a five-point scale, where 1 means Disagree, 3 means Neutral, and 5 means Agree. Both of these inventories were designed with the understanding that the criteria are culturally determined. Further, “Bem thought that it was possible to be both masculine and feminine at the same time and that this was the healthiest psychological state” (OSRI). Therefore, while my psychosexual identity is male, my gender identity is mixed: according to the Open Sex Role Inventory, I score 102 masculine to 91 feminine. Our gender need have nothing to do, strictly speaking, with our sex. However, regarding my discussion of trans matters, I am grateful for the advice and assistance provided by Dr Aaron Devor, the world’s only Research Chair in Transgender Studies at the University of Victoria, where I also work. I undertook three interviews with him, on 28 June 2018, and 22 February and 27 March 2019, and all attributions and citations refer to the content of those meetings.

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It is also important to distinguish transgender from transsexual, a troubled term that for many is redolent of the medicalisation of the subject, but that is appropriate for those individuals who have made or want to make a complete transition, including surgery as well as hormone therapy. They see themselves within the sex/gender binary, and may indeed abide by some of the precepts of heteronormativity. But, to quote Devor, “there are many transsexual people who would like to disappear into the binary but their physical reality does not permit them that luxury.” Therefore this problematic distinction—since it is based on matters of perception—must be made: the practices I propose in this book do not, strictly speaking, apply to those individuals who self-identify as transsexuals and who are able to “disappear into the binary”; my concern, rather, is with those individuals, regardless of other identifying features, who cannot. However, I hope to evade this particular bramble because my principal concern is with observable evidence, with gender expression; that which is socially intelligible in the individual in terms of gender signs; their more or less masculine or feminine presentation, and how or whether such presentations of self may cohere with or deviate from those of characters to be represented in performance. Finally, to put this aside without laying it to rest, I affirm that arriving at an understanding of these matters ought to be guided by the stated preferences of individuals themselves: by means of what terms do you prefer others to name you? This book originally seemed to be about homophobia, but this term is too broad to capture the set of discriminations that is my subject here: the issue is gender normativity as opposed to sexual orientation. As Butler reiterates in Gender Trouble, “the performance of gender subversion can indicate nothing about sexuality or sexual practice. Gender can be rendered ambiguous without disturbing or reorienting normative sexuality at all” (xiv). As acceptable gender styles have changed in recent years one is more likely to encounter—as I have many times—young men and women who are self-identify as heterosexual but whose gender presentation is in any number of ways inconsistent with historically established patterns. And, conversely, it is only because of the possible disjunction that may abide between sexual orientation and gender presentation that actors like Rock Hudson and Kevin Spacey were able to achieve the success they did in Hollywood, a topic I explore in some detail in Chap. 3. To return the matter of definitions: I use the term effemiphobia to refer to the distaste for and rejection of that which is ‘feminine’ in males. I concede that this term does not yet appear in recognised dictionaries, but it is

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used in the blogosphere11 and serves my purposes. It is perhaps a more sober descriptor than sissyphobia, a term coined by Tim Bergling in Sissyphobia: Gay Men and Effeminate Behavior. The female equivalent— the distaste for and rejection of that which is ‘masculine’ in females—does not warrant to date even a provisional or conjectural term, which is telling in itself. Having struggled with various options I have settled upon the admittedly clumsy and unmusical butchphobia, with its slang connotation, which nonetheless also serves my purposes. I have given centrality to the term gender dissidence to refer to those individuals whose gender presentation is more or less, in any number of ways, incongruent with ‘chromosomal sex’ according to contemporary conventions. This is equivalent to gender nonconformity, which may be defined as “the extent to which a person’s gender identity, role, or expression differs from the cultural norms prescribed for people of a particular sex” (Standards of Care 5). However, I prefer the political echoes of dissidence; its implication with the idea of protest suits my particular dispositions. Within the use of this term, I aim to gather not only those who identify themselves as male and female, and are comfortable with the pronouns he/him and she/her, but also those for whom the issue of naming is still a work in progress. I quote again from the APA website: Genderqueer is a term that some people use who … define their gender as falling somewhere on a continuum between male and female … They may also request that pronouns be used that are neither masculine nor feminine, such as ‘zie’ instead of ‘he’ or ‘she,’ or ‘hir’ instead of ‘his’ or ‘her.’ Some genderqueer people do not identify as transgender. Other categories of transgender people include androgynous, multigendered, gender nonconforming, third gender, and two-spirit people. Exact definitions of these terms vary from person to person and may change over time but often include a sense of blending or alternating genders.

At times I use the terms gender home or gender baseline in order to try and capture the observable phenomenon of each human subject’s preferred location on the complicated map of gender identities and expressions. Throughout this work, I use training, given that it is about specific skills acquisition rather than education, which may be understood as a 11   For examples, please see https://www.google.com/search?q=effemiphobia&ie=utf8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=sb (accessed 15 September 2016).

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more broadly based expansion of the capacities of the whole person. My focus here is on the body of practices that contributes to the formation—I invoke the sense in which it is employed in French—of the actor as an interpretive and creative artist, given how much actual invention actors are called upon or elect to do. I distinguish actor training from drama and theatre education, which are largely academic pursuits and which may not be susceptible to the kinds of discriminatory patterns that I plan to name and analyse and for which I suggest remedial practices.

‘Queer’: Are We Fed up with It Yet? This book is established on the discursive territory called queer studies; it seems to have wandered there by accident and then decided to stay. What does the queer in queer studies mean in this context, and how do I propose to engage with it? (It still makes me wince to use this word, given my age: in my adolescence it was the most hateful homophobic and effemiphobic slur one could hurl at someone.) David Savran offers this inspiring list, most of whose elements are useful to me: [A] locus of refusal; an unbinding of psychic, sexual and social energy; a destabilizing third term; a principle of radical democratization; a post-­ modernist renovation of camp; an affront to the bipolar system of gender and sexuality; a way of transcending both assimilationist and anti-­ assimilationist politics; a privileged mode of subversion. (57)

Because I plan to this term in the broadest possible way, I need to call in the editors of Queering the Non/Human, who note that it may be “an identity category, political positionality, methodological framework, or system of knowledge production” (Giffney and Hird 4). Perhaps I use the term in all those disparate ways. But is queer primarily something one is or that one does? The editors of Queer Ecologies propose that it is both (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 5), but it is the doing with which I am most concerned here. For Savran there is no doubt: “Queerness … is constituted in and through its practice” (59). Giffney and Hird state that “a spirit of critique underpins much queer theorising in addition to a respect for difference, dedication to selfreflexivity and drive toward revision” (4). This list also feels right to me: adherence to such principles will produce “the continual unhinging of

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certainties and the systematic disturbing of the familiar” (ibid.). John Clum, in Still Acting Gay, argues that queer entails “a reveling in difference, a belief in performativity over stable essence, a celebration of marginality” (263). I hope, like Clum, to make queer an inclusive rather than an exclusive term. However, it probably cannot gather in all those individuals that the ever-expanding alphabet soup acronym of gender and sexual difference is meant to address: “For many years, the organizers of Canada’s biggest pride parade—Pride Toronto—went with LGBTTIQQ2SA: ‘a broad array of identities such as, but not limited to, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, intersex, queer, questioning, two-spirited [sic], and allies’” (Szklarski). Two-spirit is a contested term within aboriginal communities themselves, as I will explore in my final chapter, and queer may be entirely inappropriate to describe those individuals best described in this list as “transsexual,” who may have made a transition so complete that the in-­ betweenness of “queer” does not apply to them. Judith (Jack) Halberstam goes further and notes that “there is considerable antipathy between gays and lesbians and transsexuals, and the term ‘queer’ has not managed to bridge the divide” (144). This unfortunate situation is given more attention in Chap. 4. As some have argued the umbrella term queer can serve to dilute or even erase the psychic and cultural specificity of gays and lesbians. Film theorist Brett Farmer writes: “One problem that I have with queer is that it frequently encourages an acritical pluralism wherein the differences that structure sexual subjectivities are all flattened out into a postmodern vision of democratic pansexuality” (16; see also 35–38). I therefore will use the terms lesbian and gay when referring in particular to the groups signified by those terms—in itself at times a vexed prospect—and queer when I hope to collect all kinds of gender dissidence and dissidents together in relation to some concept, social practice or aesthetic object. This disparate range of things, to which the citations above refer, may be succinctly summed up, according to David Halperin, as “non-standard” (15). But perhaps I—we?—are stuck with queer? Savran notes, notwithstanding its problems, “that ‘queer’ remains a provocative way for thinking about the intersection between certain theatrical forms and certain sexual subjects” (58). Language is constantly chasing its tail; words are defined by more words, which are defined by more words. We do the best we can in such slippery circumstances.

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Overview The chapters of this book proceed as follows: in “‘You’re Soaking in It’: The Social and Cultural Bath,”12 I consider the social matrix within which a complex welter of practices regarding sex and gender contend. To mix metaphors, this is the stew upon which our students have been feeding since they entered sociality. I consider a number of cultural practices, including the current North American fetish for using pink and blue to identify the sex of babies and young children, the ‘Princess’ phenomenon, the effects of video games and the obsession with muscularity among young men. In “The Influence of Hollywood,” I engage in a brief overview of both the history of gays and lesbians in American mainstream cinema and the representation of queer people on screen. I pay particular attention to the messages that Hollywood’s notorious homophobia—largely intact to this day—sends to young actors-in-training who aspire to find employment in professional film and television. In “Gender Dissidence,” I explore the features and constitutions of various non-conventional expressions of gender: the ‘feminine’ male, the ‘masculine’ female, as well as the transgender subject, reiterating my commitment to support for gender non-conformity. I engage in this exploration in reference to cultural objects, both ‘popular’ and ‘avant-garde’ examples, as much as to scholarship; this seems logical and appropriate in a work that is about the arts of performance in their social context. In “Gendered Movement and ‘Physical’ Acting,” I use the lens of Laban Movement Analysis to analyse conventionally gendered movement and apply it to the work of drag king and male impersonator Diane Torr. Her “Man for a Day” workshops teach women how to perform male personae convincingly enough to be able to ‘pass’ in public. I discuss how various ‘physical’ approaches to acting—in contrast to the text-centred, psychological model offered by the American ‘Method’—may support the performance of gender via technical means. The relative efficacy and safety—in terms of the emotional well-being of actors—of such methods are supported by current research in cognitive neuroscience, as synthesised and articulated by Rhonda Blair. 12  Some readers may recall that this phrase derives from a 1981 ad for Palmolive dishwashing liquid that became a favourite gay male punch line.

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A feminist critique of realism is taken up in “‘Queer-Looking, Queer-­ Acting’: The Subversion of Realism,” prompting a (re)consideration of the work of Bertolt Brecht. As Elin Diamond argued in her landmark work Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater, “feminist theory and Brechtian theory need to be read intertextually” (43). Gender performance lends itself readily to the kind of ‘defamiliarisation’ that is at the heart of the Brechtian project. This is followed by a survey of select examples of queer theatre in North America. I consider the predicament in which much North American theatre finds itself: what is the place of the liveness of theatre in a mediatised world? Many have argued that the theatre, in order to (re)claim its legitimacy, must relinquish its devotion to psychological realism, which derives from the nineteenth century, given the superior capacities of film, television, and other media.13 I engage with the work of Jordan Tannahill, whose perspectives on queerness and theatre are representative of a new generation of creators. The project of radical inclusion based on gender may inevitably take us to a reconsideration of the entire art form we know as ‘theatre’: what does this art form have to say for itself in an age of sharpening environmental and political crises? I conclude with “Acting Queer Ecology: Extensions and Excursions,” in which I take what seems to be the logical next step in my argument: having challenged the gender binary perhaps we should turn our attention to the human/non-human version. I speculate about where living in the midst of the climate crisis might take acting pedagogy, and indeed theatre itself. As Donna Haraway claims, “queering has the job of undoing ‘normal’ categories, and none is more critical than the human/nonhuman sorting operation” (Companion Species xxiv). Making detailed reference to the work of both Timothy Morton and Una Chaudhuri, I identify new ways of thinking about what actors can do—and how we might enable them to do it—at what may seem like a very strange intersection indeed, that of queer ecology, environmental theatre, indigenous epistemologies, and the pedagogy and aesthetic philosophy of Jacques Lecoq. This book claims an intersectional place of its own, at the crossing of theories of acting, pedagogical practice, cultural studies, and queer stud13  See, among many others, Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 1999; Eddie Paterson and Lara Stevens, “From Shakespeare to the Super Bowl: Theatre and Global Liveness,” Australasian Drama Studies, 62 (April 2013): 147–162; and Claudia Georgi, “Liveness on Stage: Intermedial Challenges in Contemporary British Theatre and Performance,” CDE Studies (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2014).

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ies. A hybrid object that frequently cites other hybrids, it is a kind of ‘social studies reader’ on matters of sex and gender mainly intended for practitioners. Many artists, including singers, dancers, actors, directors, and choreographers, have migrated into the academy in recent decades. Many of them will, like me, have earned a Master of Fine Arts, considered a terminal teaching degree. Therefore they will most likely have been exposed to the basics of semiotics, performance studies and feminist theory, and the names of prime movers such as Lacan, Bourdieu, Foucault, Derrida, and Butler. And some may have gone on to complete PhDs: there is a new breed of (former) artists who are also doctors. Some, also like me, may have gone on to publish in peer-reviewed journals. But there are probably many others who have attained their positions without such academic credentials—a feat that is virtually impossible today, of course. Will this work fall between two stools? Too theoretical for some acting teachers, yet too elementary for those who have crossed the particular threshold that the acquisition of a doctorate represents? In order to be thorough I must invoke theoretical analyses, but I have also done my best to be clear, and I therefore beg readers’ patience. This book is also intended for students themselves who may be asking troubling but perhaps productive questions about the content and purposes of their training: who is teaching them? What are they being taught and why? And, of course, it is they who have the significant responsibility of determining the fortunes of the theatre as an art form in this age of looming environmental crisis and political upheaval.

CHAPTER 2

‘You’re Soaking in It’: The Socio-Cultural Bath

The creation of a highly differentiated gender binary produces a paradox that is cleverly revealed in Denys Arcand’s masterful film Le Declin de l’Empire Americain (Decline of the American Empire). The character Claude, who is hosting a weekend getaway for a group of friends, both male and female, shows one of the young men a glass display case containing the preserved and pinned specimens of two frighteningly large insects that are radically different in appearance. And yet, as he states, they are the male and female of the same species. Similarly, gender-based differences have been so pervasively and profoundly configured on female and male bodies in Western cultures as to suggest two entirely different beings; they amplify the given differences of biologically determined sex to an absurd degree. I maintain that despite the destabilising influences of certain trends within North American culture that question gender norms, the cultural forces that produce, propagate, and guarantee them are largely intact, generating pervasive binarising effects. In this chapter, I consider some of these forces. Much has been written on this set of topics by scholars and specialists in a raft of disciplines, and to cite all such work would be an impossible task if it were not also redundant. I therefore engage with them selectively according to their apparent significance in terms of the construction of the gender/sex binary. As Cordelia Fine has written, “it’s hardly surprising that children take on the unofficial occupation of gender detective. … Everything around

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the child indicates that whether one is male or female is a matter of great importance” (Delusions of Gender… 212–213), from the largely compulsory use of the colours pink and blue, to different kinds of toys and games, to participation in dance and cheerleading versus rough-and-tumble sports. They have likely made their first forays into dating and sexual activity, in which highly gendered roles are activated in relation to one another. They have had to negotiate the terms of micro-cultures associated with the various age categories through which they have passed, in each of which they may become targets in various ways because of perceived gender non-conformity. Young people have been schooled in a discourse of gender that may be confusing in its complexity, offering conflicting messages about what is or is not acceptable in terms of presentation of self and in relationship formation. As I will have reason to note repeatedly, the cultural terrain under observation is very mixed: for example, while many young people in North America may have access to gay-straight alliances in their middle and high schools, and regard homosexuality as simply a normal form of expression along a continuum of possibilities, they may witness—or be subjected to—various kinds of gender- and/or sexuality-­ based bullying and harassment. They may encounter discrimination and rejection in their families or places of worship, in the organisations that host and support various kinds of recreation, or from highly vocal elected officials who may be politically right wing. Many of these forces have become more potent and pervasive in the digital age. As is well known, this social realm is no longer spatially or temporally delimited: it exceeds the physical bounds of school architecture and playing fields. This mediated culture follows young people home and may continue to exert its influences hours after homework has been put away. Many young people have to be discouraged from taking their phones and tablets to bed with them. And even if they do not do this they often resort to their devices immediately upon rising. The condition of being active online is almost incessant and has been identified as an addictive behaviour with wide-ranging deleterious effects. I invite the reader to enter the search terms ‘cell phone addiction’ and note the avalanche of results. There have been numerous examples of how sustained internet bullying, often relating to matters of sexuality and gender expression, has resulted in the suicide of its victims. The potential for digital technology to facilitate criminal activity, disinformation, and outright hate speech is daunting indeed. Facebook currently employs 8000 workers to scan ­ digital content and either

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approve it for uploading or reject it, but as of 2018 had plans to increase this number to 20,000.1 But the problem is much more complex—with ramifications that have yet to be fully identified and understood—than the fact that internet usage has become an addictive activity. Dr Jean Twenge, a psychologist at UC San Diego, author of iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, has observed significant shifts in psychological and behavioural markers in the generation that grew up with the smartphone. As she notes, “the arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health.” Her lengthy subtitle hints at the kinds of negative effects on mental health with which she is concerned. One of these, notable from my perspective as a ‘movement’ instructor, is the potent disembodying influence of participation in digital culture; its displacement of consciousness from a state of being in the present moment, which is, of course, the essential condition of the actor. Young people are often hypnotised by their devices, unable to put them away even while in motion, lost in the imaginary realms conveyed to them by their phones—for which purpose, of course, ‘smartphones’ seem rarely to be used. Each year I ask students entering the performance focus to try a very simple exercise: to walk to the library across our very beautiful, grassy, tree-lined campus without looking at or listening to their phones; to listen to the birds singing; to feel the turf under their feet and the sun on their faces; to be in the real world rather than a virtual one. At least they are free of their devices during their time in the acting studio and in rehearsal. But my concern here is with the way that digital culture has made access to the shaping discourses of all kinds of media easier than ever before, including prescriptive imagery regarding gender presentation as a key component of glamour, success, and power. Among other kinds of immersions, students joining post-secondary acting programmes have been awash for most of their lives in images and stories from popular culture, and the celebrities who are its dramatis personae. Narratives concerning the gender performance and sexual orientation of stars who may be role models for young actors can have significant impact. What influence might this exposure have on the formation of their attitudes regarding what 1  See Sylvia Thomson, 19 June 2018, http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/facebookcontent-reviewers-1.4708722 (accessed 22 June 2019).

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actors do, how they look and behave, and on notions of what constitutes success? Further, how have such images and narratives affected the imaginative lives, preferences, and biases of performance faculty themselves? We do not teach in a social and cultural vacuum, and may be as susceptible as our students to the representations of the glamorous and well-connected few who circulate in the rarefied world of Hollywood and Broadway celebrity.

Pierre Bourdieu: Field, Capital, and Habitus In order to address this set of topics I invoke some of central components of the work of the French social philosopher. He called these his “thinking tools,” and, while they have been recruited widely for a range of theoretical uses, they emerged in the course of his empirical studies, as “his starting point was always a particular social phenomenon or practice” (Grenfell 2). I hope to extricate them as precisely as possible from the net of concepts in which they are situated and use the lens that each affords to consider the materials that pertain to my subject areas. Bourdieu’s work is particularly useful because it is consistently articulated in relation to notions of embodiment. For example, chapter 4 of The Logic of Practice is entitled “Belief and the Body.” And practitioners in the theatre academy have found a ready engagement with Bourdieu’s notions of cultural capital because “they cannot be divorced from the person … [and] presuppose embodiment” (109). Field refers to social space and aims to capture any internally consistent community of practice, such as, for example, medicine, politics, the church, education, or television, one of the many subjects about which Bourdieu wrote. He described a structured social space, a field of forces, a force field. It contains people who dominate and people who are dominated. Constant, permanent relationships of inequality operate inside this space, which at the same time becomes a space in which various actors struggle for the transformation or preservation of the field. (On Television and Journalism, qtd. in Thomson 74)

Bourdieu likened such fields to sports activities, in which there is some common matter at issue, rules that govern how it should be undertaken, specific conditions that determine how the game is played and in which players aim to maintain or improve their positions. However, “the game

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that is played in fields has no ultimate winner, it is an unending game, and this always implies the potential for change at any time” (Thomson 79). The whole of society forms what Bourdieu called the field of power, and multiple fields within it then break down into subfields, that is, “art into literature, painting, photography, and so on” (73). And while each subfield abides by the logic of its presiding field, it may have “its own internal logics, rules and regularities” (74). The community that is a post-secondary department of theatre functions as the subfield of the generality of ‘post-secondary theatre departments,’ which, in turn, forms part of the field of ‘post-secondary education.’ And similarly, I propose, ‘post-secondary theatre study’ overlaps significantly with ‘professional theatre practice.’ How are we implicated as social agents in the kinds of struggles to which Bourdieu pointed in terms of the ways gender expressions are embodied and negotiated? Capital is perhaps the concept most frequently used by writers and commentators, some of whom may not actually know its origin in Bourdieu’s work. He wrote that “it is in fact impossible to account for the structure and functioning of the social world unless one re-introduces capital in all its forms and not solely in the one form recognized by economic theory” (Forms of Capital 105–106). Hence we have forms of symbolic capital, such as social capital, cultural capital, and scientific capital, that Bourdieu argued were no less “self-interested” (ibid.) than the economic variety, but whose similarity to strictly monetary exchange is often concealed, and therefore misunderstood. According to Bourdieu, capital may be divided into three interrelated forms: objectified capital, embodied capital, and habitus. Examples of objectified cultural capital include actual infrastructure, such as museums, concert halls, and theatres, while embodied capital refers to the capacities, the ‘know-how,’ of an adept in any given field. For example, embodied capital in the field of science denotes the “ability to manipulate instruments and formulae” (Moore 106). Its counterparts in the various fields of the performing arts would include the ability of an opera singer to sight-sing a role, of a ballet dancer to take an advanced class or learn choreography, and an actor to physicalise a role convincingly from text. Objectified and embodied capital are linked by habitus, defined as “dispositions and attitudes” that provide for the “rules of the game” (ibid.) in any given field. Moore notes that while habitus has no material existence, its effects are predictable and abide by an internal logic: “the rules of chess or grammar cannot be found anywhere in the world in a material form,

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but are known only through their realizations in practice” (105, emphasis in original). In any given cultural moment, where a particular set of “dispositions and attitudes” is dominant, “those with the well-formed habitus are higher in cultural capital” (103). And the more skilled the player, the greater her cultural capital. Think how this might be applied to the field of the Hollywood feature film: Meryl Streep perhaps possesses greater capital as a female actor than any of her peers, and these capacities likely translate into capital of the monetary kind. Time is the crucial factor here: while one may get rich in an instant by purchasing a lottery ticket, training takes many years. As Moore observes, “the formation of embodied cultural capital entails the prolonged exposure to a specialized social habitus, such as … the priesthood or the military or … the apprenticeship of the artist” (111). Part of my interest in habitus consists in the way one may also use it to consider the performative nature of gender, given that it “focuses on our ways of acting, feeling, thinking and being” (Maton 52). Among other effects, it seeks to account for the functions of the individual subject and the social body in relation to one another. It describes a condition that reproduces itself over time: each habitus contains its own history, which it carries forward as it negotiates a relationship with the conditions of the present, which, in turn, dispose it towards making choices that point to the future (ibid.). The habitus, as Bourdieu wrote in The Logic of Practice, ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms. (54)

As Maton writes, versions of this idea can be traced in the work of numerous philosophers all the way back to Aristotle (56), but its particularities make it enormously useful in allowing us to comprehend how the norms of gendered behaviour are produced and perpetuated in any given community; how as individuals we seem to make choices that really belong to the whole organism of the social body which shapes us and to whose shaping we in turn contribute. It is equally useful in our attempts to understand actor training and the art of theatre to which this training is directed. It becomes clear that field, capital, and habitus must be considered together, because specific practices arise from their combustion, as it were, and it is those practices that are at issue in any social study; in this one the

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focus is on the relations between the inculcation of gendered behaviour, actor training, and spectatorship in the theatre. As Karl Maton writes, “to understand practices we need to understand both the evolving fields within which social agents are situated and the evolving habituses which those social agents bring to their social fields of practice” (53). This set of tools may be applied to members of the same social class, occupation, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, or racialised group (ibid.). Habitus and field are constantly evolving, each shaping the other, but relations between them are “ongoing, dynamic and partial: they do not match perfectly, for each has its own internal logic and history” (57). Change may be so gradual as to be imperceptible, generating conditions of relative stability. But alienation or unrest arise when the habitus of an individual or individuals is at odds with the conditions of their surrounding field (ibid.). Using these conceptual tools is particularly useful in various kinds of dissidence within the field of theatre, including that of gender non-­conformity, or of aesthetic disposition, topics I take up in subsequent chapters. Bourdieu might be gratified to find that his ideas seem to be based in the way our brains actually develop and function, at least according to neuroscientists such as Bruce Wexler, who makes the following observations: People selectively affiliate with like-minded individuals, and forget and discredit views and information inconsistent with their existing beliefs. On the level of subjective experience, people like things more simply because they have seen them more and they more closely match established internal representations. Because of this, individuals generally try to surround themselves with familiar objects and people, and resist intrusions of foreign elements into their environments. (4)

The Regime of the Pink and the Blue I delve into this matter in some detail because it yields much useful information regarding the potency of the cultural forces responsible for the construction of gender. It also points to the still-unsettled question about which measurable differences in gender are in fact attributable to sex. And also because of its utility as a metaphor for the whole apparatus of gender construction: to what extent are student actors reproducing the gender typing they were inculcated during childhood? And to what extent are instructors re-inscribing gender normativity in their teaching practices?

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It is ironic that in the early years of the twenty-first century, when considerable progress has been made in support of diversity in gender expression, the regime of sex-based colour-coding that governs early childhood has never been so pronounced, so pervasive, and so rigidly enforced. Or is there a causal relationship here? Has the very move towards diversity generated the kind of anxiety that prompts a return to certainties of the conventional sex/gender construct, such as this simplistic colour binary? The fact that it begins even before birth lends weight to this idea. Carly Gieseler, writing in the Journal of Gender Studies, explores the phenomenon of ‘gender reveal parties’—a good example of the misuse of gender, as the matter at hand is clearly about sex—wherein prospective parents, having given evidence of foetal sex from ultrasound directly to event planners, discover that result by means of the colour of the food consumed and materials used at such parties: “expectant parents and guests pop piñatas unleashing blue or pink candies, bite into cupcakes stuffed with pink or blue filling, or open sealed boxes releasing pink or blue balloons” (2). That such events are typically memorialised on multiple social media platforms is evidence of the role that digital culture can play in the re-inscription of stereotypical gender codes. Most troubling is the content of some of the messages on cakes made for such events, putting aside for the moment the disturbing implications of having to cut into something—in this case a cake—to discover the sex of a foetus. Suzee Skwiot, writing for cafemom.com, found a recurring theme in such items as “Badges or Bows,” “Guns or Glitter,” “Rifles or Ruffles” and “Pistols or Pearls,” each supposedly sex-appropriate term in either blue or pink icing. Apart from the alarming investment in gun culture note also that the ‘masculine’ element is always listed first. Even if parents don’t engage in the costly ritual of a ‘gender reveal party,’ the colour-coding begins as soon after birth as possible: a newborn must be instantly identifiable as female or male, as though any question on the matter might produce an existential crisis. It is deeply ironic that while gender styles in the area of fashion have allowed men to wear pink, lavender, and purple shirts and ties, an unthinkable trespass in the days of my youth, the coding of pink and blue for children is almost as pervasive as an institutional uniform. This seems to be more rigorously and universally enforced with girls: a female child’s entire physical world—clothing, furniture, toys, decorations—may be coloured various shades of pink and purple. But her parents might be taken aback to discover the history of such practices: for many years, children of both sexes wore white clothing, but

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when colours came into vogue, the rigid pink-for-girls/blue-for-boys that we see in hyperactive evidence today was often precisely reversed. For example, a trade publication from 1918 called Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department advised the following: “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is daintier and more delicate, is prettier for the girl” (Maglaty). Marco Del Giudice has looked into this matter with great thoroughness, and demonstrates in scores of extracts taken from newspapers and magazines between 1889 and 1930 that our colour-coding preference, far from being automatic and unquestioned, was a matter of widespread and quite vigorous debate, and could go either way (1558–1562). “In total, the database of quotes from newspapers and magazines comprised 34 instances of standard coding and 28 instances of reverse coding” (1556). Is there a biological basis for this marker of sex-as-gender, so ubiquitous in our time? Melissa Hines and Wang Wong studied children’s preferences both in terms of colour and toy type in two related studies published in the same issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, and acknowledge that in some studies it has been hypothesized that the female preference for pink evolved from the female role of picking reddish fruits and infant caretaking, and the male preference for blue from the male role of hunting and associating blue with clear skies and good water sources. (Preferences… 1244).

However, their findings “generally supported socio-cognitive influences on gender-typed color preferences” (1250), in line with the evidence of the preponderance of other studies on the subject. But they caution, like the responsible scientists they are, that “further investigation is required to evaluate these competing viewpoints” (1244). Their work, following that of other researchers, reveals important evidence about how the components of gender identity accumulate progressively in the psyches of young children, and how the cultural practice of colour-coding may interact with this process: By about age two, most children have gender identity, meaning that they know that they are girls or boys. By about age four to five, they have gender stability, meaning that they know this will remain the same over time. Finally, by about age seven, they have gender consistency, meaning that they understand that gender remains stable across situations. (Effects… 1241)

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Hines and Wong note the phenomenon of “gender-labelling,” and suggest that pink and blue become part of this overall system: “Children who are aware of their gender may adopt the gender-appropriate color and avoid the gender-inappropriate color to consolidate their developing gender identity and to avoid social disapproval associated with violating gender norms” (1251). They observe that colour preference increases markedly around the third birthday, but becomes more relaxed at “the third and final stage of gender understanding, gender constancy, when children understand that their gender will not change even if they engage in cross-gender behavior” (ibid.).

Toys Are Indeed Us: “Why Does [sic] All the Girls Have to Buy Pink Stuff?”2 In one of their studies, increasing the complexity of the matter in question, Hines and Wong tested colour preference in combination with toy type, measuring children’s play with dolls and trains that were coloured both pink and blue. They concluded that “although young children’s preferences for gender-typical toys were unaffected by color, they were more likely to play with gender-atypical toys that had a color typical for their sex than ones that did not” (Effects… 1241). While the colour of toys had an influence on the choices children made whether to play with them, and for how long, it seemed to be less significant than the “affordances” of the toys themselves: overall, both boys and girls preferred the train. It does not seem surprising that the functionality of toys was more significant than whether they were pink or blue. And this is where biological factors are more likely to play a part: Gender-typed toy and activity preferences are thought to be caused, in part, by organizational influences of prenatal or neonatal androgen exposure on the developing brain… [therefore] [g]ender-typed color preferences may reinforce gender-typed toy play, and in turn influence the development of cognitive and social skills. (Preferences… 1251)

2  This quote is taken from a remarkable video document of a young girl named Riley protesting the gendering of toys according to type and colour that ‘went viral’ in 2011. Please see https://qubitstoy.com/blogs/news/115594308-why-your-kids-need-gender-neutraltoys (accessed 27 August 2018).

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Experts still disagree regarding which sex-linked differences—of which toy and colour preferences are only a small part—are inborn, due to genetic predisposition and/or hormone exposure in utero, and which are culturally constructed. In the introduction to one of their articles, Hines and Wong consider the significance of this area of research, citing numerous related studies, and postulate that play with boy-typical toys elicits spatial activities and may therefore enhance spatial skills. In contrast, play with girl-typical toys elicits social play and may therefore enhance verbal and social skills. Large and consistent gender differences between boys’ and girls’ toy preferences have thus been hypothesized to contribute to gender differences in later spatial cognitive and social development outcomes. … Because playing with boy-typical toys is thought to enhance spatial skills important for success in science and mathematics, some researchers and parents advocate encouraging girls to play with boy-­ typical toys in attempts to narrow gender gaps. … Although not discussed as extensively, encouraging boys to play with girl-typical toys could enhance their social and verbal skills. (Effects… 1234)

I find their last point intriguing, as it seems to hint at the bias of researchers who feel more comfortable encouraging girls to play with “boy-typical toys” than coaxing boys to engage in activities that may cause considerable social anxiety. (The issue of how cross-gender behaviour is differently received according to sex is explored in Chap. 4.) But more to the point: are we to infer that if more boys played with “girl-typical toys” they’d acquire enhanced social and verbal skills and would therefore be better prepared to train as actors, for example? Would they also be more inclined to negotiate than to fight? I am not being facetious here, as the implications of this and much other similar research are indeed significant. How are we shaping the play activity and preferences of children according to biological sex, and therefore establishing influences that may have enormous implications in later life? While sex may produce gender in terms of different preferences and behaviours, it is evident that such differences are also socially constructed and enforced. It seems that overall the stereotypical differentiation of gender in toy manufacture and marketing is even more pronounced now than in earlier decades. In her research into the history of toys and their marketing, Elizabeth Sweet found that “the marketing of toys is more gendered now than even 50 years ago, when gender discrimination and sexism were the

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norm.” She found that the industry is largely run by men, who make decisions about marketing that are not based on consumer demand; in other words, change might be possible if consumers were to band together and insist upon it. There is a huge body of research on topics related to this subject, and it is hard to know what to cite, but I was struck by the fact that an entire issue of the journal Sex Roles was devoted to it in 2018. Contributing editors Lisa Dinella and Erica Weisgram noted that the issue of gendered toy marketing was deemed sufficiently important for the Obama White House to host a conference entitled “Breaking Down Gender Stereotypes in Children’s Media and Toys” in 2016 that brought together researchers, media executives, toy company executives, activists, and many other interested parties to discuss the current research on children’s gender-typed toy interests and to generate suggestions about how the negative impact of gender-stereotyped media and toys could be reduced at a national level. (253)

Research undertaken by the issue’s various contributors clearly reveals “how subtle gender-related messages affect children’s performance and behaviors, and how adults create these gender-related messages and affect children’s interests” (ibid.). Children will choose the most gender-­ differentiated toys, in accordance with presumed judgements by peers, under the influence of what Cordelia Fine calls “jeer pressure” (Delusions… 218). Parents and peers play a crucial role in the way the entire system of gender stereotyping—its habitus, to revert to Bourdieu—is sustained over time. The crucial difference in marketing strategy since the onset of the digital age is that advertisers are now targeting children directly, rather than their parents. I consider two of these studies since their research questions engage explicitly with issues of performance. Play is a crucial part of all children’s development, of course, but the essence of the actor’s work is also ‘play,’ and it emerges from and resembles the activity in which children engage, regardless of how much it may become differentiated by being professionalised. Reich, Black, and Foliaki looked at the narratives of LEGO® building sets. They considered “the play themes, activities, and character relationships depicted in LEGO® City® (marketed to boys) and LEGO® Friends® (marketed to girls) [to determine] whether the social roles or anticipated identities found in the LEGO® product narratives differ

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between the two product lines” (287). They found distinctly gendered messages that encouraged boys to play characters with high levels of professional skill and expertise, often involving acts of heroism. Girls, on the other hand, were directed to engage in hobbies of various kinds—consigning them to a world of amateurism—as well as domestic activities, caring for others, socialising, and being concerned with and striving for beauty (285). The authors speculate “that boys and girls are learning different skills when playing, which may reinforce current gender stereotypes and influence future career aspirations” (286). Are we actually moving backwards in these regards? Feminist theory is founded upon the notion that gender is socially constructed, not essential to male and female subjects. And yet, according to various writers whom I cite in this chapter, belief in gender essentialism is creeping back into the public discourse. Simone de Beauvoir famously pronounced that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (249), and the main argument of this book aligns with that position. However, before one becomes a “woman” one must become a “girl.” Golden and Jacoby investigated the “Princess” phenomenon—an invention of the Disney corporation which has become a kind of cultural epidemic in North American society—in the play activity of thirty-one three- to five-year-old girls from a variety of ethnic and class backgrounds. “Through their eleven official princesses, Disney circulates powerful and consistent messages regarding gender norms and roles” (299). The authors found significant effects of this stereotyping on young girls and suggest that “parents and educators might reconsider the type and amount of media they provide their children, acknowledging the effects of these images on their children’s behaviors and understandings of gender” (ibid.). Playing the princess entails a sustained investment in the pursuit of beauty, concern with clothing, and accessories, preoccupations that engender excessive self-regard and that encourage passivity, reducing personal agency. Playing this character, as opposed to playing a superhero, for example, entailed wearing the dresses and accessories, “twirling,” striking poses and little else. The authors cite a broad study undertaken by an American Psychological Association Task Force “which reported that girls and young women with greater exposure to mainstream media content placed appearance and physical attractiveness at the center of women’s value [and that] self-objectifying behavior could have serious future ramifications for girls” (309).

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Playing the princess may represent a female child’s first foray into creating a character. How might its effects condition the self-concept, self-­ presentation, and expectations of young female acting students? In an article from 2010, I explored the ways that such stereotyping inhibits young female actors in their ‘movement’ training, and argued that such acquired constraints can actually be overcome by means of such training (Pretty Sexy… 300). But the psychic obstacles are real and considerable, and acting instructors need to note and address them. Golden and Jacoby cite a survey, undertaken in 2006 by Girls Inc., of 1059 girls from grades 3 to 12 which found that “girls reported feeling pressure to be thin, kind, caring, please everyone, speak softly, and not cause trouble” (300). Consider what kind of impediment this presents to both student and instructor in the acting classroom, where we probably agree that the objective is to grapple fearlessly with the whole range of behaviours that comprise the human predicament.

“Dude, You’re a Fag” As C.J. Pascoe examines in Dude, You’re a Fag: Adolescent Masculinity and the Fag Discourse, boys whose gender expression contains elements of the feminine can face social ostracism, physical assault, or worse. Her paper is based on fieldwork conducted in 2005 at a North Central California high school she refers to as “River High.” There she found—in what one imagines is an environment typical of its type—an epidemic of effemiphobia collectively engaged in by teenage boys in order to guarantee each other’s masculinity. She cites Leo Bersani, who has argued that ‘effeminate’ men’s failure to perform socially as men derives from their bearing the mark of “a penetrated masculinity,” in which “to be penetrated is to abdicate power” (19.) Being called a ‘fag’ inscribes, if only temporarily, an abject subjectivity in which one has failed radically to perform as a man. From this observation, Pascoe elaborates that such men “symbolize a masculinity … which, in its contradiction, threatens both psychic and social chaos” (85). The free use of this term constitutes a disciplinary function “through which boys name and repudiate this abjected identity” (88). She notes that “any boy can become a fag, regardless of his actual desire or ­self-­perceived sexual orientation” (88). Students of both sexes agreed that being called a ‘fag’ was the worst thing a young male could be called (90). These findings lend weight to Judith Butler’s observations about the social dimensions of gender performance:

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If gender is a kind of a doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing, it is not for that reason automatic or mechanical. On the contrary, it is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint. Moreover, one does not “do” one’s gender alone. One is always “doing” with or for another, even if the other is only imaginary. (Undoing Gender 1)

The boys at “River High,” constantly lobbing the word ‘fag’ at each other like a social grenade, seem to illustrate Butler’s notion that the “body has its invariably public dimension; constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine” (21). Indeed, school is perhaps the most potent social source of gender construction: “Through school, young people are coerced and disciplined to become modern gendered subjects by the codes and behaviours that are sanctioned or censured by a wide range of agents” (Holdsworth), including their peer group, older students and teachers, as well as the content of school activities themselves.

The Effects of Video Games The size and scope of the computer video game industry is astonishing, having become in a few decades “the most pervasive entertainment medium in the industrialized world” (Sanbonmatsu 473). Brian Crecente, writing in Variety in 2018, cites a report by EEDAR—Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, Inc.—in which it is estimated that “67% of Americans, or roughly 211 million people, play video games on at least one type of device.” Santiago and Needleman, writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2018, report that the industry is worth well over US$100 billion. Computer technologies of all kinds have historically been male-­ dominated. And while the video game industry reflects existing relations of power in society, in terms of race as well as sex and gender, it also produces effects as “a powerful cultural force in its own right” (Sanbonmatsu 473): are we playing video games or are they playing us? As Sanbonmatsu writes, feminists have observed that such games mirror “the worldview of the White, heterosexual men who overwhelmingly create and play them, [and] that exaggerated sex stereotyping, misogyny and simulated violence against women are the norm” (ibid.). He observes that the majority of game protagonists are male, and portray “the aggressive, dominating man authorized by the wider patriarchal culture” (ibid.). There is thus a consistency of subject position from creator to protagonist to consumer.

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Some of the violence of games is truly appalling, but we ought not to be surprised by it, given “the institutional origins of the medium in the U.S. national security state apparatus” (476): video games emerged from the military, and so it ought not to surprise us that many of them are about war and urban violence. Two prime examples are World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto. Having been created by university researchers and designers working with military personnel, they are inventions of what has been called the “military-industrial-academic-entertainment complex” (ibid.). Sanbonmatsu notes the disturbing fact that “young men and boys routinely play at war using forms of software and hardware that are functionally indistinguishable” from those being used in current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (477). But the horrific suffering of real people—men, women, and children—is reduced to an adrenalin-pumping activity that is about scoring points. While games do not necessarily prompt acts of violence, “evidence suggests that playing such games in fact does dull players’ empathetic responses to real-world victims of violence, including women” (478). Elena Bertozzi notes—in agreement with aforementioned researchers such as Hines and Wong—that the lack of female engagement with gaming matters “because participating in complex digital play is a predictor of confidence in and competence with digital technology” (491). She cites various scholars who propose that more young women might be interested in games if they were less inclined to portray women as passive sex objects, and less saturated with violence (ibid.). The latter observation points to a self-fulfilling prophecy: in keeping with the regimes of other forms of gendered marketing, many video games are designed to appeal to boys, who have internalised the preferences that such games instil. These are often in diametrical opposition to the values of, for example, princess play, in which girls may have been schooled for years. The argument can then be made that girls dislike video games because of intrinsic differences in the ‘female brain.’ Bertozzi writes: “Given that digital play offers a considerable amount of gender plasticity through avatars, it might seem illogical for gender stereotypes and concerns to persist in digital gaming, but they do” (492). In her essay, she explores the politics of competition between the sexes in patriarchy: if a male wins against a female it seems like either an easy victory or an infraction of the rules of chivalry; but if a male loses to a female, it is a disaster for him: his loss “is compounded by the humiliation of having been defeated ‘by a girl.’ If this occurs in front of male spectators he is likely to hear about it for a long time afterwards” (495). By and large this industry generates conventionalised notions of the subject and of culture; the game player embodies an ethos fundamental to

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capitalism—the heroic individual bent on mastery of his environment—in addition to all the very troubling sexual politics. Sanbonmatsu makes an observation that is particularly germane to our work as acting instructors: “the player’s fundamental cognitive and behavioral modality is oriented toward manipulation of the representational world, rather than receptivity toward it” (478, emphasis in original). Receptivity is precisely what we are trying to inculcate in our student actors! I am profoundly suspicious of video games and the effects they have on young people, especially young men: how does one establish an ethos combining trust, compassion, and sense of ensemble in a class or rehearsal room, given the effects of long-­ term exposure to values that represent its diametrical opposite? I speculated earlier about whether video games are in fact playing those who play them. We should all take notice of the observations of neuroscientist Bruce Wexler: During the first part of life, the brain and mind are highly plastic, require sensory input to grow and develop, and shape themselves to the major recurring features of their environments. During these years, individuals have little ability to act on or alter the environment, but are easily altered by it. By early adulthood, the mind and brain have elaborately developed structures and a diminished ability to change those structures. The individual is now able to act on and alter the environment, and much of that activity is devoted to making the environment conform to the established structures. (5)

In short, we become what we do, and therefore much gender typing, rather than expressing differences that are ‘hard-wired,’ reflects years of brain-­ shaping through cultural forces.

“Bring on the Shirtless Men”3: The (Relatively) New Objectification of the Male Body Much has been written about the prescriptive regimes regarding the female body and the effects these forces may have on young women,4 but relatively little attention has been paid to their analogues among boys and 3  This is taken from the title of an article in the National Post: http://nationalpost.com/ entertainment/movies/bring-on-the-shirtless-men-why-its-acceptable-to-objectify-themale-body-but-not-the-females (accessed 28 August 2018). 4  I draw the reader’s attention to the American Psychological Association’s Report of the Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, available at: http://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/index.aspx (accessed 29 August 2018).

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young men. At gyms and fitness clubs all over North America—and many other parts of the world as well—millions of young men, often sporting significant tattoos, wearing baseball caps turned around and effectively deafened by music from digital devices, are busy hefting barbells and dumb-bells, straining while trying to press far too much weight on conditioning machines, glued to their images in the mirrors that are often installed floor to ceiling on every side. In the locker rooms, they anxiously inspect their bare torsos in the mirrors to be found there. Masculinity is identified in part with the acquisition of significant muscle tissue: ‘bulking up’ is the general goal, and work-out plans and diets are offered in a plethora of print- and web-based magazines such as Men’s Health.5 Muscle-­ building may be combined with the risky practice of taking anabolic steroids. And it is alarming to note how the language of violence is routinely used in connection with this activity: the objective is to get ‘jacked,’ ‘cut’ or ‘ripped,’ and biceps are often referred to as ‘guns.’6 While weight-­ training and other forms of exercise—as well as a healthy diet—are important to overall health and therefore as part of an actor’s formation, it is essential to identify the line beyond which such preoccupations become obsessive and even dangerous. Studies have confirmed my suspicion that this phenomenon is growing: for example, Richard Leit et al. examined 115 centre-folds from the now-­ defunct Playgirl magazine between 1973 and 1997. Using the quoted heights and weights of the models’ they calculated their body mass index (BMI) and fat-free mass index (FFMI). They found that, indeed, “Playgirl centerfold models became increasingly ‘dense’ and more muscular over time.” They concluded that “these observations, in combination with previous studies, suggest that cultural norms of the ideal male body are growing increasingly muscular.” There is a feedback loop at work here: As the drive for muscularity increases men may “seek out magazines and other media focused on muscularity. Thus, the drive for muscularity may promote continual cognitive, emotional, and behavioral re-indoctrination of the muscular ideal” (Parent 90). Mike Parent notes that, “increasingly, men are seeking psychological help for body image problems, primarily focused on muscularity” (88). The negative health effects associated with the pursuit of muscularity  Please see https://www.menshealth.com/ (accessed 29 August 2018).  See, for example, https://www.muscleandfitness.com/workouts/workout-tips/7-reasons-your-guns-arent-growing (accessed 29 August 2018). 5 6

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include “excessive exercise, eating disorder symptoms, body dysmorphia, depression, low body esteem, and propensity to use steroids” (89). Such problems may be added to the list of health concerns for which acting instructors need to keep a sharp lookout, given that they are often cast in loco parentis. The drive for both muscularity and thinness may be more pronounced, and therefore liable to produce greater deleterious effects, among gay and bisexual men. Parent notes “the dominant North American gay culture’s idealization of a physique that is both muscular and lean—an idealization that is unrealistic for most men” (96). Brennan et al. cite various studies that “consistently report greater body dissatisfaction among gay and bisexual men compared to heterosexual men” (1). They surveyed over 500 gay and bisexual men of various races and ages at the Pride festivities in Toronto in 2008, and found that the drive for muscularity was correlated with disordered eating, internalised homophobia, and symptoms of depression, among other factors (10). They further noted that this phenomenon reflects an adaptive response to homophobia: “By attempting to increase one’s musculature and to appear more masculine, one may avoid the potential of being exposed to harassment and/or violence by fitting into the required social norm of gender expression” (ibid.). Instructors must be aware of the acute internalised pressure young male actors-in-­ training may feel regarding how they ought to look. Indeed, the negative effects of such prescriptive body imaging may now pose as many problems for young men’s psychic health as they have historically for young women.

Conclusion As I’m sure is clear from my introduction this book is founded in a particular disposition arising from post-structuralist critique, which has fed, for example, second-wave feminism, among other movements for social justice. And my operative position needs to be re-stated from the perspective of developmental psychology, many of whose specialists are also “guided by social constructionist theory, situating gender not as a naturally existing category, but as a social creation” (Boe and Woods). But this position must not be taken as a given in the world of social science: “The degree to which biology, as opposed to socialization, influences gender-­ linked behavior is one of the most hotly debated aspects of gender research” (ibid.). However, conservative forces in North American society—as well as elsewhere—have happily claimed putative scientific support

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for gender essentialism as part of a backlash against the challenges posed by feminist analysis and activism. ‘Boys will be boys,’ goes the old adage; a propensity to competition, high-risk behaviours, aggression and various forms of violence, and a piece of wisdom affirmed, one imagines, by social conservatives in Western societies. We tend to think of men’s higher testosterone levels as an innate sexual difference that drives the tendency to engage in typically ‘masculine’ behaviours, but Van Anders, Steiger, and Goldey staged an intriguing experiment regarding how causality actually operates between hormone and gender. Their work suggests that gendered behaviour—in this case wielding power—may elevate hormone levels. What is especially intriguing about this study—and appropriate for my topic—is that it employed trained actors, both male and female, who had to perform a monologue in which they fired a subordinate, “a context that demonstrates one’s own status and power” (13806). They asked both men and women to perform the action in stereotypically ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ ways, and measured testosterone levels both before the activity and afterwards. The results were surprising: Our experiment demonstrates that gender-related social factors also matter, even for biological measures. Gender socialization may affect testosterone by encouraging men but not women toward behaviors that increase testosterone. This shows that research on human sex biology needs to account for gender socialization and that nurture, as well as nature, is salient to hormone physiology. Our paper provides a demonstration of a novel ­gender-­testosterone pathway, opening up new avenues for studying gender biology. (13805)

In Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society and Neurosexism Create Difference, Cordelia Fine cites scores of recent studies in brain science concerning sex and gender, most of which tend to endorse the formative effects of culture regarding how we become women and men on the basis of being born female or male. She writes at length and in detail about what she calls ‘neurosexism,’ the over-simplified reduction of research about the brain in all its complexity and contradiction in order to justify conventional, prescriptive stereotypes about males and females; that there are such things as ‘female brains’ and ‘male brains,’ and that they are marked by consistently measurable differences; that such differences, arising from genes and hormones, are innate, fixed, and universal, express themselves

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in contrasting sets of qualities, preferences, and aptitudes, and supersede anything that cultures can construct; and that attempting to raise children in schemes of ‘gender neutrality’ is a doomed project. She warns that “from the seeds of scientific speculation grow the monstrous fictions of popular writers” (xxviii). She calls on researchers to demand more nuanced accounting of their work in popular media, and proposes that editors and journalists exercise more rigorous scrutiny in what they write and publish: “It is appalling to me that one can, apparently, say whatever drivel one likes about the male and female brain, and enjoy the pleasure of seeing it published in a reputable newspaper, changing a school’s educational policy, or becoming a best-seller” (174). As I proposed in my introduction, citing my Humanities professor, ideas are not bloodless, but have actual effects in people’s lives. Fine argues that “sexism disguised in neuroscientific finery is changing the way children are taught” (xxviii). Are we in fact witnessing a widespread cultural reversal towards pre-feminist notions of male and female, of ‘anatomy as destiny’? Elizabeth Sweet is one of many who concurs with Fine, noting that “this new tale of gender difference … does not fundamentally challenge gender stereotypes; it merely repackages them to make them more palatable in a ‘post-feminist’ era. Girls can be anything—as long as it’s passive and beauty-focused.” She acknowledges conservatives’ fear that embracing gender neutrality will create a generation of androgynous children who are required to play with featureless and meaningless toys. But she counters this notion with the observation that as the bright palette and diverse themes found among toys from the ‘70s demonstrates [sic], decoupling them from gender actually widens the range of options available. It opens up the possibility that children can explore and develop their diverse interests and skills, unconstrained by the dictates of gender stereotypes.

I suggest that this is a useful, even inspiring, model for the way acting instructors might engage with the phenomenon of gender expression in their classes. Just as we do not teach in a social and cultural vacuum, so our students do not train in one: they come to our departments with all the emotional baggage that may result from life in the social world that the foregoing describes. They may have been bullied for their gender expressions or behaved as bullies—as members of a kind of gender police force—or both.

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This may have included actual physical and/or sexual assault. We need to ask ourselves what we must do to support them, and what we are prepared to do to ensure that the same kinds of gender-based discrimination are not re-enacted in our departments. To cite Bourdieu once again, we must model and invoke a transformed habitus in these matters.

CHAPTER 3

The Influence of Hollywood

This topic warrants its own chapter because, as Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin note, “the movies have taught us what it means to be heroic or villainous, masculine or feminine, heterosexual or homosexual” (2). While this topic breaks down into two broad streams—gays and lesbians within Hollywood, and as consumers of its images; as practice and as spectatorship—the subject area of this book brings them together: young queer actors-in-training are particularly susceptible audience members for cinema because they aspire to be professionally employed within its restricted, highly coveted, and glamourised domain. What clues about their prospects as queer actors within the industry to which they direct their dreams of success may be gleaned from the images it generates? Before I commence this survey and analysis, I need to note that I speak from a complex position as a Canadian, that of a culturally colonised proxy invader, if you will. Canadians come from all over the world: my father and mother were Polish and English, respectively, immigrants who arrived in this country traumatised by the horrors of World War II. But we all, regardless of origin, partake of the cultural legacy established by the European settlers who took possession of this land and subjected its indigenous peoples to various kinds of violence that amounted to genocide, practices that continue to this day. In turn, we have been—and remain— the objects of cultural colonialisms on the part of both England and the US.  The Queen is still our official head of state, and canonical English plays retain a dominant position in our dramatic literature. Simultaneously, © The Author(s) 2020 C. Alexandrowicz, Acting Queer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29318-5_3

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we remain largely a cultural vassal of all things American, including plays, movies, and television, as well as other cultural industries, about which much has been written over many decades. One of the many foundational ideas of Enlightenment philosophy to which we are heir is a belief in the inevitability of progress: we are always in a state of becoming that is ineluctably also about betterment, and so every cultural moment is unquestionably superior to those that preceded it. “Doctrines of progress first appeared in 18th-century Europe and epitomize the optimism of that time and place” (Meek Lange). And yet it seems that in some ways it was easier—perhaps altogether better—to be a queer actor in Hollywood in the 1920s and early 1930s than any other decade one could name, including the present one. I here offer the reader a radically concise summary of queerness in relation to Hollywood in the belief that it is crucial for acting instructors to consider the patterns of such history. If we subscribe to Bourdieu’s notions of how field and habitus are interrelated and unfold in time, then we must accept that the residues from the past are not inert, like sediment, but are active, like biomatter, in the way the industry functions today. In a recent Theatre Journal article, Rebecca Schneider boldly attempted to make meaning out of the parallel between Palaeolithic-era cave prints—or stencils, really—of human hands, and those raised in protest in the “Hands up—don’t shoot!” protests staged by Black Lives Matter activists. She writes: “History is, after all, that which is carried along with us as well as that which has already happened” (286). This is particularly germane to those who teach acting for the camera, and who hope to avoid re-inscribing long-­established sex- and gender-based prejudices every time they set up their equipment.

The Early Decades Cinema as an art form is roughly coextensive with the conception of homosexuality as an identifiable category of being based on sexual behaviour (Barrios 3; Farmer 25). And “gays and lesbians have been shaping Hollywood in all its manifestations since the very beginning” (Mann xxiv). The irony is that for much of that history, homosexuality simply did not exist in terms of explicit representations. Hollywood’s vast inventory of images of the human has provided one of the most reliable, consistent, and predictable regimes for the representation of conventional expressions of the masculine and feminine in our culture. The power and reach of the

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film industry are such that it both reflects and produces cultural practices, and thus repeats all of the complications and contradictions of its social matrix. I therefore reiterate what I noted in my introduction: while historically film has represented, valorised, and prescribed the norms of compulsory heterosexuality, it has also conveyed or implied, in more or less obscure codes, the opposites by means of which that version of heterosexuality has defined itself. Homosexuality and other kinds of gender dissidence have thus formed the shadow of the normative for most of the history of the art form. When queer characters finally began to emerge, they were at first portrayed as objects of ridicule, and later as villains. They were either evil or abject; murderers, or alcoholics, and suicides. And yet, just as gays and lesbians managed to survive, sometimes even to flourish, within this medium, gay and lesbian audiences have found ways to make subcultural meaning out of a body of texts that has been relentlessly heterocentrist, heterosexist, and homophobic. Brett Farmer wrote: Although Hollywood’s role as an institution of heteronormativity is indisputable and its representational strategies of homophobic abuse glaringly evident, this in no way exhausts the vast range of cinema’s signifying effects or the dynamic ways in which it is often used and interpreted within the contexts of gay and lesbian reception. (5)

The history of Hollywood’s treatment of gender presentation follows a kind of oscillation between bound and free flow, to use terms from Laban Movement Analysis that I discuss in detail in Chap. 5; between relative relaxation and strict retrenchment. Hollywood—used here to denote the mainstream North American film industry and the myths that animate and support it—was founded in the midst of the urban licentiousness of the Jazz Age, of flappers and bathtub gin and sexual freedom, and this included, in particular circumstances, the freedom to express queer styles and desires. “The film industry of the 1920s was not conformist, conservative or homophobic” (Bailey), and it therefore has much to teach us about the ways that mainstream film today could be more accepting of gender non-conformity. In the early years of the twentieth century, Los Angeles was becoming an important gay centre—partly due to its status as a port—and Hollywood had developed a significant gay and lesbian subculture (Barrios 9). The city became a hot spot for all kinds of licence in keeping with the dispositions of the Jazz Age. Many Hollywood films of the 1920s and early 1930s

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were full of frank sexuality, and this included overt queerness, such as it might have been configured and received at the time. “There were … more visibly gay and lesbian characters onscreen at this time than at any other point in American cinema until the late 1980s” (Barrios 10). There was thus a kind of concordance between the images on screen and the communities that were responsible for their production: “Hollywood was … a haven for same-sex lovers—not merely tolerating them but actually considering them chic” (Mann 90). Convention-bound, Hollywood has always traded in types: “By the 1920s, a stereotypical image of male homosexuality was prevalent both in the cinema and in real life: the pansy … a flowery, fussy, effeminate soul given to limp wrists and mincing steps” (Benshoff and Griffin 24). This figure represented the cinematic response to the ‘Pansy Craze,’ in which gay male performers, often in full or partial drag, achieved considerable celebrity in clubs in New York City, San Francisco, and a few other urban centres (Barrios 51). A handful of actors, such as Franklin Pangborn, Grady Sutton, and Edward Everett Horton, built successful careers playing this type. The Pansy—or Sissy—was a clown, an object of ridicule, a failure. Consistently frustrated, he embodied various kinds of abjection, and thereby set off the virtues of the leading man. But perhaps it was better to be represented as an object of mockery than not at all, as Harvey Fierstein stated in the film version of The Celluloid Closet, based on the book by Vito Russo: “I liked the sissy … my view has always been visibility at any cost: I’d rather have negative than nothing” (Epstein and Friedman). In addition to the pansy, some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, those playing romantic leads, were more or less openly gay, such as Warren Kerrigan, Ramon Novarro, and William Haines. But more to the point, as Mann argues, they were often quite soft, even androgynous, including one of the biggest sex symbols of this period, Rudolf Valentino, “whose gender ambivalence [was] copied by scores of other male stars” (79). Mann quotes lesbian star Mercedes de Acosta, who recalls that it was a time “when many young women wanted to look masculine and many young men wanted to look feminine” (90). Some gay and lesbian actors in the silent film era managed to express their queerness to an extraordinary degree, such as Alla Nazimova and Lilyan Tashman. The latter enjoyed an enormously successful career—cut tragically short by her death from cancer at the age of thirty-seven—while essentially living as an out lesbian. Her success may be attributed to the fact that, despite her notoriously aggressive behaviour with women, les-

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bian, or otherwise, she was conventionally feminine (Mann 112–120). Leading men in Hollywood at this time might feature their gender ambiguity openly, but such freedom seems not to have been extended to leading ladies. The most famous butch woman of the era was behind the camera, director Dorothy Arzner, who dressed in male attire and wore her short hair slicked back, and who managed to carve out a remarkable career as a filmmaker (62–74). It is instructive to note in passing that women’s employment in Hollywood at this time as editors, scenarists, and screenwriters far outstripped that of any subsequent period, and Arzner’s “films at Paramount were almost all scripted by women” (74). Indeed, Benshoff and Griffin speculate that at this time “women were writing approximately half the pictures made in Hollywood” (50). But roles for masculine women on the screen were strictly defined: the tomboy characters, the counterpart of the pansy, “were the gum-snapping sidekicks to the leading lady or the hillbilly in love with the leading man” (Mann 135).1 Neither as numerous nor as identifiably gender non-­ conforming, they also “weren’t objects of scorn or ridicule the way their male sissy counterparts were” (ibid.). Patsy Kelly, one of the few tomboy actresses who was actually a lesbian, eschewed the usual trappings of feminine beauty and glamour and lived openly with her lover. And for this, she paid a price: “It’s no wonder Kelly never made it to the kinds of leading parts landed by other comediennes like Carole Lombard or Lucille Ball, known as much for their glamour as their slapstick” (139). The butch lesbian as a type was often configured as a severe, mannish spinster, or was cast as an inmate. Indeed, in the male-dominated spheres of both straight and queer Hollywood “women’s prison movies were one of the few places onscreen where lesbians were allowed to exist openly” (Barrios 106). Of the films in this genre, surely the most notable was Caged (1950). This points to an important difference in the way that male and female gender dissidence is regarded in patriarchal cultures. As Quentin Crisp, the late icon of gender dissident performativity, noted in The Celluloid Closet, “there’s no sin like being a woman. When a man dresses as a woman the audience laughs; when a woman dresses as a man nobody laughs” (Epstein and Friedman).

1  This tradition, established in Hollywood’s earliest days, persists even to our time: a good example is the character Renée Zellweger played opposite Nicole Kidman in Cold Mountain (2003).

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Other queer actors, such as William Haines, paid even more dearly for refusing to participate in the various social masquerades that were required to preserve one’s reputation—or at least to deflect overt hostility and discriminatory treatment. He “lived openly with his male partner in defiance of studio wishes and … had little time for fostering a heterosexual image. Haines was fired … [and] spent the rest of his life reviling his boss, Louis B. Mayer” (Mann xi). However, Haines was a survivor and went on to a successful career as an interior designer. But while relative fluidity in gender expression was allowed the 1920s, shifts in this pattern began to occur during and after the Depression for a number of reasons. First, massive unemployment had done grievous damage to the traditional image of man as provider, which contributed to a re-inscription of conventional notions of gender (122). Also, the moral excesses of the 1920s were blamed in part for the economic disaster which had befallen the country (ibid.). Second, the advent of the talkies made male femininity that much more apparent, and audiences began to be put off by it. Mann writes that William Haines’ camp characters “were suddenly too outrageous—too recognizable, too much like the queer down the block” (ibid.). Third, and most significant, a massive moral backlash against Hollywood’s excesses, growing stronger over a number of years, suddenly became an overwhelming force for repression. Former Postmaster-General Will Hays had become the head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), and in 1924 the Hays Office—as it came to be known—devised a formula by which all studios were to abide. “All scripts were to be submitted to Hays before production: his readers would ‘advise’ the studios about questionable themes or storylines” (Mann 93). And this included “any inference of sex perversion,” a term that was synonymous with homosexuality (94). The Production Code was officially established in early 1930, developed from Hays’ original formula, but in the first years of the Great Depression, it was seldom taken seriously. However, it acquired real teeth when it was framed as part of the federal regulation of the film industry and was put into legal effect on 1 July 1934. A gentlemen’s agreement had been re-written as legal sanction: Joseph Breen was named head of the Production Code Administration (PCA), to which all scripts were submitted before production began, and all finished films were submitted for a final seal of approval. Any film denied an official MPPDA seal would be, under the agreement, also denied a release. (141)

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The Catholic Church also played a part: always vociferously opposed to what it saw as the moral lapses of Hollywood, in April 1934, its Legion of Decency came into being as an additional force for censorship: “it decided which films were fit for Catholic consumption and which (the ‘Condemned’ category) were not” (Barrios 125). The censors had power over content as well as performance, so that the way actors behaved on screen was as much a matter of scrutiny as the content of scripts. The PCA functioned in much the same way as did the Lord Chamberlain’s office regarding what was permissible on England’s stages via the Licensing Act, in effect from 1737 to 1968.2 Adherence to the Code changed everything: Hollywood production was now essentially governed according to the precepts of conservative Christian belief, and the only presentable relationships were those that implied or portrayed procreative heterosexuality, but “suggestions of any kind of sexuality were muted” (Benshoff and Griffin 29). Richard Barrios called the Production Code and the League of Decency behind it a culture war (10), part of which was the enforcement of conventionally configured representations of gender. His book documents in excruciating detail the kind of hypervigilant scrutiny that was applied to scenarios and scripts. It is hard to imagine such dire censorship today, and to realise that it was indeed akin to the kind that was exercised concurrently in all arts production in the Soviet bloc with, of course, the significant difference that those identified as offenders were not abducted in the middle of the night and murdered or sent to labour camps. The new male stars “had to transition from their soft subtle androgyny to harder unquestionable masculinity” (Mann 155). And queer content that had been freely represented in the 1920s and early 1930s—or that which could be so interpreted—went into hiding. But of course, just as queerness is and always has been a vital part of human expression, it could not be erased from the screen and operated under the terms of the ‘open secret.’ Some movies were loaded with coded content, signs of ‘connotative’ rather than ‘denotative’ homosexuality, in which “an entire universe of cinematic queerness becomes possible” (Benshoff and Griffin 66). Queer content can neither be confirmed nor denied: D.A.  Miller notes “the particular aptitude of connotation for allowing homosexual meaning to be elided even as it is being elaborated” (124). Like many repressive 2  See The Lord Chamberlain Regrets…: A History of British Theatre Censorship, Dominic Shellard and Steve Nicholson with Miriam Handley (London: British Library, 2004).

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measures censorship backfired, and actually generated queer meanings which gay and lesbian audiences learned to read. It is possible to argue that the pendulum began to swing back towards conditions of greater relaxation—if only briefly—in the 1940s: World War II, like the first, produced conditions that allowed for more gender fluidity, with women flooding in to take on the range of jobs that had been vacated by men who were now in the armed forces (Mann 240–249). Meanwhile, gay men in the military gravitated towards the entertainments that were devised for the troops, many of which included performing in ‘G.I. drag’ (241). The ‘buddy’ film emerged as a sub-genre directly as a result of wartime culture, and while reflecting a need to show the crucial power of male bonding, nonetheless frequently configured the couple according to traditional gender roles, “allowing the male couple to be seen as almost husband and wife” (Benshoff and Griffin 33). Wars, for all their destructive power, mobilise vast numbers of people from urban and rural areas, and across divisions of class and race, and thus facilitate significant homosocial and homosexual contact. And, after the war, “hundreds, even thousands, arrived in Los Angeles with a greater sense of themselves, and a decreased tolerance for disguising their lives” (Mann 241). Consequently, homosexuality was much more in evidence just after the war. Mann observes that actor “Clifton Webb was the William Haines of the 1940s,” openly gay, and playing a character very much like himself on screen, “informed by the traditions and customs of the gay subculture” (250). He played villains among other character parts: “Like J.  Warren Kerrigan and William Haines, it was Webb’s very queerness that made him box-office gold, but ultimately he transcends even them in his subversive appeal—for [they] after all, did end up getting the girl” (255–256). It is hard to decide whether this is progress: the stars of the 1920s played romantic leads, despite their evident gayness, while Webb became as much of a star, but played a figure very much like himself. However, he also played father figures throughout the 1940s, and when it was noted with disapproval that he was a ‘bachelor,’ which was a coded term for homosexual at the time, he said the following, which might stand as the epigraph for this book: “I may not be a family man … but I am an actor. I didn’t have to kill to play the murderer in Laura. [A role that made him famous.] I think I’m good enough an actor to pretend I’m a father” (256). Another shift worth noting is that after World War II, with the advent of film noir, the pansy type from decades prior underwent a metamorphosis and became deadly, along with women. A number of film critics have

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speculated that this expressed general social anxiety regarding the reliability of masculinity after the traumas of wartime (267). “Often the villains of noir were women or effeminate men,” and a handful of actors, such as Webb, Samuel Cregar, Peter Lorre, and Robert Walker, specialised in such roles (ibid.). Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), based on a play about the Leopold and Loeb murder case of the 1920s, featured gay men as killers, and was laced with subtle clues as to the real nature of their relationship. Like many films of this period, Rope “creates a strong link between queerness, criminality and mental illness” (Benshoff and Griffin 37). But part of this shift is that the link between homosexuality and gender inversion begins to dissolve, and men who are understood to be gay are not necessarily presented as feminine (ibid.). Films made during the roughly thirty-year-long rule of the Production Code—and especially in the repressed decade of the 1950s—consistently present negative images of men and women understood to be queer: they suffer from addiction and other forms of mental illness, are villains and murderers, or are themselves victims of violent crime. Hollywood, geared to the Code, amounted in part to a kind of machine for generating heterosexist, homophobic propaganda. Benshoff and Griffin note that, at least from a contemporary perspective, one may read films with such suffering queer characters, which usually ended with their deaths, as potent critiques of the oppressive society that generated such discrimination and persecution, and in consequence such aberrant behaviour. It is impossible to measure whether queer audiences were able to see such films in this way, and one is left to ponder the damage they did to all things queer (85–106).

The Case of Rock Hudson William Mann notes that in the 1950s, gender expressions were so thoroughly binarised as to become almost caricatures: “The model was Brando. And Rory Calhoun, Paul Newman, Tony Curtis, Anthony Quinn. And, of course, George Nader, James Dean and Rock Hudson: three sexual ‘deviants’ who helped set the tone and style of masculinity for a generation” (316–317). Rock Hudson was able to conceal his sexual orientation precisely because he was so thoroughly masculine, albeit while conveying a safe, non-threatening, boy-next-door version of it. This even allowed him to play elements of male femininity in some roles, such as in Pillow Talk

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(1959) with Doris Day. One has to sort through the complications of a closeted gay actor playing a straight character gesturing in ways and communicating interests widely understood to signal gayness. But in industry circles, his sexual orientation was an open secret, as it was regarding many other stars over the decades. For years, such contradiction between image and reality had been massaged and managed by press agents and winked at by sympathetic journalists. But it was also compelling quarry for those writers—not necessarily homophobic—who smelled valuable exposés. In 1955, the tabloid Confidential threatened to reveal Hudson’s secret to the public, which would have ruined him utterly. In response, his agent Henry Willson, who was also gay, arranged the star’s marriage to Phyllis Gates, formerly Willson’s secretary, which defused the threat, despite the obvious fact that this did nothing to rewrite Hudson’s past (Meyer 272). But perhaps there is another way to read Rock Hudson’s milk-fed masculinity and the role it played in his commodification. As Meyer notes, Hudson was physically the biggest male star in Hollywood at the time, at 6′ 4″ and 200 pounds, and was consistently photographed in ways that emphasised his heroic proportions; this made him one of the biggest stars of the period in terms of earning power as well. But unlike more hard-­ edged leading men of the 1950s, such as Marlon Brando, whose animal allure was laced with the potential for violence, Hudson was safe, “and provided a less threatening, less sexual model of masculinity” (262), at a time when women were being taught the necessity of fending off male advances in advice columns and books on proper comportment. He was the kind of man one could bring home to meet one’s parents. Meyer quotes Joe Hymans, writing in McCall’s magazine in 1957: “Rock is never cast as the heavy in movies, never appears drunk, and never, never makes passes at a girl. His fans wouldn’t stand for it” (263). He is sexy, but somehow de-sexualised; monumental, but immobile—the stuff of fantasies, but not the kind that might rupture conventionally configured desires. Is it possible that Hudson’s very queerness, both concealed and revealed, was the key to his idealised and highly marketable masculinity, and which made possible his success as a ‘movie star’? Meyer writes: “There were things that heterosexual society wanted from Rock Hudson’s body (a safe date was one) but only under the proviso that the homosexuality underwriting those things remain unspoken and precisely unspeakable” (283). Meyer quotes Dave Lipton, head of publicity at Universal Studios in 1956 when Written on the Wind was being made, in which Hudson played the bland lead character, rather than the more volatile and colourful role

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of his best friend, a role for which he had campaigned: “Rock’s fans … like him because he’s what they want their daughters to marry, or their children’s father to be, or their childhood sweetheart. If we let him break out of that character, they’d howl” (271, emphasis added). It is at once fascinating, instructive, and disturbing to note this nexus of celebrity, publicity, consumption, and profit-making: the ‘star,’ purportedly an actor, and therefore capable of transformation, is packaged by marketing experts for the purposes of playing a fixed, restricted set of roles that are largely a function of his actual personality to satisfy a demanding and discriminating fan base whose tastes have been carefully measured by those experts, and who will accept no deviation regarding the product they regularly consume. As I demonstrate further, this complex mechanism, an interplay of the field called Hollywood, and the habitus of the paying public that makes this field possible, remains largely intact to this day, but with a difference. Celebrity, always at the heart of Hollywood’s functions, has only become more scrutinised, traded, and marketed with the rise of social media. One’s image off-screen has acquired the capacity to overwrite one’s image on it, and either the admission or perception of homosexuality has become a significant determining factor in how actors are regarded, valued, cast, and marketed. The AIDS epidemic, among its other effects, revealed to mainstream society how much of their art and entertainment experience depended upon gay male authorship and interpretation. It is widely acknowledged that many male actors are gay—even more dancers are—and the reasons for this, while fascinating to contemplate, are obviously outside the purview of this work.3 But this statistical fact was revealed horribly and tragically during the crisis in North America, in which thousands of prominent artists in all the performing arts were dying in the most appalling ways. Much has been written of Rock Hudson’s illness and subsequent death from the disease, in the course of which his homosexuality was finally revealed, a common occurrence during the 1980s. It shocked the public and signalled a shift in both awareness and political engagement. His good friend President Ronald Reagan first mentioned the epidemic in 1985, the year in which Hudson revealed the nature of his illness and shortly thereafter died, but otherwise ignored the disease that was killing thousands of gay men who were not celebrities, as well as Haitian immigrants and 3  For a fascinating and cogent discussion of this topic, see David Halperin, How to Be Gay, in particular, “Queer Forever,” 454–457.

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i­ntravenous drug users. The President didn’t speak officially about the AIDS epidemic until 31 May 1987.4 Richard Meyer notes that the photographs of the gaunt, prematurely aged Rock Hudson, now the “face of AIDS” (274), spread across newspapers and magazines, confirmed the widespread notion that his illness was not the result of a virus that destroys the immune system but homosexuality itself: “Closeted through all the years of his celebrity, Rock Hudson’s secret finally emerge[d], Dorian Gray-like, on the surface of his body” (275). Much of the response by journalists, critics, and other public figures to his illness sounds a note of aggrieved betrayal, and reveals at once a homophobic lack of compassion and a remarkable inability to distinguish between the man, the celebrity actor, and the characters he portrayed. Such responses reveal much about the psychic and social functions which celebrity performs for its public, the price of which is actually a denial of the actor’s role as a storyteller. It is this part of Hudson’s tragic story that is of most interest and use to me, because of the potential for such notions to persist in the way we view film actors. Meyer cites sex columnist Ruth Westheimer’s lament that all the thousands of female fans who fantasised about being in Rock’s arms “now have to realize that he never really cared about them” (279). He objects that “rather than scrutinize the extreme over-investment of these spectators in Rock Hudson’s starbody [sic], Westheimer blames Hudson for not reciprocating their desire” (ibid.). Theatre critic Frank Rich complains that Hudson’s natural masculinity on screen, and his gentlemanly portrayal of heterosexual characters, that may have served as inspiration and possibly instruction for countless thousands, was now revealed to be invalid because founded on a lie, performed as they were by a homosexual (278). It was apparently inconceivable to Rich and others that Hudson—and gay men in general—could impart anything of value to notions of the way a man can be in the world.

Out on Screen Explicitly gay and lesbian characters began to appear on screen as a consequence of the liberation movements of the 1960s, but while gays and lesbians were out on screen, their representations were often no more salutary than they had been under the terms of the Production Code, whose power 4  See https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/hillary-clinton-nancy-reaganand-aids (accessed 1 August 2018).

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began to wane in the first years of the 1960s. (It finally came to an end in 1968, when it was replaced by a ratings system.) The film of Mart Crowley’s much-discussed and analysed play The Boys in the Band (1970) deserves mention here. While it portrayed gay men as neurotic, self-­hating, and destructive, it at least gave them visibility as part of a complex and significant community. The Killing of Sister George (1968), a UK production, conveyed similarly problematic images of lesbians. But both films “are important cultural artifacts that … dramatize how homosexual identity was then beginning to emerge from within psychological models of disease and disorder and celebrate itself as … deserving of equal rights” (Benshoff and Griffin 138). And while Hollywood was forced to respond to the pressures exerted by new production in television, the counterculture, the influences of European art cinema, as well as those of American avant-garde film (131), such changes were short-lived, and did not result in any new productive engagement with queer content. Despite lobbying by the Gay Activists’ Alliance and the National Gay Task Force, which urged the industry to abide by a set of guidelines regarding the way queer people were represented, “Hollywood in 1973 was actually withdrawing from the topic … [and] mostly ignored the burgeoning gay rights movement altogether” (154). The early 1980s saw the beginning of significant mainstream production of gay- and lesbian-themed films, a number of which deserve mention. Cruising (1980) featured Al Pacino as a cop hunting a serial killer preying on men in the shadowy S/M leather scene in Manhattan, during which he comes to question his own sexuality. The film caused a storm of outrage in the gay community, and noisy protests were staged to disrupt shooting. “It became known to many (and still is known) as a notoriously homophobic Hollywood film” (Benshoff and Griffin 182). But many commentators responded differently, noting that more than 1600 men who were part of the ‘leather subculture’ participated as extras, and arguing that the film accurately observed the conditions of this particular sexual subculture (183). Steven Davies concurs with this view: “Cruising, when watched now, over thirty years later, is actually quite entertaining and a not-too-unrealistic glimpse into gay life in the pre-AIDS days” (93). Personal Best dealt with lesbian love among athletes, but one of its main characters opted for a heterosexual relationship by the end. And, “while many lesbians were thrilled to see two women onscreen in romantic and sexual situations, others complained that the film was shot in an exploitative manner” (185). This film forms part of a trend that was called ­‘lesbian

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chic,’ in which, as David Savran notes, lesbians, as long as they were reassuringly feminine in presentation, became “stylish, sexy and consumable commodities guaranteed to titillate (this development neatly complements and extends the long history of lesbian pornography marketed to straight men)” (62). The television series The L Word typifies this conversion of the complexities and often—to straight audiences—unsettling aspects of lesbian sexuality and culture into the harmless domestic antics of ‘gay women.’5 Making Love, by gay screenwriter Barry Sandler, was the first Hollywood production to feature men falling in love and having sex, but many found that the film, in seeking to normalise homosexuality—to make gayness ‘safe’ for straight audiences—drifted into banality (186). The film was not a success, but, most disturbing, audiences often reacted so violently to scenes of erotic tenderness between men that near-riots ensued (188). “Homophobia was still commonplace and usually went unchallenged in both Hollywood as well as the rest of the nation” (189). Indeed, Vito Russo, author of the seminal text The Celluloid Closet—made into a documentary that I also cite in this chapter—railed against the homophobia of the 1980s: Anti-gay prejudice may be more prevalent now than at any other time in our history. Never have Hollywood screenwriters felt so secure in their belief that it is acceptable to insult homosexuals, and nowhere has fear and hatred of gay people been more evident than in commercial, mainstream motion pictures. (250)

So much for the inevitability of progress. Queer independent film-making, instigated by unstoppable gay and lesbian auteur directors, and finding distribution through the expanding network of gay and lesbian film festivals, began to produce the first crop of queer-centred narratives of complexity and balance in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Notable examples included Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts (1985), Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1991), Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), Todd Haynes’ Poison (1991), Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992), Rose Troche’s Go Fish (1994), and Cheryl Dunye’s Watermelon Woman (1995). Also of note was Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1991), the remarkable documentary about the drag compe5  See https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0330251/fullcredits?ref_=tt_cl_sm#cast (accessed 31 March 2019).

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titions staged by Black and Hispanic gay men and trans women in New York City. In combination with independent film production from the UK, including Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), James Ivory’s Maurice (1987), and Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991), and films by prolific German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder, North American audiences at last were able to view queer-centred cinematic art. (Note that in a male-­dominated society, communities and practices of resistance tend also to be male-dominated; white male-dominated, in fact. More gay films than lesbian films are made, with more gay men writing about such films than lesbians.) But even indie films needed to turn a profit, and so had to achieve a certain mainstream appeal, which meant that they ran the risk of being rejected as bland and conventional by queer filmgoers in search of narratives that were at once true to life and edgy. Many others—I include myself—found them as welcome as autumn rain after a drought-stricken summer; any sympathetic representation was wholly welcome. The AIDS epidemic spawned a cinematic sub-genre which itself produced problematic effects, at once confounding and re-inscribing associations between (male) homosexuality and pathology. Some of these films, in particular Longtime Companion (1990) and Philadelphia (1993), were mainstream productions with high-profile casts. The latter film generated much controversy: while it played a powerful role in exposing the discrimination suffered by HIV-positive people—and by extension sexual minorities—to a broad audience, it infuriated many AIDS activists, whose tireless and heroic work in battling the epidemic it ignored entirely (Benshoff and Griffin 254). It must be said in passing that, while it is at times productive to subsume the field of television within that of Hollywood, it is just as frequently misleading to do so, as the former medium has demonstrated overall a greater willingness to engage with transgressive narratives and images in terms of gender. This is partly because, as Barrios notes, the financial stakes are not as high (315). Such shows as Oz (1997), Will and Grace (1998), the US version of Queer as Folk (2000), Modern Family (2009), Orange Is the New Black (2013), and Transparent (2014) are some examples of this trend. And while Hollywood mostly refused to deal directly with AIDS in the years when the epidemic was raging out of medical control, television—in particular cable television—took its place as the medium wherein sympathetic narratives that dealt with the crisis could be seen (e.g. An Early Frost, made in 1985). It could also be argued, however, that many

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such shows, including Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003) and its sequel Queer Eye (2018) simply recirculate “time-worn stereotypes of gay men as fashion designers, interior decorators and hairdressers” (Benshoff and Griffin 16). The 1990s and early 2000s saw a new commercialisation of queer-­ themed storytelling, resulting in a crop of what Davies disparages as “dubious, sitcom-style gay comedies” (153). This trend reflected both a growing social acceptance of homosexuality and producers’ perception of gays and lesbians—especially gays—as a profitable new target market. But the first decade of the new millennium also witnessed a significant shift to material of real substance, such as Michael Cuesta’s L.I.E., John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, both from 2001, Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven (2002), and HBO’s production of Angels in America (2003), directed by Mike Nichols and featuring top-drawer stars such as Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson.

Playing Gay and Playing Straight A true watershed moment in gay cinema was achieved with Brokeback Mountain (2005), based on a short story by Annie Proulx, co-written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, directed by Ang Lee, and starring attractive, masculine, up-and-coming—and heterosexual—actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger.6 More than just a film, Brokeback Mountain was an international cultural event, as Australian film scholar Scott McKinnon noted regarding its impact in his home country (171–178). It normalised gay male love and sex as no other film had ever done, probing the negotiations and struggles that are common to all intimate relationships. And it depicted how homophobia, both internalised and socially enacted, kills—literally in this case—such intimacy between men. It also sparked debate and discussion: Its reception lay at the heart of the paradox of gay life in the first decade of the 2000s: that gay culture and identity were so accepted as to be thought by some to be on the brink of extinction, and yet that homophobia and heterosexism remained within the accepted boundaries of public and political discourses. (171)

6

 See https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388795/ (accessed 7 August 2018).

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I recall the overwhelming impact this film had on me when it was first released. I have reviewed it a number of times since then and noted its staying power. But consider, once again, that the weightiest queer film of the early 2000s was a gay film: it is hard to imagine a story about lesbians achieving similar profile as a cultural object; our most compelling narratives are still mostly sexed as male. One remarkable exception to this is Thelma and Louise (1991); while not explicitly a lesbian story it is uniquely transgressive as a narrative of female rebellion against the constraints of patriarchy. Brokeback Mountain was nominated in numerous categories for an armful of prizes, including eight Academy Awards. But while it won top honours as best picture at the Golden Globes and the British Academy of Film and Television Awards among others, it won only three Oscars—for music, adapted screenplay and direction—and failed to win the most coveted prize for Best Picture. This snub was widely regarded as proof of Hollywood’s profound, long-standing, and still vital homophobia (Davies 188). What does the landscape look like today? In terms of the oscillation to which I referred as part of my introduction to this topic, we are, plainly, in a period of relative relaxation; of freer flow in terms of how gender variance is portrayed and received. However, much remains to be done. I suggest that conditions have not significantly changed since the release of Brokeback Mountain in 2005: straight actors almost invariably play the gay characters who do appear, while gay actors are relegated to playing sidekicks who may or may not be stereotypes. As I have cause to repeat a number of times, I find myself in a vexing predicament: the argument of this book is founded in large part on the notion that any actor of skill and ability can conceivably play any role. But this could only be realised under conditions that were genuinely inclusive and free of various kinds of discrimination. Gyllenhaal and Ledger—whose untimely death only three years after the film was released still stings—delivered stellar work in Brokeback Mountain. But would the film have been as big a success if it had employed actors who were known to be gay? One might just as well turn this question around and ask: how likely is it that openly gay actors could become bankable stars of the stature of Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, who might be hired to play the leads in such an ambitious film in the first place? Is it not plausible that casting attractive heterosexual stars would be more acceptable—and in fact be seen as somehow heroic—to mainstream audiences? It was surely safer for such audiences to behold

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straight men simulating—fleetingly and very unconvincingly, one must note—sex acts that would have been simply too uncomfortable to watch if they had been performed by actors known to be gay. The thought that those men ‘actually do such things in real life’ might have proved to be too much for mainstream audiences, and fatally undermined the credibility of the scenes between the two characters. Conversely, actors known or perceived to be gay are essentially forbidden from playing the romantic leads in heterocentrist dramas. Is this perhaps a rash statement? Many gay and lesbian actors continue to hide the truth of their sexual orientation, even in this era of marriage equality. Actor and director Jodie Foster finally came out in 2007, albeit in a very roundabout manner, despite the fact that it had been widely known for years that she was a lesbian in a long-term relationship (Davies 204). Despite years of rumours Kevin Spacey refused to come out publicly as a gay man; he was forced to do so in the face of an accusation of sexual misconduct against a minor, one of many similar subsequent allegations.7 That hugely successful actors continue to maintain a façade of heterosexuality is either comical or pathetic, depending on one’s perspective. This bias is more pronounced in the case of male stars, in accordance with the sexist expectation that men perform sexual agency and dominance. Mainstream actors are still meant to behave like ‘real men,’ and suspicions about their sexual orientation may contaminate their reputations. If an actor is brave enough to come out and become widely known as gay, he may be considered unqualified to play heterosexual roles convincingly. Rupert Everett’s experience is perhaps the best illustration of this problem: one of the very few top-rank stars to come out his career suffered notably as a result, despite his good looks, acceptably masculine bearing and evident acting ability. As Davies notes, “his career has recently been confined to playing homosexual roles or dressing up in drag. He claims to have lost major roles because of his sexuality” (204). Davies goes on to speculate about whether an openly gay actor could play James Bond, that epitome of masculine bravado: “No chance,” he concludes (ibid.). Newsweek writer Ramin Setoodeh caused a stir in 2010  in an article entitled “Straight Jacket” in which he argued that openly gay actor Jonathan Groff was fundamentally unbelievable as a straight man and love interest for the character Rachel Berry, played by Lea Michele, on the 7  See http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-st-kevin-spacey-20171031-story. html (accessed 27 August 2018).

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popular TV show Glee. Upon viewing this material, I found his assessment to be inaccurate and unfair. But more pointedly, Setoodeh, who is himself gay, was re-inscribing prejudicial notions rather than challenging the society that harbours them. As Mark O’Connell complained, the writer “had the opportunity to invite readers to explore and question audience reactions to gender non-conformity in a straight, male-dominated society … Instead, he indicted the gender-nonconforming actors themselves for not being better at conforming” (242). Much as I agree with this position I must note that, in his conclusion at least, the journalist was simply stating an uncomfortable truth: “If an actor of the stature of George Clooney came out of the closet tomorrow, would we still accept him as a heterosexual leading man? It’s hard to say. Or maybe not. Doesn’t it mean something that no openly gay actor like that exists?” (Setoodeh). One of the few openly gay stars, of film as well as theatre, is Sir Ian McKellen, who recalls the consequences of his coming out: I became a better actor, and my film career took off in a way that I couldn’t have expected. You can’t lie about something so central to yourself without harming yourself. That’s why I can say to other actors: if you really want to be a good actor and a successful one, and you’re gay, let everybody know about it. (Davies 203)

And yet, as he notes, “there’s not one [leading A-list actor] in America [who is gay]. Not one” (ibid.). That his message is not being heard in Hollywood is corroborated by the interview subjects in the documentary Gay Hollywood: The Last Taboo (Kazamia). “If [actors] were outed as being lesbian or being gay, it could limit what they could do on the screen, because people wouldn’t buy them in the part,” notes James Robert Parish, author of The Hollywood Book of Scandals. Paul Boyd concurs that coming out can have a measurable effect on box office earnings: “If you come out and say, I’m gay and I’m proud of it, and you have a movie coming out, that’s going to cut your box office potentially in half.” David Wallace observes that “the Hollywood establishment will do anything it can to see to it that the real facts about Hollywood never become so public that they will affect the business of Hollywood.” This effect is based on the mechanism that is at work in the public imagination whereby fantasies are geared to celebrity: the moviegoer wants to believe it could be him or her in such intimate relation to a recognised star. Ken Baker observes that “it’s not necessarily homophobia … it’s a matter of audiences not being able to

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separate the actor from the character they’re playing.” Camille Paglia accords with this view, noting that coming out “curtails the fantasy life of the mass audience,” because it is sexuality that drives the cult of celebrity. How much has really changed since 1985, the year of Rock Hudson’s death? Therefore, gay actors can’t play gay characters, because it creates discomfort in audiences that they actually ‘do things like that’; nor can they play leading roles because they won’t be convincing in them. In both cases, one notes the failure of the mass audience to receive a fictional representation without the intrusion of the real lives of actors, or what is presumed to be real. Perhaps everything one needs to know about mainstream American attitudes can be captured in the question posed by David Thomson in Gay Hollywood…: “Could someone be president if they were gay?” The answer to this seems obvious: while the election of a bi-racial president in 2008 represented a triumph over discriminatory attitudes such success was not repeated in 2016 when a woman aimed for the top job in the land.8 (This seems to suggest that America is even more misogynistic than it is racist, a daunting notion indeed.) Hollywood is a business enterprise first and foremost and therefore must act in its best interests as such. As Richard Barrios observes, “despite the so-called mainstreaming of gay life in the twenty-first century … commercial Hollywood movies deal very little with homosexuality” (315– 316). He argues that queer films are not and have never been good box office, a fact that is not necessarily attributable to homophobia; rather, audiences want movies to afford them forms of escape and ‘gay films’ are simply too real (315). But is not this rejection itself a component of homophobia? In their conclusion Benshoff and Griffin seem to concur with this assessment: “Stereotypes that have influenced depictions of homosexuality in past decades have persisted to the present day. Producers in Hollywood still worry that queers are not good box office, and such worries help keep people in the industry closeted about their own sexuality” (288). This state of affairs is being perpetuated by all parties in the industry. In the next chapter, I consider the construction of male femininity and refer to David Thorpe’s fascinating documentary Do I Sound Gay?, in which he explores the phenomenon of ‘gay voice,’ as it has come to be called. As 8  Much has been written about the role that misogyny played in Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss. See, for example, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/15/ america-hillary-clinton-misogyny (accessed 9 August 2018).

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part of his research, Thorpe travels to Hollywood to interview both gay actors and dialect coaches. Noted voice coach Bob Corff reveals that between twenty and fifty actors a year come to him to sound “less gay.” He acknowledges that, ironically, while many casting directors and producers are themselves gay they won’t cast someone whose gender presentations are not solidly convincing, “because people in Middle America won’t be able to accept that.” Corff begins to teach Thorpe elements of what is called the Standard American Melody, used “by people who get other people to do what they want,” that is, the set of speech patterns used by ruling class men. This is the model to which male actors ought to aspire if they wish to be successful in Hollywood. In a moment of excruciating comedy, he directs the filmmaker to echo the phrase “Stop it!” repeatedly to get him to sound more authoritative, with no noticeable effect on the sibilance of Thorpe’s ‘s.’ Jeff Hiller, an out gay actor who does not present as typically masculine, notes the thin slice of the casting pie that is left to him: a gay character that is a ‘meaty role’ will go to a straight actor, which, of course, excludes him. Equally, he will not be cast as the gay guy with the “awesome body,” so he gets what is left over, the “sad, self-hating, bitter queen.” When asked how he feels about this situation he says, “well, at least I’m working.” It is a galling paradox: in decades past no A-list actor would risk his reputation playing a gay character; now that gay narratives and characters have achieved marketability producers and directors seek heterosexual actors to play them. The requirement for bankable actors to present with all the conventional markers of gender is easily verified by tuning in to the red carpet prologue to the Academy Awards. In fact, this particular pressure has only increased in recent decades: women’s highly elaborated femininity is more in evidence than ever. And part of the equipment required for male actors to play lead roles today is the acquisition of a muscled physique, a kind of corporeal costume that has become an indispensable component of masculine marketability. And, in further reference to James Bond, it is instructive to note the evolution of Ian Fleming’s character over the years, from Sean Connery to the debonair and slightly effete Roger Moore, to Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan. The actors who have played this character have, overall, become less hirsute and more beefy, culminating in the hairless, blunt muscularity of Daniel Craig. I therefore come full circle and conclude that it was easier, perhaps altogether better, to be a queer actor in Hollywood in the 1920s and early

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1930s than any other time, including the first decades of the twenty-­ first century.

Conclusion I noted earlier the inability of the mass audience to separate the actor from his role—to understand, in effect, the basic operations of ‘play-acting’— such that, no matter the transformative ability of an actor known to be gay his performance as a heterosexual romantic lead will fail to be convincing. This inability to appreciate the artifice of cinema is both astonishing and unfortunate. But it is also deeply troubling, because it betrays attitudes that have the capacity to infect the popular conception of actors in general, not simply those who work in the hyper-realistic domain of feature films. The tendency to cast straight actors to play gay characters is at work in the theatre as well, and is likely to be more in evidence the more mainstream the theatre in question. The hole-in-the-wall production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch I saw in Vancouver in 2003 starred a gay actor of great power and ability named Greg Armstrong-Morris: who? I acknowledge that openly gay Neil Patrick Harris originated the role of Hedwig on Broadway, but by the time I saw the show in December 2014—loaded with technical bells and whistles that didn’t necessarily add anything to the impact of the work—the lead had been taken over by Michael C.  Hall, noted star of Dexter and Six Feet Under, in which he also played a gay character. As John Clum observes in the case of plays with evident gay content, “it has been a tradition to cast what we might call ‘openly heterosexual’ actors in leading homosexual roles as a way of defusing the threatening aspects of the play for a mainstream audience” (12). But to return to the spine of this book: the inventory of gender-based discrimination retold in this chapter is, from a contemporary perspective, appalling and outrageous, and has caused untold damage over decades. But while it has surely become attenuated, it is still actively exerting its effects in theatre and film. Can we claim to be impervious to such effects in post-secondary theatre instruction? Hollywood casts a long shadow over the generality of acting in North America, including those who teach it: what actors do, who is qualified to be an actor, and how they ought to be prepared for their craft. Instructors in acting for the camera, like the casting directors for whom they themselves may audition, routinely refer to a performer’s ‘hit,’ a violent term that is intended to capture the particular quality that an actor projects on screen. There is an essentialising

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component to this concept: one cannot, it seems, forgo one’s hit in favour of another; one is stuck with it. And, as one might imagine, it can reinforce oppressive stereotypes, which, in turn, determine what one is qualified to play. Such attitudes and the practices in which they result could not be more at odds with the spirit of this book, which is to invest belief in the power of the actor to project any quality her ability and skill may allow, even given the photographic dispositions of film. I propose that we establish a set of conditions of practice whereby we no longer offer pieces of advice such as these to student actors: “You’re quite the tomboy: could you maybe grow your hair, act more girly?” “You read as quite swish: you’re going to have to tone down the gay thing.”

CHAPTER 4

Gender Dissidence

As Judith Butler has observed, ‘intelligible’ genders “are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire” (Gender Trouble 23). By means of this totalising regime, certain identities—those which thwart this linearity—are proscribed and forbidden, and yet they persist in human societies across space and time. I have chosen to call these identities ‘gender dissident’: they define and are defined by those identities that are ‘gender normative.’ Such terms only have meaning in relation to one another: like negatively and positively charged particles, and like other constructed binaries, such as those of ‘race’, they are bound together dynamically by their difference. The order in which one discusses topics in a series can be perceived as a marker of their relative value to the speaker, but this can be read in opposing ways: do we save the topic with the most weight for last? Or is the first item of which we speak that which has the highest implicit value for us? In this chapter, I have chosen to consider gender dissidence in the order that most closely concerns my own experience, given the personal, ‘auto-­ ethnographic’ disposition of this book, which seems the most honest way to approach the subject. I begin with an analysis of ‘effeminacy’ in men, continue with a discussion of ‘butch’ self-expressions in women, and conclude with a consideration of transgender matters.

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Alexandrowicz, Acting Queer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29318-5_4

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Male ‘Femininity’: How You Walk and How You Talk Many people in contemporary North American society feel some degree of discomfort with male subjects who display gender markers that do not conform to what is conventionally considered ‘masculine.’ A male who performs elements of the feminine will be referred to, with distaste and disapproval, as ‘effeminate,’ coded term that suggests one either is or might be homosexual. And as Ramsay Burt notes, it “has often been used against gay men in a derogatory and injurious way to suggest their failure to behave like proper men” (168). In engaging with the issue of gender-­ based discrimination, it is instructive to consider that the word ‘effeminate’ carries a pejorative connotation that ‘feminine’ does not. As David Gere points out, the term would never be applied to a woman: “a woman cannot become womanish, as that is already her condition” (358). Rather, it “is an epithet flung exclusively at aberrations of masculinity. It is never equivalent to the female, but is reserved, rather, for the male rendered ‘not-male’” (358). Merriam-Webster online offers the following definitions of the word: 1. having feminine qualities untypical of a man: not manly in appearance or manner; 2. marked by an unbecoming delicacy or over-refinement, as in or (of a man or boy) having traits, tastes, habits, etc., traditionally considered feminine, as softness or delicacy. 3. characterized by excessive softness, delicacy, self-indulgence, etc.: effeminate luxury. (“Effeminate”) Evidently that which is “untypical” is a negative attribute. “Delicacy” in men is “unbecoming,” and, while a degree of “refinement” is acceptable, one imagines, “over-refinement” is not. And further, it is inappropriate for men to behave with “softness or delicacy,” for these are clearly feminine attributes. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) offers the following: “Womanish, unmanly, enervated, feeble; self-indulgent, voluptuous; unbecomingly delicate or over-refined” (“Effeminate”). Note the emphasis on physical weakness, the crossover with Merriam-Webster in the matter of delicacy and over-refinement, as well as the addition of new terms that concern the operation of the senses: to be ‘effeminate’ is also to be

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“voluptuous,” which the OED defines as “gratification of the senses, esp. in a refined or luxurious manner; marked by indulgence in sensual pleasures; luxuriously sensuous.” One might take from this that to be fully embodied, fully present in the moment of sensual awareness—as actors are constantly exhorted to be—is, in some way, to be unmanly, and therefore like a woman. In order to explore how ‘effeminacy’ is actualised in the subject, I turn here to a work based in dance, but incorporating many theatrical elements, for a queer-framed performative lens on the topic. African-American choreographer Joe Goode’s renowned solo 29 effeminate gestures, first performed in 1987, and still regularly revived to this day, includes a series of expansive and flamboyant gestures integrated with changes in posture and placement of weight repeated a number of times with variations, an interweaving of text and movement which forms a kind of catalogue of—and amounting to a manifesto about—effeminacy as it is commonly understood and recognised in North America. In one passage, the dancer performs the series of moves while speaking a text composed of incomplete sentences in the conditional tense, which suggest that effeminacy is about various kinds of excess: “if you talk too much … if you laugh too much … if you feel too much … if you gesticulate too much.”1 Later on, the dancer performs the same series of movements while creating the sound effects of gunfire and explosions, as though to contrast the expression of effeminacy with that most masculine of pastimes, making war. The gestures are then integrated into a long passage of sweeping virtuoso choreography that forms a significant portion of the solo. David Gere has written astutely about this piece in 29 Effeminate Gestures: Choreographer Joe Goode and the Heroism of Effeminacy. He argues that effeminacy may be defined as various kinds of excess: of emotional expression and of physical articulation. The rectilinear is masculine, while that which is curvilinear is feminine. Symmetry is masculine, while its opposite is feminine (351). If the masculine man is meant to contain certain emotions—and the gestural means of their expression—then the ‘effeminate’ man expresses emotion freely through expansive and highly articulated gestures. The irony of this that we train actors—in ‘acting,’ ‘movement,’ and ‘voice’—to be sensitive, posturally and gesturally articulate, and emotionally expressive, but there is clearly a problematic tension between what may emerge from this process of training, and what it is 1

 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFmc2ujYmPs (accessed 17 June 2017).

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acceptable for young men to express, both in the field of theatre training and in the characters they are required to play. We want young actors to be expressive, but not too expressive because this capacity may destabilise their status as men. In his discussion of the work of UK-based DV8 Physical Theatre in The Male Dancer… Ramsay Burt refers to the “spectre of male failure” in terms of roles that may make men appear “hysterical and ecstatic” (51). These are the component elements of the curse that the dominant culture lays upon men considered in some way ‘effeminate.’ By contrast, 29 Effeminate Gestures… makes a resolute claim to the achievement of gestural freedom through exaggeration, hence the inclusion of the word ‘heroism’ in the title: “the effeminate male figure in this solo celebrates an unmistakable personal power” (357). According to Gere, the ‘effeminate’ male embodies a more complete shift than the transvestite because he “cross-gestures rather than cross-dresses” (376). There is more at stake, as his gender rebellion is embodied rather than achieved via costume. Therefore the solo also represents a move towards establishing “a coalition between women and homosexual men as oppressed classes” (362). Performing ‘effeminacy,’ he writes, “is a fundamentally defiant activity” (367).

‘Gay Voice’ While ‘effeminacy’ is typically identified via movement and gesture, it may also communicate itself via vocal expressions; feminine men, who are presumed to be gay, may be part of an audible as well as a visible minority. The term ‘gay voice’ has arrived in common parlance to denote this phenomenon. The voice, obviously a fundamental part of the actor’s instrument, is a key expression of individual identity, and is as liable to the configuring effects of cultural forces as any other faculty of the person. Some years ago I took a voice workshop with renowned teacher Richard Armstrong, who conveyed to the class, using the piano keyboard, the pitch range in which male and female voices actually overlap, despite the fact that women learn to pitch their voices towards the high end of their range while men do the opposite. Filmmaker David Thorpe decided to explore his own ‘gay voice’ in a fascinating documentary entitled Do I Sound Gay? In the course of his research, he interviewed a number of speech specialists. What he found proved to be both funny and enlightening, and very useful for my ­purposes:

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it offers intriguing and convincing evidence about the ways that the features of gender are acquired early in life, but that may nonetheless be modulated or discarded in favour of others later on, as part of a more or less conscious process of self-revision in response to changing social pressures. Thorpe’s dissatisfaction with the way he spoke, and his decision to seek professional help in order to speak in ways that did not immediately reveal his sexual status, was a function of finding himself single in his mid-forties after a painful break-up; it was therefore part of a crisis in self-esteem. ‘Sounding gay’ was identified as a root cause of his lack of self-confidence, and therefore with being single. He proposes that gay men in groups who exhibit ‘gay voice’ sound like a herd of “braying ninnies” and wonders how anyone could “respect, let alone fall in love with” one of them. This confession of gender-based self-hatred will ring true to any gay man who has shuddered at hearing his recorded voice, or experienced overwhelming relief that he does not in fact ‘suffer from gay voice,’ and therefore is not carrying this damning and uncontrollable feature of ‘effeminacy.’ Equivalent to an accent, it is a giveaway of presumed difference, and one may therefore become a target of exclusion, mockery, or even violence. David Halperin considers the case of an acquaintance who records his outgoing message “thirty times over, until he’s sure his voice reveals no trace of effeminacy” (55). Thorpe interviews gay journalist and advice columnist Dan Savage, who notes that moving and speaking in accordance with strictly enforced heteronormativity was, and continues to be, a matter of survival for many young queer people, and is carried into adulthood: “It’s how you walk and how you talk, those two things.” Thorpe interviews Zach King, a feminine fifteen-year-old youth in Chillicothe, Ohio, who, since the third grade, has endured severe bullying, including violence, but continues to express himself proudly and bravely: “I’m comfortable in my own skin: I’m a diva! And they don’t like that.” But despite his bravado, his mother admits, “I see the pain, I know it’s there.” David Sedaris confides that every time he calls the front desk of a hotel—an act to which he resorts with great frequency, given his extensive book tours—he is almost invariably mistaken for a woman. “Do I really sound like a woman?” he wonders. “I don’t think I sound like a woman. I think I sound like a very small man, like about this high,” he says, measuring a five-inch span with his hands. Thorpe’s good friends Alberto and Sam, who are a couple, ask him pointedly—and poignantly—“Why don’t you just accept how you sound?

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There’s nothing wrong with you.” But at the same time Alberto admits that “I have a sort of generic self-loathing that is created around my gayness, and my voice is part of it.” It is stunning to consider the depth of such self-loathing, a psychic force that has abided with and shaped gay men from childhood, when they first became aware of having failed fundamental tests of being masculine. Thorpe’s interviews with gay men in various public places reveal that the reasons for this are widely understood: men are the dominant sex, women the subordinate, and if a man talks like a woman, he is committing an act of gender treason, relinquishing his congenital right to superior status. These men also make it very clear that feminine features in men are not sexually attractive and are in fact a ‘turn-­ off.’ (More on this below.) Dan Savage confirms that gay male loathing of feminine behaviour is a function of misogyny: “They want to prove to the culture that they’re not not-men, that they’re good because they’re not like women … And then they’ll punish gay men whom they perceive to be feminine in any way.” Thorpe admits that while he has fought for decades to embrace his subjectivity as a gay man, “this voice thing still plagues me.” And Sedaris confesses to the following: “I’m embarrassed to say this, but sometimes somebody will say, ‘I didn’t know you were gay,’ and it’s like, ‘Why does that make me feel so good?’ And I hate myself for thinking that.” Fame and celebrity do not seem to have an ameliorating effect on gay self-loathing. Despite the fact that his closest friends urged him to accept his voice the way it was, Thorpe continued with documenting the project to change his speech patterns. His work with specialists in dialect reduction for professional actors amounted to trying to code-switch—analysis of this term is undertaken in the next chapter—in order, essentially, to ‘pass as straight,’ an objective to which Thorpe readily admits. One of these specialists agrees to assist him in pursuit of this goal, without acknowledging any of its political dimensions. Thorpe can’t recall what he sounded like in childhood, growing up in Columbia, South Carolina, but does remember that in middle school he began to be called a ‘faggot,’ a particularly vicious insult then and now (see the discussion of “Fag Discourse” further). People of his generation grew up watching highly successful gay celebrities, including Paul Lynde, Liberace, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Truman Capote, all of whom were decidedly feminine, were notable exemplars of ‘gay voice,’ and were in fact known to be gay, even though no element of this was ever openly ­discussed.

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Wealth and celebrity notwithstanding, the idea of growing up to be like one of them was anathema: “I knew it was taboo to resemble them in any way. I cleaned up my act, and I stopped getting called a faggot.” His friends and relatives concur that he did not ‘sound gay’ when he was an adolescent, but that he does sound gay now. “How and when did I begin to sound gay?” Where does ‘gay voice’ come from? If speech patterns— like almost everything else in our society—are gendered, how are they produced? When we are growing up we emulate certain speakers and not others. Prof. Ron Smyth, a linguist at the University of Toronto, recalls that his brother liked to spend time with their father, going to his workshop, while he himself liked to stay home reading, helping his mother with the baking, and secretly listening to her phone conversations: “Guess who sounds gayer?” His research is concerned with how sexual orientation may be linked to subtle differences in how people produce speech sounds, what are called ‘micro-variations.’ This tendency amounts to an increased investment in articulation and is part of what forms the way masculine and feminine speech patterns are differentiated. Vocal articulation links very clearly with the kinds of physical articulation that Joe Goode documents in 29 Effeminate Gestures. I recall that when I began to associate with Francophone Quebecers on a regular basis in the 1990s, and was able to deploy the French I had studied all through public, middle, and high school, I was able to understand the women better than the men; the latter sounded as though they were rolling pebbles in their mouths as they spoke. One of the features of this set of speech patterns is called a ‘lisp,’ although lisping per se—allowing the tongue to protrude between the teeth when forming an ‘s,’ resulting instead in the digraph ‘th’—does not really capture the elongated pronunciation of this consonant. It is better described as ‘sibilant,’ and is considered to be a form of ‘feminine’ pronunciation, and therefore “gender-inappropriate,” according to Smyth. Thorpe and Sedaris—and I as well, by the way—recall being sent to the ‘speech teacher’ in public school to correct this perceived impediment. Sedaris realises that all the students who were kept after school for this remedial activity were incipient gay boys. However, like any number of other markers of gender, ‘gay voice’ is not necessarily linked to sexual orientation, but it is part of a stereotype that is applied to gay men. Smyth argues that this set of speech patterns may be found as often among heterosexual men, and refers to a study in which the

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rate of accuracy in correlating speech styles to sexual orientation was only about 60%. In support of this finding, Thorpe introduces us to two friends of his. One of them, Chris, has a high, light voice, “all treble, no bass,” as he says, and is often mistaken for a woman on the phone; nonetheless he is heterosexual and married with children. He reveals that he grew up in an ashram and that most of his immediate adult role models until the age of twelve were female. By contrast, Thorpe’s friend Matt was raised in a family of four boys, played sports as a child and teenager, and presents as conventionally masculine, despite the fact that he is gay. Thorpe admits that he “would love to sound like him.” Stand-up comedian Margaret Cho recalls that her Korean father laboured mightily to rid himself of his accent, desperately wanting to fit in—to become “fully American.” African-American news anchor Dan Lemon deliberately worked to eliminate his particular drawl when he began working in television; when he caught traces of it, he felt he sounded “lazy,” acknowledging that this formed part of an objectionable stereotype. And yet when he goes home his family and friends often complain, “You talk like a white guy!” Racism equates with homophobia in terms of the ‘code-switching’ that is required in order to fit in linguistically. And there is a significant overlap with the factor of class, because a wealthy man, who is likely to be educated, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan, has time to drawl over and elongate his vowel sounds. Kenji Yoshino, author of Covering, explains that the title of his book refers to the process whereby members of stigmatised groups try to reconfigure features of their self-presentation to conform to the terms of the majority culture. As Margaret Cho observes, thinking of her father, the price of this may be anxiety and self-hatred, which may persist across generations. As acting pedagogues we need to ask this question: are we inflicting the same kinds of disfiguring practices on our students? Thorpe’s flamboyant choreographer friend, identified solely as ‘Miguel,’ demands to know, as much as good friends Sam and Alberto, what Thorpe thinks he is doing: having spent years working to attain self-acceptance, he is now resolutely in pursuit of the same self-conscious performance of hypermasculinity that marks much of gay culture, something Miguel rejects as a pervasive, oppressive force, one that he finds “so ungenerous and so unloving.” Thorpe makes an intriguing discovery when he interviews one of his cousins and a best friend from college: he began to ‘sound gay’ when he came out. Cousin Gil recalls that “in September of 1993 you sounded like

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a straight boy from an academic family in South Carolina, and by May you were sounding pretty gay.” His old friend Gaby remembers that when she came out as a lesbian she bought a black leather jacket, and suggests that his assumption of a ‘gay accent’ was the vocal equivalent. Another friend from this time felt that he was trying to advertise the fact that he was gay by deliberately speaking in a recognisably and even stereotypically gay manner—that it was the voice of an ‘impostor.’ How does this shift occur? In what measure is it conscious or unconscious? It seems to be a bit of both: “Men can learn to ‘sound gay’ from being with gay men,” notes Smyth, referring to the practice of ‘camp speech, a collective behaviour in which gay men speak in an exaggerated way and imitate female stars of film and pop music. (‘Camp performance’ is considered next.) What does the acquisition of elements of another gender—other than the one socially assigned according to sex—have to tell us about the way the features of gender accrue to the sexed body in general? If gender is a kind of doing, can one learn to do it differently? And how might this inform how we think about acting and its pedagogy? In the first chapter of Gender Trouble, Judith Butler explores various feminist positions on the construction of gender in the subject: is gender inscribed deterministically on passive bodies, in alignment with biological sex, or is there a volitional aspect to its acquisition (11–12)? As she notes, the “controversy over the meaning of construction appears to founder on the conventional philosophical polarity between free will and determinism” (12). Indeed, as she observes, the gender/sex construct in which we are formed seems to preclude discursive measures with which to explicate it at all; it evades language altogether. Butler’s study of gender is rooted in the theory of its ‘performativity,’ about which there has been much discussion and debate; and also confusion, in particular with its relation to ‘performance.’ She has intervened extensively in this debate, which I explore in some detail in Chap. 5. For my present purposes, I cite her clarification on ‘performativity’ versus ‘performance’ in Bodies That Matter, first published in 1993, three years after Gender Trouble: “performativity is neither free play nor theatrical self-­ presentation; nor can it be equated with performance” (59). But David Thorpe’s story—and the evidence of many other gay men whose gender expression shifted in response to varying social permissions, prohibitions, or prompts—seems to suggest that while gender is imprinted compulsorily it may also be adopted through a process of more or less conscious choice. In her Preface to the 1999 edition of Gender Trouble, Butler herself seems

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to suggest this: she observes that “performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual” (xv), and in her note to this observation she concedes that the “ritual dimension of performativity is allied with the notion of the habitus in Pierre Bourdieu’s work, something which I only came to realize after the fact of writing this text” (n8, 192). As we have seen, habitus is indeed is some ways a function of more or less conscious choice. By the end of the film, after all the work he has done, and all the money he has spent, Thorpe finds that he has achieved a goal he had not necessarily anticipated: he has reconnected with his voice, his body—with himself—and his voice is deeper, more resonant and more confident. However, as friends of his note, he still sounds “like a lady talking … a very handsome lady.” The voice is in its mysterious ways a profound expression of the self, and acceptance of one is predicated upon acceptance of the other. Dan Savage concludes that “for many gay men it’s the last vestige of internalized homophobia, this hatred of how they sound. But, what’s wrong with sounding like you are who you are? Sounding like a gay man?” It is crucial that instructors of voice and speech in the acting academy learn to embrace vocal as well as physical diversity of gender expressions, even as they are teaching students skills that will give them the greatest possible range in their performances. That is, while equipping themselves to face the often discriminatory practices of the profession, they must also safeguard acceptance of differences that may be a core component of their ‘gender home.’

‘Straight-Looking, Straight-Acting’ In patriarchal cultures, where the feminine is held in low regard, a man who behaves like a woman is worthy of contempt, not simply because he is performing the role of the lesser sex, but because he has elected to divest himself of male privilege. And a man who gives up his male sex materially and irrevocably in the case of sex reassignment surgery is, as a character observes in Orange Is the New Black, “like [someone] winning the lottery and giving back the ticket.”2 The compelling exceptions to this rule—which must be noted, but cannot be considered closely here—are the drag queen and female impersonator, differing types of gender renegades whose performances, dependent 2  See https://www.tvfanatic.com/quotes/shows/orange-is-the-new-black/episodes/lesbian-request-denied/ (accessed 15 December 2017).

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upon the cult of mediated female celebrity, have significant cultural and economic capital. Their work forms a highly profitable industry because its audiences are mainstream, that is to say, largely white, middle-class, and heterosexual. The work of the late Craig Russell, the late Charles Pierce, and Barry Humphries—among many others—as well as RuPaul’s reality­TV shows RuPaul’s Drag Race and Drag School, the two versions of the movie The Birdcage and the musical inspired by it, La Cage aux Folles, as well as the film Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, are prime examples of this phenomenon, and there are many more. According to John Clum, drag, at least on stage, makes homosexuality safe (29). And yet, as Judith Butler cleverly points out, “the sight of a transvestite on stage can compel pleasure and applause, while the sight of the same transvestite on the seat next to us on the bus can compel fear, rage, even violence” (Performative Acts… 410). By contrast, a ‘tomboy’ is accorded a kind of grudging admiration—at least in pre-pubescence—because she evinces aspirations of movement upward to the status of the male. One must also consider recent and current American television shows, such as Will and Grace, Glee, and Modern Family, where gay characters are portrayed sympathetically. While one might argue that these presentations merely reinforce stereotypes—they rarely represent heterosexual men who are gender dissident, for example—they nonetheless present images of gay men modelling alternative masculinities. But despite such significant shifts as the achievement of marriage equality, and the appearance of queer characters in various forms of popular culture, homophobia, effemiphobia, and transphobia are potent forces operating in North American society. I propose that not much has changed in most high schools since 2005 when C.J. Pascoe wrote Dude, You’re a Fag. Further, gay men are not necessarily champions of those among their number who do not present conventional correspondences of gender to sex. Traditional masculinity is a highly regarded and prized commodity of the body and of self-presentation in most male homosexual communities, certainly in North America. This has a long tradition in gay theatre, where conventionally masculine characters are portrayed as powerful and charismatic, while those of a manifestly feminine disposition are construed as clowns, or are simply absent. As John Clum notes, bad boy gay playwright Joe Orton “did not like effeminacy or camp caricatures. Men were to be masculine. Orton’s untying of homosexuality from the farce queen is as much his own erotic desire for masculine men and dislike of effeminacy as it is a political statement” (105). Social scientists have demonstrated the

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truth of this in various studies. Brennan et al. made the following statement in their study of gay men in search of the muscular ideal: “Being masculine and muscular are highly valued qualities among gay and bisexual men, particularly in Western cultures and in major urban centers that are likely to house a larger population of gay and bisexual men” (2). Indeed, effeminacy is often as despised in the gay male world as it is in much of the rest of the culture, as Tim Bergling explores in Sissyphobia\: Gay Men and Effeminate Behavior. ‘Straight-looking’ and ‘straight-acting’ are terms commonly found in personal profiles on gay dating and sex websites; they denote the high value of the owner, and imply pity and contempt for those in the marketplace of persons and bodies who have/are neither. In Chap. 1, “No Femmes Need Apply,” he reports on the findings of a survey of such ads and profiles: “masculine-themed ads accounted for nearly 40 per cent of the total, while feminine-themed ads, though present, barely registered at 1 or 2 per cent” (13). Further, he found that effemiphobia correlated directly with misogynistic attitudes: those men who were most dismissive of gay male femininity were also the most negative in their attitudes to women. He concludes, “we dislike effeminate men first and foremost because they are behaving like women” (58). In How to Be Gay, David Halperin laments “the current tendency in gay male culture to keep upping the standards of acceptable gay masculinity, requiring gay desirability to depend on increasingly desperate performances of stolid, brutal, unironic virility” (293). It is ironic that, while it was drag queens who played a key role in the Stonewall riot the political movement and cultural style that emerged directly from it embraced an astonishingly conventional and homogenous construction of masculinity in the so-­ called clone culture of 1970s San Francisco (49–51). It is important to recognise the history and significance of this pattern. I quote this passage at length because it captures the visceral matter at stake here: The association of gay men with femininity is a cause for particular anxiety because it represents a throwback, a symbol of age-old homophobic prejudice. It resuscitates a host of ancient bogeymen that have been used in the past to harm us—to turn us into figures of fun, objects of abuse, creatures of satire, victims of hatred, moral condemnation, and violence—and it reminds us uncomfortably of those hoary medical understandings of sexual deviance … according to which same-sex desire was a symptom of sex-role reversal and homosexual men were congenital inverts embodying the sexual nature of women. (306)

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Halperin goes on to note that while masculinity is a central cultural and erotic value in the generality of gay male society (ibid.), the feminine gay man is easily and instantly categorised as “the fairy, the poof, the bitch, the sissy, the flaming queen, [and] incurs the easy ridicule and cheap contempt of both the straight world and the gay world—and even, for all he knows (or fears), the disdain of his own lover” (307). In this way, the “fag discourse” observed by Pascoe is no less in operation as a form of disciplinary power among gay men than in the wider society. And, as David Gere observes, “the level of hatred toward men who perform their genders effeminately is extraordinary, all the more so because it has been so effectively internalized” (369).

Female ‘Masculinity’: Too Butch to Play Juliet? Judith (Jack3) Halberstam attempted the first book-length treatment of this subject entitled, simply, Female Masculinity, in 1998. The work is a sampling of topics in history, literature, film and popular culture, in particular drag king performance. Her core argument is “that far from being an imitation of maleness, female masculinity actually affords us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed … [that] masculinity has been produced by and across both male and female bodies” (2). It is significant that no study of its scope was undertaken until then and there has been nothing to improve upon it since. As Halberstam notes, “the history of public recognition of female masculinity is most frequently characterized by stunning absences” (231). Why is this so? First, in a patriarchal culture ‘masculinity’ is understood to be an innate property and expression of men, and is therefore ‘unmarked,’ in the same way that ‘whiteness’ is unmarked in the hierarchy of ‘race.’ In his foundational work Black Skin, White Masks Frantz Fanon wrote that “not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man” (110). We think we ‘know’ masculinity and need not anatomise it; it is the given against which femaleness and femininity are defined. The radical structuring principle of male and female as self and other, as subject and object, was first comprehensively analysed in another foundational 3  Judith Halberstam also goes by the first name Jack, but I refer to her as Judith, the name on the 1998 text that I consider here. Halberstam’s position on the matter, which seems to have evolved over time, is flexible: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_ Halberstam#Early_life,_education_and_gender_identity (accessed 31 March 2019).

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work, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. De Beauvoir applied the lens of existentialism to the relationship between the sexes and observed that “humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him” (xvi). As Halberstam writes, focusing on the performative dimension of the question, “masculinity ‘just is,’ whereas femininity reeks of the artificial” (234). According to this code maleness may only be seen and defined in negative terms by that which deviates from it; thus, much has been written about what is ‘feminine’ in males, but very little about what is ‘masculine’ in females. The second force operating against the visibility of this subject is the particular nature of the discomfort we feel in contemplating the masculine woman: as I noted in Chap. 2, while we offer her grudging admiration, once the tomboy has achieved maturity her expressions and aspirations render her invalid as a female who must also be feminine in order to participate in the regime of compulsory heterosexuality. As Halberstam argues, despite “decades of sustained feminist and queer attacks on the notion of natural gender, we still believe that masculinity in girls and women is abhorrent and pathological” (268). Although many girls who are tomboys go on to a heterosexual orientation, being a tomboy is associated with, and seen to be a predictor of, lesbianism (Carr 120). And, as the feminine male may be scorned in gay male communities, so the butch woman may be regarded with misgiving among lesbians, and for similar reasons. As Halberstam writes, “many lesbians have seen and still do see the butch dyke as an embarrassment and furthermore as a dupe of sexological theories of inversion” (120).4 As Athena Nguyen notes, “butches have been accused of bringing undesirable masculine behavior into a community that is meant to be a haven from the patriarchy, masculinity, and men” (668). Third, the tomboy who persists into young adulthood is perceived as a serious threat to the territories claimed by men, which may prompt anything from discomfort to lethal violence. The drag queen may be funny as well as disturbing; a man renounces male privilege to perform as some dimension of ‘Woman.’ It is a paradox indeed that a man exercises his power and privilege to give them up, and an entire set of comedic genres is built at this intersection. But according to the codes of the patriarchy the drag king is not funny. I repeat Quentin Crisp’s observation from 4  The ‘invert,’ according to early sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, was considered a woman trapped in a man’s body or vice versa (75–110).

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Chap. 2: “When a man dresses as a woman the audience laughs; when a woman dresses as a man nobody laughs” (Epstein and Friedman). And finally, we are also disinclined to speak of this topic because it is inescapably about loss and failure: Halberstam observes that at puberty “the full force of gender conformity descends … onto all girls, not just tomboys” (6). She notes that while puberty as a rite of passage for boys is celebrated in literature, and represents an entry into augmented social agency, no matter how limited due to additional factors such as race and class, for girls “adolescence is a lesson in restraint, punishment and repression” (ibid.). She considers it remarkable that any girls at all retain their ‘masculine’ dispositions into young adulthood (ibid.). I began this chapter with an analysis of the pejorative word ‘effeminate’; Halberstam wonders in her conclusion, “Why is there no parallel concept for ‘effeminacy’?” (269). What term might we improvise for the purpose? ‘Emasculacy’? Given the sexual politics at play, it is not surprising that the nearest appropriate term is ‘butch,’ which can apply to a wide range of things, including, of course, to men. Merriam-Webster online is much less forthcoming on the definition of this term than it was regarding ‘effeminate’: “1: notably or deliberately masculine in appearance or manner 2: closely cropped // a butch haircut” (“Butch”). Language just generates more language, of course, and if we look up ‘masculine,’ we find the following: “having qualities appropriate to or usually associated with a man.” It is assumed we understand what ‘masculine’ means. The OED lists the following for ‘butch’ under entry four: “A lesbian whose appearance, behaviour, or identity is regarded as masculine.” The OED’s fourth entry under the adjective ‘masculine’ concisely validates the feminist argument regarding its relativity and contingency: “Designating an object deemed to be of the male sex on the basis of some quality, such as strength or activity, esp. as contrasted with a corresponding object deemed female.” As I have noted, the central argument of Halberstam’s book is that ‘masculinity’ does not belong solely or naturally to men, and yet she never actually attempts to define it as a set of traits. She seems to be participating in the very pattern she set out to expose: the inability or unwillingness to anatomise that which is ‘unmarked.’ Perhaps she was unable to be specific about how we might read masculinity because she had no recourse to a set of analytical tools which might aid in the task. I refer—in anticipation of the discussion in my next chapter—to Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), a system which is indeed able to analyse and measure the qualities of masculinity as embodiment, which is my concern as an instructor in the area of

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performance. After all, ‘masculine’ presentation is about much more than sporting a short haircut and wearing shirts, jackets, ties, and heavy shoes or boots. In “Gendered Movement and ‘Physical’ Acting” I explore in some detail the way ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are constructed as stance, gestural vocabulary and movement patterning using the very useful tools that LMA provides. What, in a radical sense, does it mean to be ‘masculine’? Throughout her text, like other writers on sex and gender, Halberstam uses the plural masculinities; of course, masculine expressions are as varied as the cultures that have coded them. But what is at the base of this plurality? In order to identify a set of traits that do indeed accumulate as a core construction of the masculine, I propose that we look to our evolutionary past, when males were hunters and warriors. Such criteria, although long since rendered obsolete as adaptive advantages in dominant cultures, still inform how we think of gender. In my Introduction I referred to the Open Sex Role Inventory, one of whose forty items is “I take stairs two at a time.” One supposes that a ‘masculine’ person would agree strongly with this, while a ‘feminine’ person would not. A hunter, transported from the Palaeolithic past, would certainly ascend stairs two at a time, because this denotes taking space with confidence, a quality essential to his pursuit, pun intended. Therefore, a woman whose qualities equate with being an effective hunter—strength, speed, skill, endurance, and confident use of space and movement—will read as masculine. What qualities are required to be a warrior? Again, to be strong and swift, with the addition of being fearless, physically courageous, and inured to pain and discomfort. Such qualities, as we all know, readily tip over into that which is decidedly negative: to be blindly subservient to authority, violent, cruel, and destructive—the traits that today we collect under the term ‘toxic masculinity’; but let us consider them in their ideal forms for a moment. It is intriguing to consider that the typically patriarchal society that was Classical Greece, our prime cultural progenitor, featured two goddesses who were respectively emblems of the hunter and warrior: Artemis and Athena. Britannica.com tells us that the former was “the goddess of wild animals, the hunt, and vegetation,” but also, queerly enough, “of chastity and childbirth” (“Artemis”). Athena, the warrior goddess who sprang fully armed from the forehead of her father Zeus, also assumed disparate responsibilities, being “goddess of war, handicraft, and practical

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reason” (“Athena”). Artemis was associated with wild nature, while Athena was a deity of the urban sphere, being the protectress of Athens. Greek mythology also provides us with stories of a whole race of female warriors, the Amazons, who “mated with men of another people, kept the resulting female children, and sent the male children away to their fathers” (“Amazons”). I herewith invoke the images of Artemis, Athena, and the Amazons as valuable inspirations for our young female acting students to use as guides in exploring their own ‘masculinity’—as sources, for example, in the preparation for such roles as Lady Macbeth, Queen Margaret, Goneril and Regan, Hedda Gabler, and Joan of Arc. While Halberstam analyses some examples of female ‘masculinity’ from historiography (see 45–73)—and there are surely many more to be uncovered—one finds relatively few contemporary role models for young women, and so the images offered by mythology may as well serve as replacements. At this point, I must register objections to elements of Halberstam’s text; certainly, her interchangeable use of sex and gender, which is confusing and problematic, but, more significantly, the framing of her argument itself. Her repeated objections to the monopoly that men exercise over all things masculine culminate in this statement: “Masculinity, one must conclude, has been reserved for people with male bodies and has been actively denied to people with female bodies” (269). One wonders why she did not place the word in quotation marks on the way to dispensing with it altogether, once she had demonstrated—as so many writers have—the constructed, contingent nature of ‘femininities’ and ‘masculinities.’ As Cari Stella notes, “nobody conforms to gender roles perfectly because they’re made up; we made them up!” (YouTube). Why does embodying the positive qualities of the hunter and the warrior, of Artemis and Athena, have to be identified as ‘masculine’ at all? I find that her consistent use of this term inadvertently serves to reinforce the dictates of naturalised gender rather than subvert them. She writes, “there is nothing at all irrational about girls wanting to fight or run or wear short hair; what is irrational is to deny girls access to activity because they are girls” (268). As she goes on to say, “femininity tends to be associated with passivity and inactivity” (ibid.) and that its potential in this regard is bad for human health. (I wonder what is more astonishing: recognising this as a fact, or that we do not recognise it as a matter of course?) Is the matter not in fact about ‘activity’ versus ‘passivity’? Why not use some other term, such as ‘female instrumentality’ or ‘female agency’? (Halberstam and fellow queer scholar, the late José Muñoz, attempted to do something similar with the overused

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word ‘queer,’ replacing it with ‘wild.’5) Scholar Judith Gardiner has the same complaints—that Halberstam “considers masculinity self-evident, prior to definition” (607), and that her theoretical construct also “retains the binary of masculinity and femininity” (609). She concludes that “the concept of female masculinity is a confusing formulation to be used, if at all, in carefully specified contexts,” since it may just as easily re-inscribe as subvert both heteronormativity and the gender binary (620). She also makes the crucial point that the pursuit of ‘female masculinity’ as ‘agency’ or ‘instrumentality’ may actually devalue ‘femininities’ (609–610). We must remind ourselves that this set of human capacities includes those that are essential for health and well-being, of both persons and communities.

Being Butch in Public Who are the ‘masculine’ female actors to whom female acting students can look for inspiration? As I explored in some detail in the previous chapter, effemiphobia and butchphobia have been potent active ingredients in Hollywood’s habitus for many decades. Matters of gender expression aside, there are very few actors who are even openly lesbian, and they often present as conventionally feminine, such as Cynthia Nixon, Portia De Rossi, Sarah Paulson, and Ruby Rose.6 As one can see, these are not A-list performers, and they tend to be cast in ‘character’ roles, and not as romantic leads. To re-iterate: it is hard to imagine an A-list performer, an ‘actress,’ a ‘movie star’—one thinks of Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts, or Sandra Bullock—coming out as lesbian without catastrophic consequences to her career. One encouraging exception to the rule is top-earner Kristen Stewart, who self-identifies as bisexual, is offered lead roles, and who often comes across as gender variant.7 Women with more edge, those known or perceived to be lesbian, or those who are at all gender non-conforming, are even fewer in number. Such performers as Jane Lynch, Kate McKinnon, Lily Tomlin, and Rosie O’Donnell often work in comedy, as stand-ups or in film and television. Comedy allows for—in fact, demands—greater range of expression than  See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKDEil7m1j8 (accessed 31 March 2019).  See https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2017/06/22/who-are-the-most-famous-lesbianand-bisexual-celebrities/ (accessed 4 October 2018). 7  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristen_Stewart#2013%E2%80%93present (accessed 4 October 2018). 5 6

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what is prescribed by conventional femininity. (Think of the range permitted to the ingénue and then consider how comedy often relies on distortion and extremity for its effects.) Tomlin is a true Hollywood legend, a performer capable of great versatility, whose relationship with long-time partner Jane Wagner was an open secret in Hollywood for decades until the two married in 2013.8 Tomboy talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres made television history when she came out as ‘gay’ on her sitcom Ellen on 30 April 1997. There are two points worth noting here: even though it was her character who came out, it was universally understood that it was DeGeneres herself who did so, for which she paid a heavy price, both professionally and personally.9 However, she did not come out as a ‘lesbian,’ even now a scary word in polite patriarchal society, but as the much more anodyne ‘gay’; queer women almost never describe themselves as ‘gay.’ This is in fact why the alphabet soup of sex/gender/sexual diversity explicitly includes—in fact commences with—the word ‘lesbian.’ In any event, DeGeneres’ carefully crafted TV persona is no threat to anyone’s notions of gender normativity; it is as sweet, cute, funny, and harmless as a puppy.10 There are precious few female actors in mainstream film and television who do not present as conventionally feminine, and the range of roles for which they might be considered is severely restricted. One of the very few butch actors to achieve any mainstream exposure is Lea DeLaria, who is also a singer of great ability, and a fearless stand-up comic whose predilection for raunch is itself transgressive.11 (I recall seeing her show at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto, the world’s oldest queer theatre, about which much more in Chap. 6. She entered to a warm welcome and began by bellowing, “I just love it when you applaud because I’m wearing a clap­on, clap-off dildo!”) She has a significant role in Orange Is the New Black, a show that seems ground-breaking until one considers that it is only the latest example of the long-standing genre of women’s prison movies. I repeat my quote from Richard Barrios in the previous chapter: “women’s prison movies were one of the few places onscreen where lesbians were allowed to exist openly” (106). I concede that the actors in Orange… who  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Tomlin (accessed 4 October 2018).  See https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/arts/television/ellen-degeneres.html (accessed 4 October 2018). 10  For a sense of how DeGeneres the woman differs from this figure, see preceding note. 11  See http://www.leadelaria.com (accessed 12 October 2018). 8 9

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are in fact lesbian are more likely to be ‘out’ than those in previous iterations of the genre over many years. In order to identify a ‘masculine’ female performer who may serve as an inspiring role model, I find I must shift focus to an art form adjacent to film and theatre. Singer k.d. lang, who has won multiple Grammy awards, may be the only figure in popular entertainment who has consistently and fearlessly sustained a butch persona, in various manifestations, over many years. (Given that in America ‘popular entertainment’ and ‘TV journalism’ are often indistinguishable from one another, I must also note MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.) And lang seems to have succeeded at doing so; on balance her choices have helped rather than hurt her. She came out as a lesbian in a 1992 interview for The Advocate. This move coincided with the release of her album Ingénue, which marked a major artistic shift from country to pop. As Joseph Nacino writes, “the world accepted both her music and who she was” (2). Today lang is both an icon and role model for the plurality of the queer community, but in particular for lesbians (Elliott 160). Over the course of her career she has played openly with the notion of gender as self-conscious performance. Her album Drag, released in 1997, was ostensibly all about cigarettes and smoking, but its punning intention was clear: “On the cover, lang poses with an invisible cigarette as a woman dressed as a man dressing as a woman” (162). As Elliott writes, she has insisted on the right to “live life on her own terms in the face of intense media scrutiny” (163). Is it possible her vast straight audience forgives lang for her resolutely butch self-presentation because of her glorious, effortless voice? In other words, is this a case of butchphobia defeated by the power of an overwhelming talent?

Drag Kings and Venus Boyz I suggest that the butch woman is almost invisible in North American culture, and when she does appear, she is considered unsavoury and/or threatening. There is one and only one feature-length documentary about female ‘masculinity,’ including an exploration of drag king culture and performance, and its overlap with FtM (female-to-male) transgenderism, and that is Gabriel Baur’s Venus Boyz (2001). In introductory captions, the filmmaker explains the film as a “journey in search of women who live in between, and also live the man within, whatever that means, be it for a

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night, be it for a lifetime” (Baur). As Maite Alias writes, the film is a “pioneering work whose merit should be acknowledged” (167). Venus Boyz includes extensive footage of performances at the Casanova Club in New York City, one of the very few venues for drag king performance. It is telling that there is very little to distinguish performers from audience members; many spectators, of any and all gender identities, seem to be in some kind of drag. Those in the audience might as well be on stage—or else they are in fact waiting their turn to perform. Much comedic play is made of the gaps between the sex of the performer, their own gender identity, and that of the character(s) they are playing. As Judith Butler has famously noted, in drag representations, “we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of a performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity” (Gender Trouble 175). Bridge Markland, visiting from Berlin, plays a woman named Angela in a long wig and luxurious sequined gown, then strips off the wig to reveal a shaved head and nipples crossed with red tape, before engaging in protracted tongue to tongue improvisations with select members of the audience. She then dresses in a white shirt, tie, and pin-striped suit to play a male character named Steve. African-American drag king Dred Gerestant plays a rapper and includes strip in his act, revealing her female body in contrast to his applied facial hair, and ‘packing’ an apple rather than a dildo. He/she removes the apple from his/her shorts, takes a bite, and replaces it. The audience roars with delight. Such performances are situated in the territory of camp, a queer cultural phenomenon about which much has been written, and which may be impossible to define succinctly. However, one might begin by saying that it entails the blending of the comic and tragic, and the aesthetic uses of failure. In the ninth chapter of How to Be Gay, entitled “Suffering in Quotation Marks” (186), a phrase which itself may serve as a definition, David Halperin attempts this distillation: “camp works to drain suffering of the pain that it also does not deny” (ibid.). And, as Alias notes, camp discourses always need a conspiratorial audience as the target of their political charge … Venus boyz [sic] not only portrays in explicit ways the reciprocal relationship between audience and drag king performers, but also shows how camp humor can be a valuable pedagogical tool for social and cultural critique. (170)

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As the reader will discover in the following chapter, it is precisely as a pedagogical tool that I am proposing forms of drag be used. Venus Boyz also features the work of pioneering drag king and performance artist Diane Torr, whose work, Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance, co-written by Torr and theatre scholar Stephen Bottoms, I cite extensively in Chap. 5. Torr’s workshops for women and trans men, called Man for a Day, are about the construction of convincing male personae who can ‘pass’ in social environments. As Torr has discovered, and as she imparts to workshop participants, being perceived as male has huge social advantages. By contrast, the trans subjects whom Gabriel Baur interviews are not ‘playing’ at masculinity in drag performance, but rather living their lives as “transgender butches” (for a detailed taxonomy of butch types, see Female Masculinity 141–154), or as trans men, and facing all the risks that may arise from doing so. The most fully profiled is Del LaGrace Volcano, formerly Della Grace, who says, “I perceive myself as … a combination of both, sometimes maybe more male than female, sometimes more female than male.” There is perhaps no more compelling evidence regarding the entrenched condition of sexism than the testimony of an FtM transgender person. As LaGrace says, “It was only when people began seeing me as a guy that I realized how much of a man’s world it really is. I am treated with more respect.” But for his birthday party, he assumes female drag, in red wig and elaborate sari. The effect is mind-bending: while he takes testosterone, and has facial hair, he has not yet had top surgery, and one beholds a biological woman who has undergone a partial transition, with some male secondary sex characteristics, but who has re-assumed key accoutrements of femininity. Drag king culture is clearly a coterie pursuit, a localised form of cultural capital, to re-invoke Bourdieu. More evidence of the greater visibility, intelligibility, and indeed marketability of femininity in males than masculinity in females—the pre-eminence of drag queens over drag kings—may be obtained by comparing the earnings of Venus Boyz with Jennie Livingstone’s indie-crossover hit Paris Is Burning (1991), noted in the previous chapter. The latter grossed US$3,779,620, while Venus Boyz earned only US$18,401.12

12  See https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100332/ and https://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0293685/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_1 (accessed 31 March 2019).

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What is at stake regarding butch self-expression in the acting studio? In the ‘Western’ theatre tradition, there is perhaps no purer exemplar of femininity than Shakespeare’s Juliet, a character who seems to sum up the type of the ingénue despite the fact that she demonstrates considerable grit as the narrative unfolds. But for the purposes of this project, my interest in ‘Juliet’ is as a physical type: we probably picture her as petite and blonde, sweet-tempered, and doe-eyed. Being cast as Juliet is the ultimate valorisation of an ‘actress’—of her attractiveness and her success at projecting femininity, conventionally understood. In terms of traditional casting, women are likely to be excluded from consideration for this role if they are too old, too heavy, too tall, not pretty enough, or not feminine enough. Such actors may in fact be considered more appropriate to play the Nurse. In fact the Juliet-or-Nurse question may be thought of as summary in the matter of feminine capital as sufficient/insufficient. What I am proposing—a topic I explore below—is that we consider casting against type in the case of Juliet, if doing so serves some larger artistic or pedagogical purpose. As David Wiles has noted, “there is no reason not to cast the woman who might more typically play the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet as Juliet, as I have recently done, particularly if her verse speaking is among the best in the company” (Wiles 134). Are we willing to take a chance on a ‘butch’ actor in terms of casting?

Transgender Matters This book is about gender non-conformity, which I have chosen to amend to gender dissidence for reasons explained in my introduction. Gender dysphoria, while linked to and overlapping with gender non-conformity, is not the same thing. The seventh version of the Standards of Care articulated by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (hereafter SOC and WPATH) offers the latest word in the diagnosis and treatment of gender dysphoric children and adults. Its authors define gender dysphoria as follows: “Gender dysphoria refers to discomfort or distress that is caused by a discrepancy between a person’s gender identity and that person’s sex assigned at birth (and the associated gender role and/or primary and secondary sex characteristics)” (SOC 5). I met a trans person for the first time when I was fifteen, sitting on the front lawn of a mutual friend’s house in Ottawa. Ian—who later underwent a complete transition and became Stephanie—was slight, very soft-­ spoken, with thick, shoulder-length blond hair, and wore clothes that boys

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did not wear at that time: I recall the delicate short-sleeved sweater over a long-sleeved white shirt that was more like a blouse, and wooden clogs that only girls wore in 1970. She sat with her legs tucked together to one side, rather than sitting cross-legged, as my (female) friend and I did, occasionally brushing her hair back behind her ears. Note that while I am recalling an encounter with an anatomically male individual I am using female pronouns. This is because even then it was as clear to me as the blue sky on that summer day that I was in the presence of someone who was, in some fundamental way, female. Why am I recounting this story? Because in the current debate, there are voices who seem to dispute the notion that trans people even exist. However, to say that there is a “debate” going on regarding these matters, between various communities, including transgender activists, medical doctors, researchers, policy-makers, academics, journalists, families of transgender children, and de-transitioned people, would be an absurd understatement: it is no exaggeration to call it a firestorm, in which debate is being shut down, people are being fired from jobs, accused of everything from child abuse to bigotry and transphobia, and actual death threats uttered.13 The controversy has been particularly virulent in the UK since the adoption of the Gender Recognition Act.14 As Margaret Talbot notes, “transgenderism has replaced homosexuality as the newest civil-­ rights frontier, and trans activists have become vocal and organized.” And the stakes are high: the right to be recognised as fully human, as Judith Butler explores in Undoing Gender, and the right to life itself, in particular in the case of pre-pubescent children and teenagers. They, as a result of their gender dysphoria, which Marchiano defines as “marked discomfort with one’s sex, and in children, a stated desire to be the opposite sex” (348), may be at increased risk of suicide. I devote considerable space to this topic for two reasons: first, increasing numbers of young people are coming out as trans, and acting instructors need to understand the phenomenon; and second, the topic forces us to engage in a productive discussion on the contested relationship between sex and gender. To reiterate in the context of this particular topic: the entire project of this book is founded on the endeavour to distinguish between sex, which is ­anatomical— 13   See, for example, https://quillette.com/2018/10/18/trans-activists-campaignagainst-terfs-has-become-an-attack-on-science/ (accessed 9 January 2019). 14  See https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/17/the-guardian-viewon-the-gender-recognition-act-where-rights-collide (accessed 9 January 2018).

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to do with chromosomes, gonads, gametes, and genitals—and gender, which is for the most part, as far as we know, culturally constructed and socially enforced. And the core argument of this book is that gender nonconformity must be fully supported in every social context, from day-­care centres to elementary schools to post-secondary actor training. There can be no doubt that the numbers of young people declaring their status as ‘trans’ to some degree has dramatically increased in various Western countries, and that younger clients are being assessed (Hruz et al. 5; Davies-Arai 1). “Fourfold and fivefold increases of trans-identifying kids and teens are being reported in gender clinics in the United States and other countries” (Marchiano 348). Why is this so? As I note in my introduction, in the course of my research on this matter, I undertook a series of interviews with Dr Aaron Devor, Research Chair in Transgender Studies, at the University of Victoria, where I also work. Devor, among many others, believes that in all human societies across historical time and geographical space, there are individuals who are gender dysphoric, and who elect, at some point in their lives, depending on circumstances, to embark upon a sex/gender transition. For many, there is confusion about what such dysphoria means, and what, if anything can be done about it: “What are these feelings? Can I do anything about this? What are the risks of trying to make a change?” Many trans people would “go underground” because it was too dangerous to come out and/ or because there was no recourse to any intervention whereby some kind of change could be undertaken. All that has changed with transformations in medical technology. For Stephanie, described earlier, there was no way not to come out, and yet it was years before she was able to receive the help she needed. Devor considers that “most adults will have had feelings [of gender dysphoria] since they were children but may not have done anything about them until much later in life.” He notes that while the term transsexual has somewhat fallen out of favour, because it is perceived as “derogatory and medicalizing” among certain audiences, particularly the young, it is an appropriate way to distinguish between those engaged in or desirous of medical transition, and those who may prefer a designation such as non-binary or genderqueer. The significant increase in incidence is due to widespread public awareness and acceptance of trans and non-binary identities. But Jungian psychologist Lisa Marchiano, among many others, suggests that what we are seeing is a widespread “psychic epidemic” among young people “without a prior history of discomfort with their sex” (346), with far more females

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than males presenting at gender clinics. This often occurs in peer clusters: a group of teenaged girls will all come out as trans at more or less the same time, part of a process that is fuelled and facilitated by the internet, particularly social media, and transition videos on YouTube (354). In 2018, Lisa Littman—who coined the designation “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria”—summarised the results of a detailed survey of parents of adolescents and young adults who had come out as transgender suddenly, during or after puberty, with none of the indicators used to define gender dysphoria in children, and motivated by factors that may be attributed to social and peer contagion (2). “There were 256 parent-­ completed surveys that met study criteria. The adolescent and young adult (AYA) children described were predominantly female sex at birth (82.8%) with a mean age of 16.4 years” (1). Most of the young people had been diagnosed with at least one mental health disorder such as depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and autism spectrum disorder (30). Further, many had experienced trauma or stress resulting from the death of a family member or from sexual assault (ibid.). A majority of respondents—almost 70%—believed their children were using language about transition from online sources because they seemed to be reciting a learned script (14). Littman noted that in the course of coming out as trans and seeking medical assistance, the young people experienced worsening mental health and deteriorating relationships with family members (38). Perhaps most alarming was the finding that most clinicians consulted regarding possible transition “did not explore trauma or mental health disorders as possible causes of gender dysphoria,” or consider medical histories established by primary care physicians. In addition, they often declined to consult with parents (35). Littman suggests that Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is a “maladaptive coping mechanism” that unfolds in a manner analogous to anorexia nervosa (33). (It is both remarkable and instructive that when Littman’s paper was published a storm of controversy ensued, with both very positive and very negative feedback: “I was completely floored by the magnitude and the contentiousness of the debate,” she recalls. In consequence, it was subjected to a rigorous and almost unheard-of post-publication review. Littman notes that this “included input from three senior members of the PLOS ONE editorial staff, a statistical reviewer, two academic editors, and an external expert reviewer” [Kay]. The original article was appended to a

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notice of republication,15 and the author, journal editors, and Brown University, where Littman teaches, all issued statements on the matter. The research was not repeated, and its findings remained mostly unchanged. However, the title was revised to underline that the research was based on parental reports only; the fact that “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” is not—at least not yet—a clinical term was noted; and overall more context for the research methods and results was provided.) Others have corroborated Littman’s findings: Marchiano suggests that “adopting a transgender identity has become the newest way for teen girls to express feelings of discomfort with their bodies, issues adolescent girls typically experience” (348). Stephanie Davies-Arai also notes the high rate of gender dysphoric children on the Autism Spectrum Disorder (30). And a number of young women who have retreated from transition—more on this below—report having been the victims of sexual assault: blogger Carey Callahan recounts how this trauma “absolutely contributed to this feeling that I wanted to take my body off.” Why are so many more girls coming out as trans than boys? One would think that if transgender expression is more widely accepted there would be no significant sex-based discrepancy. Are there social pressures that may be feeding this statistical difference? Despite the new acceptance of various kinds of diversity, there has been no material improvement in the way that Western patriarchal culture responds to women who present as masculine. As I noted earlier, while the tomboy is generally accorded grudging approval, aspirations to elements of culturally defined masculinity become enormously threatening once girls attain sexual maturity. And it is clearly better to be a man than a butch lesbian in our misogynist, butchphobic culture. Girls and young women continue to be bombarded with images of passive, glamorised femininity, which seem to imply that if you do not aspire to this selfpresentation you may not be female at all. As Stephanie Davies-Arai argues, defining themselves as ‘straight guys’ becomes an attractive option for teenage lesbians within a society which views [them] as either failed women or a male pornographic fantasy. While a ‘trans’ identity is now, in some social circumstances, accepted and even cool, ‘lezza’ is still the worst insult thrown at a girl at school. (19)16 15  See https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0214157 (accessed 29 March 2019). 16  She and some others I cite on this topic write from a UK perspective, but, from what I have read, similar conditions prevail in North America and various European countries as well.

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While we obviously ought to support trans boys to the best of our ability, we should also be affirming young women’s right to be both masculine and female, so that, as Judith Halberstam has argued, “masculine girls and women do not have to wear their masculinity as a stigma but can infuse it with a sense of pride and indeed power” (xi). Davies-Arai is one of many critics who contend that the exponential increase in trans presentation is a function of the re-inscription of conventional gender stereotypes (17). Such individuals are alarmed—and astonished, I suppose—that some exponents of transgender theory have inverted the relationship between sex as a biological fact and gender as a social construct. In this conception, sex is considered to be—as I noted in my introduction—‘assigned’ at birth, “as though your sex is something randomly decided by strangers” (18). As Brunskell-Evans observes, “the overwhelming majority of people are born with unambiguous genitalia, including those children medically designated as transgender” (43). Conversely, trans activists claim that we have an innate gender identity that supersedes biological sex, despite the fact that there is no scientific evidence for this. Marchiano sums up their position as follows: “Sex is between the ears, not the legs …. Therefore, ‘feeling like a woman’ or ‘identifying as a woman’ is to be a woman” (348). She argues that “the mainstream media and the medical and psychiatric establishment have seized upon an easily digestible narrative that is based in the ideology of innate gender identity” (ibid.). Indeed, this position plays into notions of gender essentialism, of “neurosexism” that writers such as Cordelia Fine, cited in Chap. 2, have laboured to dispel; such ideas are very useful to conservative forces, and not only in Western societies. In Iran, as I note in my introduction, homosexuality is seen as so thoroughly disordered it is appropriate to address it with the radical measures of sex reassignment. If gender identity is inborn, then gender preferences may very well determine anatomy. Therefore, a boy who likes to play with dolls and wear his hair long might really be a girl, and a girl who likes trucks and horseplay might be a boy. This story from Talbot’s article “About a Boy…” in The New Yorker struck me as particularly poignant: One mother in San Francisco, who writes about her family using the pseudonym Sarah Hoffman, told me about her son, “Sam,” a gentle boy who wears his blond hair very long. In preschool, he wore princess dresses— accompanied by a sword. He was now in the later years of elementary school, and had abandoned dresses. He liked Legos and Pokémon, loved

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opera, and hated sports; his friends were mostly science-nerd girls. He’d never had any trouble calling himself a boy. He was, in short, himself. But Hoffman and her husband—an architect and a children’s book author who had himself been a fey little boy—felt some pressure to slot their son into the transgender category. Once, when Sam was being harassed by boys at school, the principal told them that Sam needed to choose one gender or the other, because kids could be mean. He could either jettison his pink Crocs and cut his hair or socially transition and come to school as a girl.

I find the implications of this troubling: such beliefs serve to undo five decades of feminist critique, activism, and achievement. Are patterns of rigid gender-based socialisation actually contributing to this wave of transgender declarations, which seems to be occurring in many countries at the same time? Can the link between gender non-conformity and gender dysphoria be one of causality? Gender non-conformity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, in this case that of the whole social body. It is an externalised set of attributes, and is culturally contingent: men may wear make-up in one culture and risk assault for doing so in another.17 Dysphoria, of course, is a subjective state that is impossible to measure consistently and accurately, but that certainly might be generated by being subject to assault on a regular basis. If we did support and celebrate gender non-conformity consistently and heartily, would fewer young people suffer from gender dysphoria, complain about it to parents and guardians, and be referred for treatment at gender identity clinics? I recall that for a period in my late teens, while struggling to accept my sexual orientation, I entertained terrifying thoughts that I must be transsexual, which is why I was both frightened and fascinated by Ian/Stephanie. As an incipient homosexual, I was clearly a failure as a male, and therefore I must be a female. I reiterate this point from my Introduction: In the tyrannical regime of the sex/gender binary, one can not only not be ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ if one is not heterosexual; one’s claim to being ‘male’ or ‘female’ is itself in doubt. Davies-­ Arai speculates that labelling gender non-conforming young people as ‘transgender’ actually functions as a new kind of gay conversion therapy (19). Are we already seeing the effects of this? Marchiano makes the observation that “many in the lesbian community are distraught to notice that 17  Consider, for example, the Wodaabe men of Niger: https://www.bbc.com/news/ world-africa-12215138 (accessed 23 March 2019).

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butch lesbians are quickly disappearing” (350). However, Devor not only believes this is indeed occurring, but considers that it is simply a function of changing circumstances permitting a more genuine expression of identity for some people. And he believes that historically many of the most butch women would have come out as trans if they had been able to do so.

Transitions The writers of WPATH’s Standards of Care caution that “only some gender nonconforming people experience gender dysphoria at some point in their lives” (5, emphasis in original). They advise mental health professionals to “give ample room for clients to explore different options for gender expression. Hormonal or surgical interventions are appropriate for some adolescents, but not for others” (16). And they emphasise that it is crucially important that medical professionals engage in a detailed assessment of a young person’s condition in order to determine diagnosis and treatment, and provide a clear picture of the benefits and risks of sex reassignment procedures (15). Devor, one of the contributing writers to this document, stresses the importance of this process from the patient’s point of view: “People should really examine their desire to begin transition, and should step into their changes slowly enough so they know where in the process they want to stop—or at least when to pause.” He does not believe that such caution should be practised by ‘gatekeepers,’ but rather by trans people themselves. Dr Stephen Feder, co-director of the Gender Diversity Clinic at Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa, also stresses the need to exercise caution. He and his staff work “closely with the children for several years to ensure it isn’t just a phase. The doctors constantly question the children on their decision. And oftentimes, [patients] turn to us and say, ‘How many more times are you going to ask me that question?’” (Spike in Demand…). If recommended, transition begins with its social phase, a process wherein the patient takes steps to present as a member of the opposite sex, including changes of name and pronouns, dress, hairstyle, and make-up.18 Social transition is intended to be only the beginning of a process that may or may not lead to medical interventions (SOC 19). The WPATH has established a set of criteria that must be met to warrant medical treatment, 18  There is much debate about when to commence this process, and very young children are engaging in social transition, a practice which the SOC writers note is controversial and not well studied. (17)

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including “a long-lasting and intense pattern of gender nonconformity or gender dysphoria” (ibid., emphasis added). It is noteworthy that the clearly established distinction between “nonconformity” and “dysphoria” seems to have gone missing between pages 5 and 19 of the text, given that it is only the latter condition that supposedly ought to merit medical intervention. Indeed, how can a medical professional make reliable distinctions between the two states? The SOC guidelines also require that the “adolescent has given informed consent” (19), but is it reasonable to consider the consent of a teenager legally equivalent to that of an adult? I remind the reader of Bruce Wexler’s observation that “during the first part of life, the brain and mind are highly plastic … and shape themselves to the major recurring features of their environments” (5). Adolescents are driven more by impulse than reasoned consideration. Speaking of current neuroscience Talbot makes the following highly pertinent observation: In the legal realm, this research has provided a scientific anchor for the idea that juvenile criminals should be treated with leniency; in the domestic realm, it has contributed to parental hovering and an acceptance of delayed adulthood. Trans politics, however, is moving in the opposite direction, toward allowing adolescents to make profound, unalterable decisions earlier.

Devor makes the observation that we allow teenagers to do all sorts of risky things, including driving, drinking alcohol, combining those two activities, as well as using firearms. And while one is bound to counter that some of these activities are either against the law or if not illegal, at least inadvisable, one must also consider the harms that may arise from not supporting the wishes of a distressed or even desperate adolescent. This, as Feder, among many others notes, “can lead to substance abuse, cutting, and, in some cases, suicide” (Spike in Demand…). Medical intervention commences with the use of ‘puberty blockers’— Gonadotropin Releasing Hormone analogues. These are given to buy time for the young person, who may continue to explore their gender non-conformity without the stress of entering puberty ‘in the wrong body.’ And, “their use may facilitate transition by preventing the development of sex characteristics that are difficult or impossible to reverse if adolescents continue on to pursue sex reassignment” (SOC 19). For example, boys will not undergo typical changes in vocal pitch, and increased bone mass in the shoulders and jaw, while girls will not develop breast tissue or

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experience their first menstruation, which, one may imagine, must be an appalling experience for a trans boy. Indeed, many transgender adults say they “wish they could have skipped going through puberty in the wrong sex” (Talbot). These drugs were developed to ameliorate a rare condition called precocious puberty, and their use as puberty blockers is considered ‘off-label’ (Hruz et  al. 18; Marchiano 352). The SOC lists these treatments as “fully reversible” (18), but are they? Treatment with these hormone analogues is known to cause stunted growth, weight gain and problems with fertility; such side effects must be weighed carefully against anticipated benefits (Steensma et al. 763). Saving a gender dysphoric child from the agonies of puberty may be a crucial, possibly life-saving intervention. But critics counter that the child might resolve their sex/gender confusion precisely by experiencing puberty alongside their peers (Davies-Arai 34). Just as social transition may lead to the medical variety, with the chemical suspension of puberty, the latter may, in turn, guarantee that the adolescent will go on to cross-sex hormones. “In fact, being on blockers appears to consolidate an investment in a cross-sex identification” (Marchiano 352). And it is troubling to peruse the long list of side effects of prolonged hormone therapy—which will be life-long in the case of full transition—as well as the elevated risk of various serious diseases and conditions to which it is linked (SOC 97–104). However, these risks and negative effects are borne by many thousands of trans adults, for whom such treatments may be essential to well-being. The hotly contested point is when, or even if, to commence such treatment in people who have not reached the age of medical consent, because the interventions of sex reassignment surgery, such as double mastectomy and penectomy, are, of course, irreversible. But the objective is—it needs to be re-stated—a feeling of well-being, of being at home in one’s body, and of being able to live one’s life without the burden and obstacle of dysphoria. And various studies have shown the “undeniable beneficial effect of sex reassignment surgery on postoperative outcomes such as subjective well-being, cosmesis, and sexual function” (SOC 55).

Desistance Lisa Marchiano summarises a number of studies which conclude “that 80–95% of children who experience a cross-sex identification in childhood will eventually desist and come to identify with their natal sex as adults”

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(350). Noted Dutch sex/gender clinician Thomas Steensma writes that the rate of remission of gender dysphoria around or after puberty is 85.2% (764), and the WPATH writers concur, warning that “dysphoria persisted into adulthood for only 6–23% of children” (SOC 11). Walter Meyer, a child psychiatrist and paediatric endocrinologist in Galveston, Texas, notes that “gender variance is … a common issue. I’m saying to parents, ‘It may be hard to live with the ambiguity, but just watch and wait. Most of the time, they’re not going to want to change their gender’” (Talbot). Children who desist generally mature as young adults who are gay, lesbian, or bisexual, and their dysphoria may have been simply a predictor of variant sexual orientation. British actor Rupert Everett, whose experiences as an out gay actor I described in Chap. 3, recalls that during puberty “I really wanted to be a girl. Thank God the world of now wasn’t then, because I’d be on hormones and I’d be a woman. After I was fifteen I never wanted to be a woman again.”

De-transition—or Re-transition? There is a significant—and growing—number of young adults, most of them natal females, who are speaking about and documenting their ‘de-­ transition,’ that is, their return to self-identifying as women. Devor prefers the term re-transition to convey the notion one is “moving into another stage of one’s life,” rather than retracing one’s steps, which may be, strictly speaking, impossible. The point is that rethinking transition ought to be considered as part of one’s personal journey, and not a radical error that one might regret for the rest of one’s life. Point taken; however, I use the term de-transition as that is the one preferred by the individuals whose words I cite. And it is impossible to minimise the suffering that some have experienced as a result of opting ill-advisedly for the procedures of medical transition. One of the most articulate spokeswomen on de-transition is Cari Stella, whose YouTube videos are both eloquent and instructive. In a film from 2016, she describes herself thus: “I’m a real, live 22-year-old woman with a scarred chest, and a broken voice and five o’clock shadow because I couldn’t face the idea of growing up to be a woman.” (This film is a rebuttal of trans activist Julia Serano’s article entitled Detransition, Desistance, and Disinformation: A Guide for Understanding Transgender Children Debates, and while I cannot consider in detail both article and rebuttal, I invite the reader to do so.) Stella says, “I de-transitioned because I knew I

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could not continue running from myself … because acknowledging my reality as a woman was vital to my mental health … Transition was a maladaptive coping mechanism.” Like many others, Stella complains that the possibility of embracing her identity as a butch lesbian was never presented to her by her therapist; instead she was offered testosterone. In other words, advice regarding the necessity to proceed with caution, inscribed within WPATH’s guidelines, and offered by many other medical professionals, was not followed. In her article, Serano claims that transphobic people fall into two main categories: The trans-antagonistic position: This is forwarded by people who do not believe that trans is an authentic experience or identity … The trans-suspicious position: Even if you accept that gender dysphoria and trans gender identities are real (albeit rare), you may become suspicious about how increasingly visible trans people are now compared to ten years ago. Stella admits to being in the latter category, lamenting how easy it was for her—as it is for others—to begin testosterone treatment after only three or four visits to a therapist. Stella also posts the results of a convincing survey of de-transitioned women she ran on line, for which she received more than 200 replies. Lisa Marchiano has summarised some of its findings: • 92.5% of those who responded said that their dysphoria was the same or better after detransitioning than during transition. • Only 8% of respondents felt somewhat or completely positive toward their own transition, whereas 60.2% felt somewhat or completely negative toward it. (353) The response to the question “Do you believe you were given adequate counseling and accurate information about transition?” was alarming: only 6% replied Yes, while 26.1% said Somewhat and 67.8% said No (Stella, 3 September 2016).19 Marchiano includes excerpts from the blog of a de-­ transitioner named Max, who offers these arresting observations: 19  By the way, it is most gratifying to watch Stella’s video “One Year off Testosterone” from 2017, in which she details all the positive psychic and physical changes she has experienced since she terminated hormone treatment. Clearly, for her transition was not the answer.

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I transitioned FtM (female to male) at 16, was on testosterone and had a double mastectomy by 17. I’m 20 now and back to understanding myself as a lesbian, like I was before I found out about transition and latched onto it as a way to “fix” body issues created by the challenges of growing up in a deeply misogynistic and lesbian-hating world. I absolutely am traumatized by what happened to me, and I’m not the only one. I’m a part of support networks for women who stopped transition that have over 100 members, and that’s just the individuals who have gone looking for others with this experience and found us. (353)

The widely accepted shift is towards an ‘affirmative’ approach, rather than the long-standing ‘gatekeeping’ protocol, whereby medical professionals exercised “extremely stringent criteria for approving gender transition” (Serano). But where does a therapist draw the line between crucial psychotherapeutic intervention and what Serano rightly condemns as “gender reparative” therapy? De-transitioners often feel ambivalence about their decision to re-­ identify as their natal sex because of the way the trans community regards them. Katie Herzog, writing in The Stranger, profiles a de-transitioned woman named Cass who says, “there are a significant number of trans people and trans allies who find what I and other detransitioned people have to say threatening or dangerous, and they would rather we not say it.” Perhaps as troubling is that “right-wing groups and media outlets use detrans people to further a transphobic agenda, arguing that their existence invalidates all trans people” (ibid.). It is understandable that trans activists would consider desistance and de-transition as an existential threats given their decades-long struggle to assert the validity of their very existence, in the face of discrimination in housing and employment, as well as various forms of violence and, as a result of this onslaught, susceptibility to various kinds of self-harm, ­including suicide. Further, the medical establishment, in particular its psychiatric wing, has an appalling record in its dealings with sexual difference. However, desistance and de-transition need to be recognised: if the former is not considered as a possible resolution of gender dysphoria the latter may be the outcome. I have cited some of the writers who contributed to Transgender Children and Young People…, whose positions clearly fall under the category of “trans-antagonist” proposed by Serano. Davies-Arai perhaps speaks for all these writers when she argues that the “transgender orthodoxy” has

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overtaken every major institution in the UK concerned with children and education and that British society is engaged in a vast, uncontrolled reallife experiment on children in matters of sex and gender (35). She warns that parents looking for solutions for their gender non-­conforming children will find no other option than transition: “child protection agencies, therapists and counsellors, teachers, all are being told that anything less than ‘affirmation of preferred gender’ is ‘conversion therapy’” (31). Everyone, it seems, has drunk the Kool-Aid. At the same time, one may assume, these critics support the rights of transgender adults: as one of the co-editors observes, “basic human rights dictate that no one should be discriminated against because of their choice of identity” (Brunskell-Evans 59). But such trans adults did not suddenly spring into existence; they too were once children. While the urge to commence this profound transformation can occur at any age—an acquaintance of mine came out as trans in her fifties, which confused many people as she is a well-known jazz musician—it is clear that a significant number of young children also express the vehement desire to change sex. What about the 6–23% of gender dysphoric children who do not desist with puberty? Gender specialists consider that if such children’s dysphoric declarations are “consistent, persistent and insistent” (Serano), they amount to crucial evidence that social transition ought to commence. A blogger in Seattle who writes www.gendermom.com under the pseudonym Marlo Mack recalls that “when he was three years old, my son told me that she was actually my daughter,” and that a mistake had been made in the womb: could she please go back inside and come out the right way next time? In such cases, it is impossible to dismiss the emphatically stated conviction that ‘I was born in the wrong body.’ And this is precisely how Ian/ Stephanie struck me: she did not seem confused or deluded; ‘biologically male,’ she nonetheless presented unmistakably as ‘female.’ (Imagine what torments this individual must have suffered attending an Ottawa high school in the 1970s; in gym class, for example.) The challenge—a daunting one that I feel grateful I am not professionally charged with making— is determining which young people are ‘truly’ trans, so to speak, and which may have been swept up in the kind of social contagion described and analysed by Marchiano and Littman. As the latter has said, “I strongly believe that the conversation we should be having around these issues is: some people are helped by transition, some people are harmed by transition, and we need more research to better understand how to maximize benefit and minimize harm” (Kay).

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As noted earlier, there is overwhelming evidence that a small number of people in various cultures cross the supposedly tight line between male and female.20 But this variant in human identity and expression is nonetheless poorly understood, and there is certainly no objective measure for it: one cannot use a particular brain imaging technique to confirm its presence; if only that were the case. As Marchiano states, “it is likely that the etiology of dysphoria will prove to have complex biological, social, and psychological influences” (348). Sari Van Anders, Research Chair in Social Neuroendocrinology, Sexuality, and Gender/Sex at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, speculates that “there is likely something biological about transness but I definitely do not think anything has been found, replicated or validated in any sense of ‘knowledge’” (email conversation, 7 December 2018). Looking into this matter has taught me a number of things about science: how much we don’t know; how studies based on the same research questions can produce variant, even contradictory results; and how scientists are no less likely to be ideologically bound than any other demographic group. Margaret Talbot’s 2013 article in The New  Yorker, “About a Boy: Transgender Surgery at Sixteen,” which I have already cited a number of times, offers what is to me a balanced view of this phenomenon: she considers one individual, the boy in question, whose case is inarguable, and another whose underlying mental health problems seem to have taken the form of gender dysphoria. Skylar, an excellent student from an affluent Connecticut neighbourhood, had always felt he was a boy, and going through puberty as a girl was like “walking around in a suit you couldn’t take off.” There never seemed to be any doubt about his need to ­transition, including having a mastectomy at sixteen, and the process was relatively easy, with knowledgeable, sympathetic parents and a supportive circle of friends, classmates, and teachers. And, as Talbot writes, “he doesn’t labor to come across as conventionally masculine [but rather] is comfortable with some gender ambiguity.” Overall, he seems well adjusted and happy, and looking forward to attending college as a man. Talbot also met a woman in the Bay Area whom she calls Danielle, whose teenaged daughter was a talented artist about to commence studies at art college, and who had a history of depression and anxiety. Anna— 20  The reader may wish to explore the phenomenon of the Hijra in India, as well as that of two-spirit people in various North American indigenous societies. For a list of research sources, please see WPATH, Standards of Care, 6.

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also a pseudonym—suddenly began to complain of gender dysphoria and expressed the wish to transition. A psychiatrist got him—Talbot uses the name Aidan—started on testosterone, but Danielle had doubts: “I’m still not convinced that it’s a good idea to give hormones and assume that, in most cases, it will solve all their problems. … A lot of these kids are sad for a variety of reasons.” When Talbot checked back with the mother some months later she found that while Aidan was still taking testosterone he was less convinced about surgery and that his artwork was taking off. “Danielle thought that perhaps he was shifting from ‘The solution to pain is becoming a man’ to ‘The solution is becoming an artist.’”

Conclusion When young people arrive at our departments they are well past the age of medical consent, and therefore instructors may be faced with students who have already commenced medical transition, or who do so in the course of their studies. Acting teachers will have to recognise and deal effectively and compassionately with increasing numbers of students claiming and enacting a whole range of self-identifications regarding gender identity. And it is conceivable that they may find themselves teaching one student who is transitioning, and another who is de-transitioning. Moreover, it is important to note that the trans student is likely to confound the core proposal of this book, namely that an actor be ready and able, if invited, to play any role, including that of a different sex. Trans people have generally laboured mightily, often for many years, to be recognised and accepted as other than their natal sex. It may be simply impossible for them to entertain the notion of representing that from which they have struggled so resolutely to escape; a struggle which has made them, so to speak, gender/sex refugees.21 One the other hand, it might be easier for actors who claim designations such as non-binary, gender-fluid, or genderqueer to entertain this as a possibility. The belief on which I base all of these speculations and proposals is that gender dissident actors, of whatever stripe and self-identification, be recognised and accepted: supporting gender non-conformity as well as the desire to pursue transition need not 21  See, for example, an account of how trans actor Laverne Cox’s twin brother, who is not a professional actor, was hired to play her character before transition on Orange Is the New Black: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/orange-is-the-new-black-laverne-cox_n_ 3660712 (accessed 3 December 2018).

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be thought of as mutually exclusive positions. It is also clear to me that we need a new set of pronouns in English! As noted earlier, a significant component of Diane Torr’s work is in the social performance of drag. The following reflection on this practice points to the ways in which we may all be able to situate ourselves on some kind of ‘transgender spectrum’: “If male and female identities can coexist within the same body, then the concept of singular identity, let alone singular gender, is thrown into question … Can exploring alternative identities lead to a fuller understanding of the self as multiple and mutable?” (Bottoms and Torr 197). This is a particularly fruitful area for specialists in performance: who are we when we are acting? Are we ever really ‘just’ acting? Does the knowledge that as a man I can play a convincing woman— or vice versa—somehow change me after the playing is done? Feminist scholar Judith Gardiner, sounding an optimistic note, writes: Gender change and variance in societies and discourses may lead to people developing more ungendered, androgynous, “both/and” categories and identities … As the gender range within and outside each binary sex category grows, we might expect increased tolerance for inter, neither, and alternate genders and sexualities as well. (619)

She is one of the few writers who attempt to supersede all the essentialising about gender in which we remain enmeshed, and to capture ‘masculinities’ and ‘femininities’ within the terms of “a cultural fantasy” (610). This is most useful for my purposes, given that my concern is about performed representations, which are essentially fantasies made flesh.

CHAPTER 5

Gendered Movement and ‘Physical’ Acting

David Gere recalls a particular set of rules from his public school days regarding properly gendered comportment in everyday gestures and activities (350–351). I recall something very similar from middle school: while a girl ought to examine her fingernails by extending her arm in front of her, a boy should do so by curling his fingers into a loose fist and looking at them upside down. A girl should carry her books against her chest, while a boy should carry them at the side of his body under one arm. A boy should never cross his legs with his thighs together, but rather keep the ankle of the crossed leg above the other knee, with his knee turned out.1 I, like Gere, recall practising the ‘correct’ way to perform these moves so as to ‘pass’ in my peer group. The gendering of our bodies, both conscious and unconscious, continues through the various stages of life. Think of the kinds of attire that are prescribed to the sexes in typical office environments. And now imagine their reversal: the men have long hair, never appear without make-up, wear dresses and skirts, decorate themselves with jewellery, and have to negotiate simple locomotion in high heels. The women wear flat shoes, white shirts, suits, and ties—often the only colourful article of their attire—while their short haircuts permit unencumbered movement of the head and neck. How would trading our social costumes change our 1  It is a measure of how gender codes have become more relaxed that it has been acceptable for many years now for men to cross their legs as only women were permitted to do in the middle of the last century.

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Alexandrowicz, Acting Queer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29318-5_5

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­ hysicality and in consequence our psyches, and thereby our relations to p one another?

Gendered Movement and the Drag King We may never know how much of human movement patterning is determined by corporeal differences that are hormonally or otherwise congenitally driven, and therefore to some extent unavoidable. For example, one might argue that the different masses of the male body—broader, heavier shoulders, and narrower pelvises—predispose male persons to certain neuromuscular patterns. However, I surmise and propose that much of what marks masculine or feminine movement is a consequence of learned behaviour. America’s most famous drag queen, RuPaul Charles, is fond of saying, “you’re born naked and the rest is drag.”2 While he was speaking of clothing, I believe “drag” may be understood in much broader terms. As Terry Goldie observes in his work on pioneering sexologist John Money, “all gender roles are shaped socially and environmentally” (97). But, as Judith Butler has argued exhaustively, the socially constructed origins of gender are concealed as part of its condition; it is materialised and naturalised through the operation of regimes of power: “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Gender Trouble… 43–44). The question at hand is what kind of unlearning of gender can take place, a matter that points back to the kind of learning that produced it in the first place. For convincing evidence that gender is a matter of learned behaviour— whose acquisition might be adapted for pedagogical purposes—one need only refer to Sex, Drag and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance. As noted in the previous chapter, the book is co-written by Diane Torr, long-time performance artist, former go-go dancer and stripper, and drag king, together with theatre and performance scholar Stephen Bottoms. The work is therefore at once the personal account of an artist/teacher, a historical overview, and a critical reflection. Over the years, in addition to her performing career, Torr has conducted hundreds of workshops in the US, UK, and Europe with women who want to explore the construction and performance of male personae, 2  See, for example, http://www.newnownext.com/oprah-rupaul-o-magazine-februaryissue/01/2018/ (accessed 26 July 2019).

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for both stage and public performance. “In seeing the world, at least temporarily, from a man’s perspective, and in being responded to as male, women are able to distance themselves critically from their socialized perspectives as females, sometimes with life-changing results” (Bottoms and Torr 2). Torr has analysed and defined the features of masculinity in detail, based on years of extensive observation of men in public space. Bottoms recalls his first encounter with Danny King, one of Torr’s drag king characters: “My fascination with Diane’s drag performances began there, with the simple fact of her ability to adopt and inhabit varying forms of masculine physicality that men tend to assume are inborn” (2). Torr’s workshops, entitled “Man for a Day,” are summarised as a do-it-yourself guide in the book (259–269). I contend that part of ‘movement’ training for actors could entail a similar activity, in which student actors would trade social costume and learn how to construct convincing characters based on the gender performance of the other sex, from the broadest strokes of postural configuration to the subtlest details of gestural expression. As Bottoms and Torr advise, “drag acts … can throw the status of gender reality into doubt insofar as they bring into focus the ways in which performance and theatricality are themselves constitutive of reality, as well as being representations of it” (33). Drag workshops are a potent provocation to the habitus that prescribes the way gender expressions are assigned to bodies according to sex and made to seem an inevitable part of them, thereby excluded from appropriation. As Judith Halberstam writes, “if masculinity adheres ‘naturally’ and inevitably to men, then masculinity cannot be impersonated. [And] if the non-performance is part of what defines white male masculinity, then all performed masculinities stand out as suspect and open to interrogation” (235). That gender is a performance whose features can be learned is supported by what may seem an unlikely source. The writers of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care, cited in detail earlier, suggest that “professionals such as vocal coaches, theatre professionals, singing teachers, and movement experts may play a valuable adjunct role” (53) in assisting transgender people to learn how to ‘pass’ in social environments.

‘Performance’ Versus ‘Performativity’ As I noted in Chap. 4, there has been much debate about the relations between these two designations, arising in large part from Butler’s analysis of drag. In Staging Queer Feminisms, Sarah French traces the contours of

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this scholarly argument clearly and effectively. Butler’s notion of the ‘performativity’ of gender derives in part from the theory of “speech acts” advanced by J.L. Austin, in which certain verbs enact what they signify, such as ‘I love you,’ ‘I promise,’ and the declaration ‘I do’ in a marriage ceremony. Gender is not what we are but what we do. However, “central to Butler’s argument is an understanding that there is no active subject who knowingly performs their gender” (French 21). We forget that we have learned our gender, and then forget that we have forgotten.3 As French observes, Butler’s analysis of drag served to illustrate the relationship between sex and gender, wherein one may clearly observe the construction of the latter on the sexed body, and thereby the disjunction between them (22). Putting aside the issue of whether drag is subversive or oppressive, much confusion has resulted from the conflation of the performativity of gender, analogous to speech acts, and the performance of gender, deriving from her analysis of drag: “While Butler provides drag as only one example of performativity, following the publication of Gender Trouble, it was largely taken up as the paradigmatic example, which contributed to the much documented confusion and conflation of the terms performativity and performance” (22). French offers evidence that this confusion arose as much from misunderstanding of Butler’s work, as from ambiguities within it (23). The issue at hand is agency, as noted in the previous chapter: “There appears to be a paradox in Butler’s thinking then between a constituted subject who is predetermined and an autonomous subject capable of subversive action” (ibid.). To what degree can we unlearn, relearn, and do gender differently? Butler has repeatedly used the word ‘repetition’ to describe how gender is founded in the subject, but this “need for repetition makes gender inherently unstable and it is within this instability that a space is created for gender to be repeated differently” (ibid.). As I also noted in the previous chapter, Butler attempted to distinguish performance from performativity in Bodies That Matter, where she writes that performance as bounded ‘act’ is distinguished from performativity insofar as the latter consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of 3  I have borrowed this analogy from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where it is quite terrifying in context.

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the performer’s ‘will’ or ‘choice’; further, what is ‘performed’ works to conceal, if not disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, unperformable. The reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake. (178)

But, as French observes, numerous scholars, such as Sue-Ellen Case, Janelle Reinelt, and Elin Diamond, have intervened to suggest that the two are “more intertwined than Butler’s analysis allows” (24). And the experiences of many queer people, documented in the previous chapter, seem to support this view.

Laban Movement Analysis My own notions of gendered movement patterns are based on years of observation in the classroom and are corroborated in the published work of various key pedagogues, as well as Diane Torr’s discoveries over years of exploring gender. I read her work on gender construction—and the teaching of gender as performance—through the work of the great polymath and prime mover Rudolf Laban, and those who worked with him and after him, such as Irmgard Bartenieff and Warren Lamb (Adrian 6), who together devised the most thoroughgoing and comprehensive system that we know for describing, visualising, interpreting, and documenting all the varieties of human movement. Laban Movement Analysis, or LMA, includes observations about the way that the body and its movement can be read as gendered. If we understand how to produce ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ movement, then anyone, regardless of their position on the gender continuum, will be able to perform any part of either. (Please note that the following fairly detailed description is provided for readers who may not be familiar with Laban’s work.)

Still Forms LMA addresses itself to four broadly construed and overlapping categories, Body, Effort, Shape, and Space. One of the most evident of these overlaps is that between Body and Shape, and Laban identified certain basic shapes that the body is able to assume. Called the Still Forms, they are the Wall, Ball, Pin, and Screw (26). The Wall is wide, with a wide base, and corresponds to what is conventionally understood to be masculine, that is, movement and gestures that are marked by a squareness,

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directness, and lack of decoration. Torr “noticed … that a lot of men don’t use their hips very much, that they move from the shoulders a lot of the time, and that they tend to move the head and neck as one unit” (Bottoms and Torr 108). This is one of the first things Torr teaches her workshop participants about masculine body configuration; she even uses the same terms, although to my knowledge she is not trained in LMA: “Even when stationary, men take up more space like obstacles. Imagine going to a club event or seeing a band. You can’t move past the male punters, who are standing there like walls” (145). The Pin is its gender opposite, in terms of our cultural constructions; thin and elongated with a narrow base, its tiny voice high in the head resonators. Here again, Torr seems to echo Laban’s term: women have to become like Pins to adapt to men’s embodiment as Walls. She observes that “as women we often end up squeezing our bodies through the available gaps” (ibid.). The Screw is essentially a Pin moving in a spiral, capable of an extreme degree of articulation, and is, I suggest, also gendered as feminine, its clearest realisation perhaps to be found in the movement of fashion models. In general, women are permitted greater fluidity and articulation in movement than men. (That this latter feature is central to the construction of ‘feminine’ movement may be in seen in the way the ‘limp wrist’—i.e. marked articulation in this joint—has been metonymically identified with ‘effeminacy’ in men, and used to mock and revile it.) The Ball—connoting age, among other things—tends to be genderless, which I find intriguing: it seems to me that when we are either very young or very old we are physically unable to perform gender, either because we have not yet learned it, or because infirmity tends to erase its features. Any acting student playing the Still Forms is, ipso facto, also playing gender; therefore gender becomes something one can detach from the self, hold up to the light, as it were, and manipulate like an object—or like a piece of costume. As Jill Dolan argues, this serves “to denaturalize gender as representation, and to demystify the workings of the gendered representational apparatus itself” (Feminist Spectator… 101). And costume, together with make-up and facial hair, is the first order of business in a Man-for-a-Day Workshop (144). From there, Torr proceeds to an examination of “the physical behaviour that men adopt, and the body language that portrays a sense of entitlement and privilege in the world” (145). And, once again, the analysis she offers may be easily read and practised in Laban’s terms.

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Effort Factors Contained within the edifice of concepts Laban established is the structural pillar called Effort, for which he proposed four factors: Flow, Space, Time, and Weight. Each of these presides over a continuum of qualities: flow operates between the poles of bound and free, forms the baseline of all movement expression, and is linked to emotion; space, which may be either direct or indirect, is associated with attention; time, from sustained to urgent, is about decision; and weight, which is manifested on a continuum from light to heavy, is associated with intention (Adrian 115–121). One may easily see how the Effort Factors may be read in terms of conventional constructions of gender: light weight may be read as feminine, heavy weight as masculine; direct attention in space as masculine, and indirect attention its gender opposite. Torr’s observations about playing masculinity confirm Laban’s association of Flow with emotion, in which women—permitted to be more expressive of many emotions than men—tend to fall on the free end of the continuum. She notes that “becoming a man … is an exercise in repression” (151). She gives an exercise called “A man fries an egg” that reveals how men tend to be more staccato—more bound, that is—in their movement patterns (147). And she notes the social price that may be paid by living more consistently in free Flow: “I’ll then demonstrate a woman frying an egg, using motions that are much more fluid and animated. She … gets the job done much quicker. Yet she appears less defined in her movements, almost vaporous; her fluidity makes her less visible” (147, italics in original). Torr concedes that on the basis of such observations, she is sometimes accused of reinforcing gender stereotypes, but defends herself by saying, “of course it’s true that none of the distinctions I demonstrate in the workshop apply to all men or all women. [But] most of them do hold for a sizeable proportion of the population, and what we’re doing in these early stages of the workshop is sketching out recognizable signifiers of ‘male’ behaviour” (148, italics in original). In general, the cultural construction of the female body prescribes a narrow base, while men tend to take up much more space in the width of their stances, and in their movement. All one has to do is to stand with one’s legs wider than shoulder-width to experience the psychic signifying that results; women, unless they are presenting themselves in an overtly sexual and/or aggressive manner, do not stand like this. Men tend to take longer strides than women and step with more weight; this is part of the

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way they are given permission to ‘take’ space, and therefore feel entitled to it, whereas women require special permission and encouragement, as it were, to relate to space in the same way. As Torr observes, “men tend to assume that they own whatever space they’re occupying at a given moment; they won’t sit perched on the edge of a chair when they can fill it up completely” (145). Voice specialist Patsy Rodenburg acknowledges this culturally contrived difference, observing that “male communication habits revolve around taking up space. Not giving in. standing feet apart, sitting legs open. Chest open or puffed out. Energy forward, probing. Head held high” (100– 101). What is not surprising, but still somehow shocking, is that the masculine ‘right to space’ is not merely claimed by the male subject but awarded by the social body itself. Torr realised “that people were creating space for me as I moved; even in that wall of bodies I was accommodated. As a woman I had never experienced such treatment” (95). She has been repeatedly amazed at this, and recalls, when out in public as a character named Danny King, being “dumbfounded at being given so much space” (146). She makes the following observation about the difference between male and female gender presentation, confirming, as I noted in the previous chapter, the unmarked status of maleness: “Whereas femininity is always drag, no matter who is wearing it (which is why it’s easy to caricature), maleness is the presumed universal. It is thus more invisible in its artificiality” (269). The factor of Time is also gendered: Torr, in particular by observing the self-presentation of male politicians, discovered how slow and sustained decision in Time gives one authority. As Danny King, she uses stillness and silence to establish a sense of power: “Danny simply projects reserve and resistance, forbidding you to enter his space” (110–111). Former President Barack Obama was famous—and was more or less gently mocked—for the long pauses he took in his speeches.

Action Drives Laban’s Action Drives are the most widely used components of Laban’s system in acting pedagogy because they lend themselves so readily to the playing of acting verbs. The eight Drives—float, glide, press, wring, flick, dab, punch, and slash—are formulated from combining three of the Effort elements—Time, Space, and Weight. For example, a float, which is light, indirect, and sustained, embodies an easy, carefree state of mind. Change

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the weight factor to heavy, and you achieve a wring, which expresses all kinds of contained emotion, grief, rage, or anxiety, as well as physical distress. At the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of Weight and Time are slash—heavy weight, indirect space, and urgent time—and punch, which differs from slash in that its space factor is direct; both of these Drives are more or less violent expressions. As the stakes go up in a scene the Weight and Time factors acquire greater density, becoming heavier and faster. By means of the Action Drives performers learn to physicalise their acting verbs fully. I suggest to my students that all playable verbs are reducible to these eight Drives. I begin my unit on Action Drives with movement alone, then add the voice, using pure vowel sounds and gibberish, then proceed to work with a neutral text, such as a recipe, so that students’ physical work is not conditioned by the semantic meanings of text. I then ask them to bring in a monologue from their ‘acting’ class to use as a sample. The text is performed through all the Drives, even those whose emotional values clearly contradict both the meaning of the text and the given circumstances of the character who is speaking. I suggest to them that surprising results may be obtained when words are subjected to this technical procedure, rather than by beginning and ending with only the most obvious meanings provided by language. Through this process, actors choose the most appropriate Drives with which to score their texts. (For more on this pedagogical work see my essay “Tactics and Action Drives: Stanislavski Meets Laban” in Objectives, Obstacles, and Tactics in Practice: Perspectives on Activating the Actor, edited by Valerie Clayman Pye and Hillary Haft Bucs, published by Routledge in December 2019.) All of these expressions operate in psychic as well as physical and vocal registers; or rather, as recent research in cognitive neuroscience has demonstrated, the psychic and the physical are synonymous. As in the case of the Still Forms, actors of all types and dispositions are able to engage in Flow Factors and Action Drives that transform conventionalised gender denomination: men may play soft and yielding qualities, while women may engage in behaviours that amount to violent combat. I refer in Chap. 2 to the study on testosterone levels and gendered behaviour in male and female actors undertaken by Van Anders et al. They were directed to perform a monologue in which they fired an employee in stereotypically masculine and feminine ways in turn. It is striking to note how the investigators’ notions of such differences align with gender

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performance analysed earlier, both in terms of LMA and Diane Torr’s social drag workshops: For the masculine condition, participants were instructed that their gestures, movements, and behaviors should involve: taking up space, dominance posturing, infrequent smiles, leading positionality rather than echoing it, interrupting, and eye contact. … For the feminine condition, participants were instructed that their gestures, movements, and behaviors should involve upending sentences, higher voice register, taking up little space, frequent smiles, hesitancy, and infrequent eye contact. (13809)

Text Versus the Body In keeping with a main theme of this book—the reciprocal relationship between pedagogy and practice—it is important to make some attempt to capture what kind of theatre art ‘physical’ acting leads to and calls forth. In Physical Theatres: A Critical Introduction, John Keefe and Simon Murray reply to the question, “Is not all theatre physical?” in the affirmative, but object that too often this physicality is relegated to a mere supporting role to the word, is regarded as vulgar or simply a means to an end—at its worst being the vehicle by which the words are delivered or moved around the stage; or reduced to the routine gestures and mannerisms sufficient to convey the stock character inhabiting and making familiar the world of the play. (3)

They propose that, at the least, physical theatre(s) are those forms that establish movement expressions in some kind of partnership with text, and therefore “confront the continuing hegemony of a theatre defined by its literary and verbal dimensions” (6). And this, which I discuss in much greater detail in the next chapter, may be a more or less direct route outside the frame of realistic representation. Keefe and Murray’s comments about the ‘physical in theatre’ as opposed to ‘physical theatre’ lead directly to the next phase of my argument, which has to do with the hierarchy that exists in much actor training. Most post-secondary theatre departments in the US and Canada, including ours, still divide actor training into three overlapping but nonetheless distinct sub-disciplines, ‘acting,’ ‘voice,’ and ‘movement.’ It is clear from this formulation that while ‘acting’ is, well, Acting, the other two are in some way adjunct. It is as though ‘movement’ and ‘voice’—even though

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the latter also focuses on text—are handmaidens to ‘acting’ classes, in which the word itself proclaims something essential, and therefore mandatory, and set apart from those cognate pursuits that one could do without in a pinch. One of these is indispensable—the book you’d take to a desert island—while the others, while good to have, are somehow ancillary. Much ‘movement training’ is often used in this adjunctive capacity, as an aid to or secondary element with, the main item on offer, which is called Acting. I speak now from personal experience: over many years, I have felt this subtle diminution of my role in the pedagogical project, as though I were a calisthenics instructor standing on the side and offering earnest assistance to the ‘acting’ teacher, often in a literal sense, when explicitly requested to address a particular problem, or to act as a coach in rehearsal. It is as though the ‘acting’ teacher is engaged in the real work of formation, an activity given maximum legitimacy because it is grounded in two sacrosanct categories, text and canon. Scene study is often established as the most significant focus of acting classes, often using canonical plays by the great masters in the Western dramatic tradition, usually Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Ibsen. In movement studies, of course, we usually do not use text, as that is precisely the point of the activity. How can a movement solo of any kind or in any style compete with the weight of Edmund’s “Thou, nature, art my goddess” from act one, scene two of King Lear? How can a devised group work compete in terms of legitimacy with a scene from The Seagull or A Doll’s House? In most of our practices the text—in particular those designated as classical—reigns supreme. As Franc Chamberlain and Ralph Yarrow note in their introduction to Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre, “the emphasis on the classics effectively works to keep theatre in its place as a branch of literature” (5). The hierarchy of values that is established by means of this long-standing tradition, a deeper discussion of which cannot be entered into here, exerts a significant influence on the entire operation of theatre departments. This condition is captured by one of the meanings of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus: “The habitus is thus both structured by conditions of existence and generates practices, beliefs, perceptions, feelings and so forth in accordance with its own structure” (Maton 51). I here include Bourdieu’s notion of doxa, that links field and habitus, and essentially refers to that which is so pervasively understood that it ‘goes without saying’—“a set of fundamental beliefs which does not even need to be asserted in the form of an explicit, self-conscious dogma” (Pascalian

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Meditations 16). Cécile Deer notes the political dimensions of its functioning, which apply precisely to the way training in and for the practice of psychological realism is undertaken in many post-secondary educational settings: “Doxa, as a symbolic form of power, requires that those subjected to it do not question its legitimacy and the legitimacy of those who exert it” (122). An informal survey that I undertook in the spring of 2017 of departments in universities across Canada4 revealed that this sub-disciplinary configuration—‘acting,’ ‘voice,’ and ‘movement’—still largely persists, even in departments renowned for their progressive attitudes to training. Surely what voice teachers do is to treat acting with an emphasis on the vocal dimension of the pursuit, while movement instructors are engaged in what might be called acting through movement. In addition to establishing a hierarchy of values this practice generates a compartmentalisation of thinking in student actors, which may be not only confusing but also disadvantageous to learning. I suggest that as part of the project of renewal and revitalisation of acting pedagogy—that I am identifying with a process of ‘queering’—we either eliminate these categories or find new language for them. This could be the first step in imagining how we might teach in a more integrated way. I acknowledge that casting the ‘movement’ teacher as a kind of calisthenics instructor is gradually losing its hold, which the shift over the years in the content of movement pedagogy reveals. For many decades, movement specialists were concerned with imparting specific skills, in particular, those that might be of use in the performance of traditional plays, rather than with prompting students to ‘create through the body.’ They frequently taught some kind of ‘warm-up’—often very difficult and demanding, and not always based on either sound anatomical principles or current kinesiological concepts—together with tumbling, fencing, some version of mime, as well as period and social dance. One can see how these may be construed as adjunctive to the main fare of text-based acting, much like the relationship of the potato and vegetable on the dinner plate to the meat. With the rise of collective devising as a common practice in theatre 4  This included the theatre departments of Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia, the University of Alberta, and York University, as well as the conservatory programme at Studio 58, part of Langara College in Vancouver.

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departments, the elements of the meal have acquired different weights.5 But while the kale may be prized for its high nutritional values, the primacy of the chicken, steak, or sockeye salmon persists. By contrast, beginning with the body is much more commonly found in certain European acting traditions. As Grotowski repeatedly urged in his writing and lectures, “there is one absolute rule: Bodily activity comes first, and then vocal expression. Most actors work in the opposite order. First you bang on the table and afterwards you shout!” (183).

Some Lineages The notion that actors require any kind of formal—never mind institutional—training is a very recent development: for centuries, actors learned the craft by practising it, under the terms of the apprenticeship system. Alison Hodge notes that “actor training in Europe and North America is a phenomenon of the twentieth century, and has come to inform both the concept and construction of the actor’s role, and consequently the entire dramatic process” (1). In contrast to the apprenticeship system, “training ceased to be simply a means of realizing the repertoire; it became an end in itself” (Watson 239). The descent of discourses in the performing arts may perhaps be apprehended via water metaphors as much as by the image of the tree that we often enlist when discussing matters of genealogy. We may be swimming in a sea of hybridised practices now but to trace their particular components we must go up-river, and then turn into certain tributaries, and at last, often without reliable textual records, that is, maps, we may find discrete sources. I now trace two of these streams, to both France and Russia. Perhaps the most influential exponent of a ‘physical’ approach to actor formation was Jacques Lecoq. His students have gone on to form companies all over the world: “performers, companies, directors, writer/devisers and audiences who have experienced the work incorporate it into their practices and expectations and thus contribute to the changing the nature of theatre” (Chamberlain and Yarrow 1). His initial training as an athlete 5  A great deal has been written on this topic. See, for example, Alison Oddey, Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett, The Frantic Assembly Book of Devising Theatre (London and New  York: Routledge, 2009); and Joan Lipkin, On the Case for Devising Theatre for Social Justice on College Campuses, Theatre Topics, Volume 26, Issue 2.

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seems to have had a profound and comprehensive influence on his work as a theatre pedagogue. As he recalls in The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre, “I came to theatre by way of sports.… The movement of the body through space demanded by gymnastic exercise is of a purely abstract order. In doing these physical movements I discovered extraordinary sensations which could be carried over into everyday life” (3). The aim of the school he founded was “to produce a young theatre of new work, generating performance languages which emphasize the physical playing of the actor” (18). If one paddles further upstream from Lecoq through a series of interpersonal channels one finds the foundational work of Jacques Copeau. Lecoq’s first efforts in theatre, both as an artist and pedagogue, were undertaken in the company of individuals who had had direct experience with the various manifestations of Copeau’s Vieux Colombier theatre and school (4). The two-year curriculum Lecoq designed is grounded in embodied practices that may be traced to Copeau. In their first year, students engage in “psychological play without words,” move on to the neutral mask—directly inherited from Copeau (Evans 78–79)—and then explore “elements, materials, poetry and painting, animals, larval masks, passions, characters and situations” (16–17). Only in the second year of the programme do students enter what Lecoq called “the main dramatic territories” (105), in which text is implicated, such as “Melodrama, Commedia dell’Arte, Clowns, Tragedy and Bouffons” (ibid.), the latter a grotesque sub-species of Clown that he invented, and whom he described as “people who believe in nothing and make fun of everything” (117). Lecoq was not a writer or director, such as Bertolt Brecht, and therefore did not establish a body of theoretical principles that might have coalesced into a manifesto, which might prescribe the dispositions of creative work. His aims were to provoke actors’ imaginations, to stimulate their capacity to engage in a rigorous scrutiny of the world, and to exercise agency in the creation of original work. Auto-cours, as he explained in The Moving Body, “is the name we give to sessions of an hour and a half which take place each day, when groups of students work on their own, without direct supervision by teachers. They prepare a performance based on a theme which I suggest, and present their work in front of the whole school at the end of each week” (91). Even though Ecole Jacques Lecoq was a conservatory whose programme was only two years in duration, it endorsed a conception of the actor as an inventor, whose training might lead to

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writing and direction as much as to acting, and any number of other pursuits (94). Students also created their work without being enslaved to language (Chamberlain and Yarrow 4). This did not, of course, preclude its use: “Being freed from the tyranny of the text is not the same as abandoning [it] altogether” (5). And, in the spirit of a kind of queer anarchy, Lecoq’s work also freed the actor from “the tyranny of the director” (9). Chamberlain notes that while many other seminal figures of twentieth-­ century theatre also spoke of ‘freeing the actor’—Copeau, Artaud, Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Grotowski, and Barba—“Lecoq doesn’t confuse the roles of teacher and director. All of the others mentioned might talk or write about liberating the actor but in the end … their teaching was/is a means of furthering their directorial ambitions” (ibid.). The next up-river route I take begins—for me at least—with the US-based National Michael Chekhov Association (NMCA), which essentially means instructors and actors Lisa Dalton and Wil Kilroy and producer Charles Bowles. Their mentor was the late Mala Powers, who while working as an actor in Hollywood was taught and coached by Michael Chekhov. In the summer of 2014 I participated in the annual NMCA Summer Training Intensive, held at the University of Southern Maine. What struck me about the work was its balanced regard towards methods that reveal meaning in text and in the body; by its emphasis on specific and accessible tools; and on the actor’s imagination, rather than on personal history. It is surprising that, given the comprehensiveness and versatility of Chekhov’s method—it is equally applicable to stage and screen acting—it is not more widely used. The following is from the NMCA website: Michael Chekhov’s unique contribution to acting has been one of the best-­ kept secrets of the theatrical world. Born in 1891, Michael, nephew of Anton Chekhov, became one of Russia’s Most Honored Actors. Constantine Stanislavski considered Misha his most brilliant pupil. He is often considered to be the finest actor Russia has ever produced. By 1928, as head of the Second Moscow Art Theater, Chekhov’s innovative directing and teaching had provoked such severe criticism by the Communist government that he was forced to flee the country for safety. (Michael Chekhov)

It is indeed troubling to ponder why even today he is one of theatre’s “best-kept secrets.” His work was translated into and deployed in English, both during his stay at Dartington Hall in England (Marowitz 160–166),

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and after his move to the US, where he worked in both New York (174– 181) and Hollywood (263–276). But he remains a relatively marginal figure by comparison with his much more famous mentor and teacher at the Moscow Art Theatre and with the founders of the Group Theatre in New York, who claimed to carry on Stanislavski’s work in America. Their encounter with the evidence of the Russian master’s visionary’s practices may be traced to the Moscow Art Theatre’s début in New York in 1923, which caused a sensation. However, as Ann Bogart and Tina Landau note, “Americans grasped onto what turned out to be a severely limited aspect of Stanislavski’s ‘system,’ and turned it into a religion” (16). As we have seen, the habitus in any given field is likely to renew itself over time through the coming and going of generations of adherents. Bogart and Landau, writing in the first decade of the twenty-first century observe that “our misunderstanding, misappropriation and miniaturization of the Stanislavski system remains the bible for most practitioners. Like the air we breathe, we are rarely aware of its dominance and omnipresence” (ibid.). Scholar Sharon Marie Carnicke has undertaken crucially important work on this topic, exposing the complex and troubled history of Stanislavski’s practice and its legacy. She notes that American acting teachers and directors invoke Stanislavski’s name as if they possessed a comprehensive knowledge of the man and his work. They tend to think of him as a tyrannical director and teacher, exclusively committed to realism as an aesthetic style and personal emotion as the primary wellspring of great acting. In fact, he viewed the actor as an autonomous artist, saw realism as only one in a myriad of equally profound theatrical styles, and developed a compendium of acting techniques, with ‘emotional memory’ as the most capricious and least effective. (Politics of… 15)

She notes that by the time of the Moscow Art Theatre’s tours to New York in 1923 and 1924, the Soviet regime had already determined that realism was the only theatrical genre that could serve the goals of the revolution, and that in their enthusiastic response to the work they saw on stage “Americans became unwittingly and ironically complicit in developing his Soviet image. When Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman, and Cheryl Crawford founded the Group Theatre in 1931, they adopted the Soviet emphasis on realism and added an American spin by emphasizing Stanislavski’s early notions of emotional memory” (16–17).

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In addition, as Carnicke reminds us, his written work was subject to extreme pressures of censorship: “He published them in the late 1930s during the most repressive period of Soviet history” (17). She goes on to document how they came to be mistranslated as the result of a serious miscalculation on his part: “In 1931, [Stanislavski] gave American translator Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood rights to all his books, unaware that commerce would oblige her to abridge them severely” (ibid.). These original problematic translations are still in wide use. I suggest that those instructors who believe that An Actor Prepares, Building a Character, and Creating a Role represent the totality of Stanislavski’s work, fixed for all time, need to think again. They likely have no idea of the culmination of his practice in what his follower Maria Knebel called Active Analysis, “a rehearsal technique in which actors examine the dynamics of human interaction through purposeful improvisations” (18). They may also have no idea of his “psychophysical experimentation with Yoga and his interest in modern dance” (26). Carnicke proposes that we are finally making progress on this subject when “we admit that the American Method and the Stanislavski System are not one and the same thing” (27). Carnicke sounds a note of genuine frustration at the persistence of habitus over time; how the identification of Stanislavski’s work with “Psychological Realism [is] passed from generation to generation of actors despite irrefutable historical evidence that proves his turning away from this style as early as 1907” (Stanislavsky in Focus… 70). Moreover, many have voiced the concern that psychological realism, as it is taught under the terms of the American Method, may actually be dangerous: Carnicke, citing an unpublished dissertation by Cheryl McFarren entitled Rethinking Affective Memory: Background, Method and Challenge for Contemporary Actor Training (2003), raises the subject of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in relation to this approach to acting. Exercises intended to re-stimulate memories in the actor as part of her/his training are thoroughly problematic for individuals suffering from this condition because remembering—which is essentially re-­experiencing— trauma produces harmful effects in the brain. Carnicke reminds us that for various reasons, “PTSD is extremely prevalent in the US,” and who knows how many of its sufferers may end up in acting classes (Stanislavsky in Focus… 164–165). But there is a psychic risk for any number of actors— apart from those who may have a clinical diagnosis of PTSD—engaged in re-stimulating memories with which they may not have made peace.

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By contrast with the Method’s psychologising, chapter 1 of Michael Chekhov’s To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting is entitled “The Actor’s Body and Psychology” and focuses entirely on the physical practice as the approach to and revelation of interiority (1–20). His work proposes, among its vast set of linked concepts and practices, the use of the Imaginary Body, in which any configuration of psychophysical features, connoting— for my purposes—any gender expression, may form the basis of character (Dalton et al. 68). His Archetypal Gestures (33) cross over significantly with Laban’s Action Drives. His formulation of the Psychological Gesture (To the Actor… 63–84), which incorporates the Archetypal Gestures, as the psychophysical key to character and narrative, may be the most significant and useful tool in his system, allowing the actor to escape the kind of presuppositions that may arise in primarily cognitive approaches to text. These tools may be readily enlisted in the matter of exploring gendered physicality. But other components of his system may also serve this specific purpose, such as his Qualities of Movement, based on the elements of earth, water, air, and fire—Moulding, Flowing, Flying, and Radiating— which roughly correspond to Laban’s Weight factor. Other physically based approaches to acting training to which I have been exposed, such as Richard Schechner’s Rasaboxes, or that I use as a core component of my curriculum, such as the Viewpoints method of improvisation, have been gaining ground in mainstream North American training programmes in recent years. These techniques also provide the possibility of a detour around the traps that conventionally configured, text-based approaches can set for both actors and instructors. In the fall of 2001 theatre director and visionary Richard Schechner published “Rasaesthetics” in The Drama Review, in which he established the theory and practice of the Rasaboxes. The work is derived from and inspired by the Natyasastra, a classical Indian performance text that Schechner considered a cultural equivalent to Aristotle’s Poetics, with the considerable difference that “unlike the Poetics, the NS is more danced than read” (“Rasaesthetics” 27). As Paula Murray Cole and Michele Minnick note, he fused concepts from this ancient source with current research in cognitive neuroscience as well as elements of the work of theatre visionary Antonin Artaud: “With a closer look one finds all three are concerned with the same thing … a circular rather than a binary relationship between emotion and the body, inside and outside, which focuses on a visceral, gut-based mode of perception, rather than a solely visual-­ auditory one” (214). The Rasaboxes, which may be combined with any

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other approach to actor formation, contain in their emphasis on embodiment and transformation significant potential for the project of gender subversion. Rasa literally means taste in Sanskrit, but it is much more than this: the stimulus of food is linked with emotion, which is in turn considered in the context of performance, both the experience of performer and that of the spectator (“Rasaesthetics” 29). The nine basic rasas are Sringara (desire, love), Hasya (laughter), Karuna (pity, grief), Raudra (anger), Vira (energy, vigour), Bhayanaka (fear, shame), Bibhasta (disgust), Adbhuta (surprise, wonder), and Santa (bliss, peace) (31). Each rasa represents the whole spectrum of each emotion’s expression, therefore Raudra, for example, includes everything from irritation to rage. A grid is drawn or taped onto the studio floor, and each box is assigned one of the rasas. When one steps into each box, one experiences a radical and enveloping psychophysical transformation in the mode of that rasa. “As emotion courses through the body, it shapes behaviour according to its demands, and in turn refuels the imagination and sparks physical impulses. Doing and manifesting intertwine with receiving and responding” (Cole and Minnick 215). Participants move from one box to another, assuming still poses that exemplify each rasa. They then incorporate breath, unconstructed sound, gesture and movement, and gibberish (218–219). When text is imported into this procedure one is able to realise a great variety of performance qualities that might otherwise escape actors in the usually seated process of text analysis based solely on given circumstances (219). Finally, elements of different rasas may be combined and layered to achieve the kind of complexity one looks for in a textured performance: one may play from a ‘baseline’ rasa, while including elements of others (221). The potentials here for actors and directors are enormous: imagine an actor playing Ophelia through the emotional baseline of Raudra (anger) with an admixture of Bibhasta (disgust); this most disempowered female character is suddenly afforded enormous energy and presence, which may offer a subtext with which to interpret the role. Or Iago might be played through a mixture of Karuna (grief) with Bhayanaka (fear, shame), which could allow the actor to explore some otherwise unimagined reason for the character’s destructive behaviour. And the potential for gender unmaking and remaking is equally promising. The Viewpoints method of improvisation and composition was established specifically and expressly to counter the pervasive Method-based

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approach to acting training in North America, one that privileges text and the reading of text, and whose point of departure is essentially a state of disembodiment. Bogart and Landau concede that the Method is “highly effective for film and television” (16), where close-ups require an actor to deliver recognisably truthful emotional states on cue. But it has subsumed theatre practice within its own hyperrealist aesthetic. The nine Viewpoints— Tempo, Duration, Kinaesthetic Response, Repetition, Spatial Relationship, Topography, Shape, Gesture, and Architecture (35–52)—together form a kind of improvisation machine, through which one may process any source object, whether theme—such as gender expression—image, or textual excerpt. It therefore acts as a destabilising force against the limiting assumptions that a purely cognitive approach can engender in young actors’ imaginations: ‘My character wouldn’t do that.’ Such approaches locate the work of the actor parallel to and in kinship with those of a dancer or musician: the actor uses her body to play the text as a score—as a part of the entirety of the performance text—but the actor is not the same as his character. As Rhonda Blair writes in The Actor, Image and Action…, each kind of performer “memorizes a score, whether it is textual, choreographic, or musical, that engages and interacts with the body” (52). However, the notion of character as an extension of the actor forms part of the doxa of film and television, and exercises a profound influence on the imaginations of both acting instructors and student actors. As Andrei Kirillov notes in his introduction to The Path of the Actor, Chekhov’s split from Stanislavski—and subsequently his entire pedagogical project—occurred as a consequence of “his refusal to exploit an actor’s personal feelings in his art; instead there should be a clear differentiation between the actor as a person and the actor as artist” (4). In Chekhov’s work the place of affective memory is taken by the imagination and its manifestation in the body. However, as Carnicke notes in Stanislavsky in Focus (213–214), it is important to remind ourselves of the history of Stanislavski’s engagement with the use of affective memory. One might argue that in his System it is empathy—itself a function of the imagination—that takes precedence over the recollection of personal experience, in whose efficacy as a performance technique he never placed much credence (157–159). Rhonda Blair notes that the theatre visionaries who came after Stanislavski—Meyerhold and Brecht, as well as Chekhov— embraced Stanislavski’s later theorising on the matter; they too “rejected the reliance on affective memory of the earlier phases of Stanislavsky’s system” (26).

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One of Stanislavski’s primary influences was the French psychologist Théodule Ribot, who was ahead of his time in his understanding that emotion is “a total psychophysical event with no causal relationship between mind and body … [anticipating] twenty-first century developments in cognitive science and brain chemistry that investigate the seamless interdependence of mental and physical operations” (Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus 168). Stanislavski called his system a ‘psychotechnique,’ which was as much as to say that he saw the body, mind, and soul—in which he firmly believed, despite what Soviet censors may have done to his writing—as part of a continuum. In order to feel afraid, run. To stage grief, collapse the body. To generate a state of suppressed rage, engage in a Wring Action Drive. Many student actors understand this truth, despite the occasionally risky psychologising in which they may be required to engage. Some years ago our department presented Lorca’s Yerma, a play about the tormented yearning of the eponymous character for a child. The young woman playing the lead confided to me that she prepared to go on stage every night by means of protracted Wringing in the hallway outside the backstage area of the theatre, and also that her onstage distress, which was extremely convincing, did not once in the two-week run entail the shedding of actual tears. This young actor sensed intuitively what current research into cognitive science has proven through rigorous experiments. And actor, director, and scholar Rhonda Blair has taken the lead in proposing that we re-make our approach to teaching on the basis of such research. Every acting instructor should read The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience! Blair places our approach to actor training in the context of our conception of the human, which of course is not fixed, but subject to the flux of history: “How we understand acting is contingent, even if only implicitly, on how we understand basic human functioning” (23). We are still in the main operating on the basis of the old dichotomy between ‘mind’ and ‘body’ established centuries ago by René Descartes; that we are essentially brains carried about by bodies. But the “truth is that these parts of our selves are inseparable: without the material of the living body, there is no mind, and without feeling, there is no true reason” (26). And we must remind ourselves that Stanislavski himself subscribed to a “monist,” that is a unified, conception of the human being against the Cartesian duality, that “mind and emotion are not separate from, but rather grow out of, the body” (29–30).

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I refer to ‘physical acting’ in quotation marks because it has become clear that this term is redundant: all acting is physical, because all psychic function is rooted in being a body. As Blair observes, “there is no consciousness without a body. This is also a basic truth for acting: the body and the consciousness that rises out of it are the core materials of the actor’s work” (3). But while the science has moved on, the approaches to acting, in particular in the US and Canada, have remained text-centred and based in notions of human function to which Stanislavski himself—as I have noted earlier—did not subscribe (10). Just as Stanislavski was in touch with the scientific findings of his time, so ought we to be with those of our own. Discoveries in cognitive neuroscience have been shaking up a whole slew of disciplines and practices, and acting pedagogy ought not to be an exception. As Blair advises, “using the findings of science can move us past some historical and cultural conventions, as well as habits of thought, that are counterproductive for actors” (8). Apart from the risks of using memory as a tool for the actor’s work there is a matter of its inefficacy. ‘Retrieved’ memories are never the same twice; memories are not ‘objects’ that can be recovered, but are, in effect, no different than products of the imagination (xiii). As Blair notes, there may be nothing to choose between what we imagine and what we think we remember: “Psychic images—whether they are of authentic past experiences or of an imagination of our self in fictive situations—are always of the body, since they are generated only within and by a body” (77). The notable difference between the two may reside in degrees of liability to the actor: using one’s imagination—Stanislavski’s ‘magic if’ —may be more altogether prudent than trying to reconstruct childhood trauma. Blair also explores ground-breaking discoveries about the existence and function of mirror neurons, which are crucial in terms of understanding how we perceive and are affected by performers, and how performers affect each other. As she concludes, “watching something is the same as doing something—the same neuron fires” (13). Such discoveries, as she says, may finally put to bed—or ought to—the outdated idea that actor training is either ‘inside-out’ or ‘outside-in.’ Another key finding from current research is that ‘emotions,’ so much a part of the discourse and apparatus of psychological realism, are actually patterns of physical response to stimuli: “Emotions are automatic, in the sense that they are based on inherited and learned repertoires of action” (66). It seems that Grotowski’s aforementioned observation about how banging on the table precedes verbal expression has been proven

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s­ cientifically. Further, while ‘emotions’ give rise to ‘feelings,’ they are distinct from them; that is, “feelings begin when emotions rise to awareness, when the state of the body begins to register consciously in the mind” (68). Thus, the sequence of events that one experiences is not “I see the bear, I feel frightened, I run,” but rather “I see the bear, I run, I feel frightened” (37). The implications of this for actor training are enormous: rather than using a substitution an actor may much more effectively and safely generate a feeling state from manipulating her physical state, as the actor playing Yerma understood. And one may enter into a psychic state that signals ‘femininity’ or ‘masculinity’ to both performer and audience by means of similar processes. While on the topic of acting and neuroscience, I must note briefly the latest method used in actor training to generate emotion safely via corporeal practices: experimental psychologist Susanna Bloch and her colleagues have developed the ALBA Emoting technique, whereby actors use specific breathing patterns, postures, and facial expressions to generate “six emotions or conditions—fear, sadness, anger, joy, eroticism, tenderness” (46– 47). A crucial part of this work is the process of “stepping out” that actors learn to undertake in order to leave such states unscathed. Blair considers that “Bloch’s technique is a precise way of manipulating the body and breath to arouse a ‘real’ emotional state, which is accurately perceived by the audience” (48).

Do What I Do and What I Say My advice to ‘acting’ instructors, from the perspective of one who teaches ‘movement,’ is to use your professional development fund—which I sincerely hope you (still) have—in order to learn or revisit physical approaches to actor training. Begin to incorporate them into your curriculum. Practise embodiment yourself as part of a process of learning to guide your students back to it—given that many of them may have become profoundly disembodied after years of immersion in the practices of smartphone culture. I believe Laban’s work lends itself most readily and productively to the configuring of gender-conscious performances, given its specificity and comprehensiveness. There are some excellent books on the subject: I can recommend Jean Newlove’s Laban for Actors and Dancers (New York: Routledge, 1993, 1995) and Barbara Adrian’s Actor Training the Laban Way: An Integrated Approach to Voice, Speech and Movement (New York: Allworth, 2008). There is also Brigid Panet’s Essential Acting: A Practical

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Handbook for Actors, Teachers and Directors (London and New  York: Routledge, 2015), which includes a section on LMA within a very wise and useful book about acting instruction in general. One might also, as I did, find a certified Laban Movement Analyst with whom to take private lessons. Take an intensive course in the Michael Chekhov Technique—or become a certified instructor, which can be accomplished relatively easily. Get The Viewpoints Book, which is a very straightforward practical guide, and learn how to incorporate its approaches into scene study class. Find someone who teaches the Rasaboxes via the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) database, or take a workshop in this method— as I also did—at one of the annual ATHE conferences. There are many approaches to acting instruction, of course: which of these lend themselves to the ‘defamiliarisation’ of gender performance?

‘Code-Switching’ It seems that each of us has a ‘home base’ in terms of gender, where we feel most ‘ourselves,’ a term that reminds us of how much our sense of core identity is indistinguishable from our gender identity. However, as Jay Prosser argues in Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, while we need to guarantee the right of individuals to claim their ‘home’ on the complex territory of gender identities, we must be aware that this sense of “home is, on some level, always a place we make up” (204). Diane Torr’s work seems to suggest that it is indeed possible to engage in a comprehensive and convincing gender conversion. But the degree to which one is able to disguise one’s gender expression through performance is debatable: do we not engage in this ‘othering’ of self with our gender baseline clearly in view? And even if we take a ‘gender holiday,’ don’t we always return to our ‘gender home’? That is, can what we act become us? I have a crucial caveat to make on the basis of this question: Torr recalls that in the course of teaching Man for a Day workshops, she “even had an effeminate man participate, one who wanted to learn how to temper his ‘girliness’ for occasions when a more conventional masculinity would help him pass unremarked” (143–144). While it may be thoroughly obvious, I must emphasise that I am not advocating a programme of ‘code-­switching’ as a way of attempting to re-inscribe some kind of gender essentialism among acting students! This term, originating in linguistics, is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the process whereby “the hearer is able to perform … a process of adjustment to the articulatory habits of the

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speaker which permits the listener to learn quickly certain types and degrees of phonemic deviation” (“code-switching”). It has been adapted for use in various contexts, such as dialect reduction in actor training—a category of identity expression adjacent to that under discussion here—including in the area of gender presentation. The expectation, by means of this logic, is that gender non-conforming actors ought to learn how to ‘act gender’ correctly via the kind of workshops taught by Torr in order to ‘pass’ as conventional men and women, with the goal of being cast in conventionally conceived productions. Mark Evans’ detailed exploration of the problematic notion of the ‘neutral body’—pervasive in many schemes of movement training—offers another way of putting this, with a focus on the English context: “the ‘neutral’ body does encourage the gay or lesbian actor aspiring for a varied West End or classical career to conceal several aspects of a physicality they might otherwise wish to celebrate” (111–112). And he notes the opportunities that gay playwrights such as Mark Ravenhill and Tony Kushner “have presented for bodies to perform in unabashedly queer ways on stage” (112). John Clum proposes that gay actors move beyond either imitating “victimized women from opera, ballet and camp movies” (197), or the stereotypes of effeminacy, and instead aim at some variety of “ideal performance [that] would be unmoored from conventional notions of masculinity and femininity—an imaginative self-creation possible onstage only outside the framework of realistic drama” (ibid.). What I am advocating is that instructors, especially in their capacity as directors, consider a diversity of theatrical strategies by means of which one might conceal the disjunctions between actor and role—in the case of gender, as well as other categories of identity—or reveal them deliberately. That is, depending on the stylistic demands of a given text and/or directorial choice, any capable actor could conceivably play any role. As Evans notes, “human subjectivity is not constituted by one single discourse, but by the intersection of many, overlapping discourses … The actor is constructed through not one body, but many” (170). The objective ought to be about creating a flexibility of (dis)positions, of bodies, texts, and mises-­ en-­scène, an issue I take up in more detail in the next chapter.

Meghan Plays Yitzhak In this chapter I have demonstrated that gender performance may be considered a kind of costume of embodiment, one that may be taken up or discarded at will. However, the following account shows that it can in

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some mysterious way become more than that, producing unexpected and surprising consequences. Meghan Gardiner is a successful actor and playwright based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She is married to an equally successful (male) actor and they have one child. I have worked with her on more than one production and know her to be the kind of performer directors and playwrights dream about, given her level of skill, intelligence, integrity, ensemble spirit, and work ethic. She is also, by her own admission, a “girly-girl”: “I’ve always loved makeup, fashion and styling my super long hair” (email correspondence, as is all subsequent quoted material). In 2003, she was cast as Yitzhak in a low-budget Vancouver production of John Cameron Mitchell’s hit musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, staged in a downtown gay and lesbian bar. It is stipulated in the script that this character, part of the band that accompanies what is largely a solo performance by the lead, is to be played by a female performer in drag, a fact that is revealed at the end of the show. Gardiner, like any actor well-­ schooled in the American version of Stanislavski that is taught in Canada, took an ‘inside-out’ approach to creating Yitzhak: I started with the character’s journey first, because I didn’t want to work on the physical transformation before I’d worked on Yitzhak’s spiritual one. I found the parts of his journey that resonated with me, and then I added layers—his physicality, vocal resonance, a Croatian accent, wardrobe, and finally, hair and makeup. A lot of actors say that you never really find the character until you put on your costume. I can’t disagree with this, but the work I’d done prior to that moment held me in good stead.

Gardiner recalls that the whole process of finding and playing this character was quite protracted: the actors rehearsed part-time for eight to ten weeks, then embarked on a four-week run of the show, which was extended by a further four weeks due to popular demand. Like one of the women in Diane Torr’s Man for a Day workshops, Gardiner bound her breasts and applied facial hair every day, among other elements of costume and ­make-­up. The actor was directed to be “integrated in the audience at the start, hauling sound equipment onto the stage and just trying to blend in,” and was therefore often exposed to the close scrutiny of audience members, perhaps more than in other productions of the piece. When I attended a performance, I knew very little about Mitchell’s piece, includ-

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ing this provision regarding casting, and I assumed that the character in question was male. I was therefore astonished to discover that, not only was the performer not a man, it was in fact this female actor whom I knew. She recalls that mine was a typical reaction: A woman came up on stage once (rather inebriated) to ask me on date in the middle of the show, and I received a beautiful love letter that I still have to this day. I realize they may have just been interested in whomever was up on that stage, regardless of gender assignment, but it still was encouraging to me as an actor.

But the part of this story that is the most astonishing, and that would be of interest to scholars and researchers in a variety of fields, from psychology to endocrinology to gender studies, is the following: The wildest thing that happened during the run, however, was that one morning I woke up and thought that I clearly hadn’t removed all the facial hair from the show the night before. I went to pluck the little sprout of coarse dark hairs and they wouldn’t budge. They were my own. They had grown during the course of the run, and they made me incredibly proud.

CHAPTER 6

‘Queer-Looking, Queer-Acting’: The Subversion of Realism

In this chapter, I propose that queer content prompts queer form—that there is ample evidence that queer theatre-makers tend to choose modes of expression which exceed the frame of realism. And further, that gender dissident actors may find greater freedom of expression as well as professional accomplishment in work that defies realism’s hegemony. At the core of this book is a very old, very conventional belief in the power of two interacting capacities of the human subject that, fully evident in early childhood, together provide for the essential function of all dramatic representation: first, in the ability of the actor to transform her/ himself, physically, vocally, and energetically; and second, in that of the imagination of the spectator to invest productively in the power of such transformations. I argue that the forms of realism in which North American audiences remain thoroughly invested detract from these capacities; they allow actors the relative ease of playing characters who are largely like themselves, and audiences to do rather less imaginative work than they otherwise might. My core argument here is that theatre need not—ought not, perhaps for the sake of its very survival—imitate the photographic realism of film and television. A quick look at the 2018–2019 season offerings of most regional theatres in North America provides evidence in support of the suspicion that—with some intriguing exceptions—realism remains the dominant form of theatrical expression in the first decades of the new millennium. This includes significant programming of musicals, which tend to have © The Author(s) 2020 C. Alexandrowicz, Acting Queer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29318-5_6

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consistent box office appeal. One gets the impression that many of the contemporary plays could work just as well on film or television. And there is a notable reliance on adaptations from well-known works of literature. In support of this notion, I suggest the reader consider any number of notable companies in the League of Resident Theatres (LORT) in the US, and their counterparts in the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (PACT). Larger companies may have second stages where more ‘challenging’ work is presented. One example is the Guthrie Theater, which in 2018– 2019 featured a solo drag cabaret show entitled Lashed but not Leashed— for full comic effect this title must be spoken aloud—and Hi, Are You Single?, another solo work about a young man with cerebral palsy attempting to navigate the gay sex and dating scene in New  York City.1 In the same season, Yale Repertory Theatre presented What Remains, a dance/ music/poetry fusion dealing with the epidemic of lethal violence against African-Americans.2 When regional theatres do present queer content, it tends to be gay rather than lesbian and to be of a non-threatening, feel-good disposition. For example, the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver, British Columbia, offered the theatrical equivalent of American gay sitcom television in the form of Bed and Breakfast, which the company described as follows: When Brett inherits a family estate, he and his partner, Drew, move to a quiet little tourist town to set up a B&B. But will these big city boys face friction in their new community? With dozens of hilarious characters all portrayed by two actors, it’s a heartfelt comedy about “being out,” skeletons in the closet, and finding a place to call home. (“Bed and Breakfast”)

In 2015 queer writer and artist Jordan Tannahill—whom I cite in my introduction—published his diatribe on the current state of theatre as an art form in North America. Its title, Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama, hints at his position on the enduring hegemony of realism, and the prospects of the art form in consequence. His core argument is that most theatre, not just the mainstream version with which I am concerned here, is a tedious, formulaic affair that we attend out of a sense of 1  See https://www.guthrietheater.org/shows-and-tickets/2018-2019-season/ (accessed 19 February 2019). 2  See https://www.yalerep.org/productions-and-programs/production/what-remains (accessed 19 February 2019).

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duty to Culture in general. It frequently merits no more than a shared acknowledgement that ‘The play was okay, I guess’—unless, of course, “It was an expensive nap” (22)—and we depart from it feeling diminished and forlorn. He warns that if the art form does not radically reconfigure itself it will be swallowed up by its own utter irrelevance. He proposes that our current investment in realism is a 200-year-old inheritance from Eugène Scribe and his Well-Made Play, despite the fact that he and his works were widely acknowledged to define mediocrity in their day (35– 39). This argument is corroborated by Bourdieu’s belief in the potential longevity of the habitus in cultural fields. Does Tannahill overstate his case? Certainly: one thinks of all the great plays in the realist canon, brilliant, and indelible productions of which one may have seen. But there is much truth in this nonetheless: Scribe’s model of the well-made play has become so ubiquitous that the programming of North American regional theatres … seems to suggest that this simply what theatre is, how plays are meant to be. … We go to the theatre to be surprised, but so often the Well-Made Play shoves the recognizable and familiar down our throats. Middle-class white people arguing in living rooms. Middle-class white people arguing over dinner. Middle-class white people arguing at a backyard barbecue. (39)

Tannahill claims that the theatre can only be saved if it embraces all the possibilities of liveness, and that in doing so it will of necessity move beyond the terms and constraints of psychological realism, which more properly belong to cinema. Citing Hans-Thies Lehmann, he argues that theatre artists must embrace “the material situation of the performance and the stage, to what is occurring in the unfolding present between performer and audience” (96).

Realism Versus the Postdramatic Hans-Thies Lehmann published Postdramatic [sic] Theatre in 1999, but it was not translated into English until 2006, so the huge influence it exerted in the English-speaking world reads as a puzzling delayed reaction. In this dense and exacting work Lehmann tries to capture in one analytical net the huge range of theatrical expressions that dispense with the core elements of ‘drama.’ In order to make his argument he takes pains to define those elements, and arrives at the following distillations: “dramatic theatre

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is subordinated to the primacy of the text” (21); “the human figure [is] still centrally defined through speech” (22); and the dramatic theatre is primarily concerned with “the formation of illusion” (ibid.). All these conditions, in turn, require and guarantee an inextricable relationship between ‘actor’ and ‘character,’ wherein the latter is, as it were, ‘laminated’ onto the former. It is important to consider that Lehmann includes the theory and practice of Brecht within the frame of the ‘dramatic,’ even though Brecht tried to distinguish his ‘epic’ theatre from what he himself called ‘dramatic theatre.’3 As Lehmann notes, all of Brecht’s practices, including the “use of choruses, narrators, interludes, plays-within-a-play, prologues and epilogues, [and] asides” (22), may be incorporated within the structure of dramatic theatre without compromising its fundamental structure. Lehmann observes that in mainstream practices, and in the popular imagination—I believe this is particularly pertinent in the case of North American theatre—‘drama’ and ‘theatre’ are considered interchangeable: “Theatre is tacitly thought of as the theatre of dramas. Among its consciously theorized elements are the categories of ‘imitation’ and ‘action’/‘plot’, as much as the virtually automatic intimate connection of the two” (21). The terms of the dramatic theatre, therefore, constitute the habitus of the art form in toto, which may be defined as a “structured and structuring structure” (Maton 51), that is, a force as much prescriptive as descriptive. As Lehmann acknowledges, “through its very form, dramatic theatre proclaims whole-ness as the model of the real. Dramatic theatre ends when these elements are no longer the regulating principle but merely one possible variant of theatrical art” (22, emphasis in original). On page twenty-four of his prologue, he supplies a long list of artists and companies who create performance outside this nexus—that is, who create post-dramatic theatre—and it is significant that the vast majority of the names are European or British. It is also not surprising that many of the names are of artists or companies whose primary identification is with dance, including the few that are based in North America. Realism—that is, dramatic theatre, according to Lehmann—really occupies a minority position overall if considered in the context of the possibilities of theatre as a whole. But it retains its dominance in theatre in English-speaking North America.

3  “The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre,” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 37.

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I must here reiterate my caveat about the distinct nature of Quebec cultural expression. For reasons that cannot be examined here, Quebec theatre, one assumes as a consequence of the Quiet Revolution,4 has abided by a different habitus, and much of its expression may be aligned with elements of the post-dramatic. This has given its queer theatre artists a tremendous head start. Robert Wallace writes: The eroticization of the theatrical site in contemporary Québécois theatre is one of the features that firmly distinguishes it from its English-Canadian counterpart. In part, this results from treating the physical and imagistic qualities of performance as equal in importance to the written text in the creation of the theatrical event—an attitude not as prevalent in the rest of the country as it is in Québec. (“Homo Creation…” 17)

Wallace goes on to note the self-referential construction of many of Quebec’s gay plays, whereby the apparatus of theatrical illusion is exposed, and proposes that “the rejection of naturalism by gay Quebecois  playwrights can be viewed as both a repudiation of the dominant theatrical mode of the American cultural hegemony and a defiant assertion of difference” (24). In Lehmann’s estimation, the only Canadian theatre or dance artist who passes post-dramatic muster is Robert Lepage (24), who is, of course, Quebecois, as well as being a one-man theatrical industry and cultural export. A remarkable exception to the mainstream’s enduring devotion to realism—but which itself illustrates the aesthetic differences between Europe and North America—is the case of Canadian Stage Company in Toronto. In June 2018, artistic director Matthew Jocelyn stepped down after nine years at the helm. While Canadian-born, he had spent almost three decades studying and working in Europe. At the time of his appointment Canadian Stage—or CanStage, as it was and is known—“was simply a theatre company that operated not all that differently from regional theatres in smaller cities across Canada” (Nestruck). That is, it offered a subscription series comprised of the mix of fare described earlier: on its mainstage popular shows from Broadway and the West End, as well as musicals, with Canadian plays on its second stage. But Jocelyn had been hired to revitalise the 4  A great deal has been written about this, of course; for a sampling of how the Quiet Revolution manifested itself in Quebec’s theatre the reader might consider Elaine Pigeon’s essay on the work of Michel Tremblay, and Louise Forsyth’s on Pol Pelletier in Queer Theatre in Canada, ed. Rosalind Kerr and cited extensively further.

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c­ompany and did so by presenting much more experimental theatrical work, as well as work based in ‘movement,’ which roughly translates to ‘abstraction.’ As Nestruck writes, “he questioned the standard definition of a ‘Canadian play,’ considering, as is the norm in continental Europe, the director or choreographer as much of an author of a stage production as a playwright.” That is, Jocelyn imported the habitus of European theatre practice within the field of Canadian regional theatre. In other words, he chose to refashion the company as a home for and purveyor of theatre distinctly in the post-dramatic mode; a disposition that, as I argue further, is the logical home for ‘queer’ expressions of all kinds. This ruffled many feathers and caused a significant loss in ticket and subscription sales. As Kamal al-Solaylee wrote in Toronto Life, “his radical, rapid revamping of the ultra-safe company has alienated audiences.” However, over the course of Jocelyn’s tenure, the company found a new equilibrium, albeit with 10–20% lower revenues (Nestruck). In advance of his departure, he programmed the 2018–2019 season, expecting “that the company will continue on a similar path under its next artistic director” (ibid.), so that what he established would not have been merely an experiment. This account demonstrates the degree to which artistic directors and critics routinely underestimate both audiences’ tastes and their capacity to evolve. If we continue to produce safe, timid, predictable theatre, audiences will come to expect and even to seek it. As Tannahill argues, “if the programming of our institutions is governed by tentativeness and trepidation, tentative and trepidatious plays will be created. Those plays will in turn foster a tentative and trepidatious audience” (44). I here summon the notion of the ‘horizon of expectations,’ developed by aesthetic philosopher Hans Robert Jauss, who essentially invented ‘reception theory.’5 The following definition, while not directly from Jauss, is clear and aligns readily with Bourdieu’s notion of habitus: The shared ‘mental set’ or framework within which those of a particular generation in a culture understand, interpret, and evaluate a text or an artwork. This includes representational knowledge of conventions and expectations (e.g. regarding genre and style), and social knowledge (e.g. of moral codes). It is a concept of reading (and the meanings this produces) as historically variable. (Chandler and Munday) 5  See http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100407730 (accessed 31 March 2019).

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Our horizon of expectations is clearly related to ‘the rules of the game,’ the phrase often invoked as a readily comprehensible short form for habitus. It is clear that Matthew Jocelyn disrupted the horizon of expectations of the mainstream theatre audience in Toronto when he introduced a whole new set of genres and styles under the heading ‘theatre.’ CanStage’s new director, named in July 2018, is Brendan Healy, formerly artistic director of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, about which much more below. As was noted in the company’s press release announcing the appointment, the board went looking for someone to guide the company along the path taken by Jocelyn: “the Artistic Director role exists to produce and present a hybrid of multidisciplinary performances that push the boundaries of form and style, to integrate theatre within a wide range of practices including dance, music, and multimedia visual arts.” In the same release, Buddies in Bad Times was credited “for its cutting-edge performances and its dedication to the promotion of queer theatrical expression” (Canadian Stage). Will Healy maintain CanStage’s investment in a ‘post-dramatic’ habitus, thereby satisfying a newly established horizon of expectations? Assuming he does, how will his queerness, as a man, theatre artist and artistic director, inform how this takes shape? It will be intriguing to see how this unfolds. In any event, Canadian Stage is probably the only major theatre in English Canada that has taken this very queer turn.

The Show Is in Your Head I here take a step back to consider some basic mechanics of spectatorship and summon pertinent findings of neuroscience in order to do so. Nobel laureate Eric Kandel is co-director of Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute, where the effects of visual images on the brains of test subjects are studied. While these are static images, rather than the time-based generations of performance, it seems logical to give credence to the overlap in function that would seem to obtain between them. These are not new ideas, but perhaps they need to be reiterated in a discussion about the precepts upon which theatrical realism is based. Kandel cites “Kant’s theory that sensory information allows reality to be invented by mind” (205), and notes the continuation of this idea in the work of many thinkers, such as art historian Ernst Gombrich: “The images in art, like all images, represent not so much reality as the viewer’s perceptions, imagination, expectations, and knowledges of other images … As Gombrich pointed out, to

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see what is actually painted on a canvas, the viewer has to know what he or she might see in a painting” (ibid.). Therefore the expectation that one is about to see a painting—or a work of theatre—is as much a shaping influence as any other the observer brings to the act of spectatorship. And it is but a short step from this to Jauss’ notion of horizon of expectations: what we expect to see, albeit subconsciously, conditions our reception of what we do see. As Picasso said, “the picture lives only through the man [sic] who is looking at it” (Kalb 116). As Sharon Marie Carnicke notes, Stanislavski himself understood this, considering the audience the “third artist” in the theatre, the first two being the author and actor (Stanislavsky in Focus… 157). Earlier in her text, she engages with this argument: “Realism contains an innate contradiction in terms: in the attempt to present nothing but real life, it denies the essence of real art” (Stanislavsky in Focus… 34). Legendary theatre artist Robert Wilson has deftly articulated the paradox that may be summed up by the phrase to which we often resort when attempting to sum up the power of theatre: it is ‘the lie that tells the truth.’ “Theatre for me is something totally artificial. If you don’t accept it as something totally artificial, then it’s a lie. … the more artificial it becomes the closer it can get to a truth” (qtd. in Shevtsova 58). While one cannot deny the extraordinary skill required to generate photographic renditions of reality— whether in painting or the theatre—and of their potential impact, one could make the argument that all parties to acts of representation, inventors, interpreters, performers, and audiences, are likely to experience greater degrees of transformation in work that exceeds the quotidian. As Carnicke wonders, paraphrasing the words of Russian Symbolist poet Valery  Bryusov, “why should one seek the illusion of truth on stage … when truth may interfere with the stronger impact of art?” (ibid.)

Queerly Post-dramatic John Clum, in the final chapter of Still Acting Gay (2000), his revision and expansion of Acting Gay (1994), discusses plays of the late 1990s, including Joe Calarco’s Shakespeare’s R & J, in which four young male actors play students in a strict Catholic boys’ school who act out our culture’s most famous love story “as a means of expressing their pent-up emotions, sexual urges, and chaotic drives” (300). Having seen an excellent production of this piece I concur with his estimation that “we in the audience forget that Juliet, her mother and her nurse are played by male actors

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[who are] so good that, like Shakespeare’s audience, we are willing to accept the conventions the production establishes” (ibid.). We ought to remind ourselves of the fact that the theatre of the Early Modern period, one of the two richest and most abundant in Western history—the other being that of Periclean Athens, when theatrical realism was also a cultural impossibility—relied upon the playing of female roles by boys and young men. But Calarco’s play demands more of both actors and audiences than did the dramatists of the Early Modern period: as Clum notes, “there are no costumes, so no drag. Acting does everything, and Daniel J. Shore is simply the best Juliet I have ever seen” (300–301). The point I aim to make here is that models for working outside the paradigms of realism, that may serve a practice of radical inclusion in our own time, are part of a cultural inheritance that goes back millennia. They also form the basis of many non-Western theatrical traditions, such as those of Japan, India, and Indonesia, which we tend to forget in an era when English-language drama is being exported all over the non-English-speaking world. As Lehmann observes, Indian Kathakali or Japanese Noh theatre are structured completely differently and consist essentially of dance, chorus and music, highly stylized ceremonial procedures, narrative and lyric texts, while theatre in Europe amounted to the representation, the ‘making present’ (Vergegenwärtigung) of speeches and deeds on stage through mimetic dramatic play. (21)

The ‘entertainment industry’—and the training programmes that feed and are justified by it—upholds in the majority of its expressions the most conventional notions of narrative, character, motivation and behaviour, and normative representations of gender form a crucial part of this overall pattern. As Jill Dolan argues, “realism is prescriptive in that it reifies the dominant culture’s inscription of traditional power relations between genders and classes” (Feminist Spectator 84). The genre is so pervasive as to be invisible, even in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It has been said that realism, with its portrayal of confined, dependent, and defeated female characters, is a “prison house of art” for women (Case, Feminism and Theatre 124). And where, given the degree to which ‘masculinity’ in women is anathema, do its precepts leave the butch female actor? But it is also a zone of exclusion for gender dissident men, who are considered unqualified to play the male subject who is the unquestioned centre of almost every dramatic narrative in the realist canon, an imagined

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ideal counterpart to whom is constructed in the audience which receives it (Dolan 2012; Case 2008; Aston 2008). The vast majority of the productions at the theatre department where I teach abide by these conventions, in part because we operate in a conservative theatre culture, and are, in addition, financially dependent on healthy box office revenues. Despite our best pedagogical intentions, we find ourselves each year carefully considering the needs and tastes of a middle-class, middle-aged, and mostly white subscription audience that is deeply invested in the operations of realism, and the horizon of expectations they generate. This exerts considerable constraints not only on the play choices we make, but also on the ways that such plays are realised in production. I concur with David Eulus Wiles, who considers this a serious failing: “In reinforcing fictional conventions, we fail to use theatre as a means of attempting to carry on an honest conversation about our culture” (134). And an honest conversation often entails a critique, wherein, as Judith Butler observes, “critique is understood as an interrogation of the terms by which life is constrained in order to open up the possibility of different modes of living” (Undoing Gender 4). There is rarely any work of social critique on our stages, and in this regard, we reinforce the status quo sustained by the regional theatre network. Should we not, in a university theatre department, be able—required even—to challenge received notions that form the habitus of our theatre culture? Many queer scholars have argued that the procedures of realism themselves serve the discourses of the hetero-patriarchy. If, as Alan Sinfield proposes, “the most powerful strategy of ideology is making its dispositions appear natural … then the project of a dissident theatre must be to denaturalize by disrupting any prospect of stable stage illusion” (Cultural Politics 50). The principal argument of Clum’s Still Acting Gay is that realism cannot serve the artistic project embraced by—in this case—gay playwrights: “Our best playwrights have always seen realism as a trap—as the least theatrical of the modes of representation and the one on which the values of mainstream society are most indelibly inscribed” (xiii). He suggests that “it is in pushing beyond the limits of realism and the expectations and sensibilities of the audience for mainstream theatre that gay drama most vividly stages gayness” (156). David Savran too identifies the radical meaning and potential of the theatre with queerness itself, broadly construed. He argues that theatre is the queerest art “in part because of its mode of address and its uncanny ability to arouse a spectator’s mutable and mutating investments” (60)—

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that is, its capacity to confuse the object of our identification with the object of our desire. And he ventures further, speculating that if theatre is the queerest art “perhaps it is so because writing and performance always function to disarticulate and disrupt identity—whether … that of the playwright, the performer or the spectator” (70). While he uses a different term to describe it he identifies queer theatre art, in America at least, with Lehmann’s notion of the post-dramatic: By the late 1980s, self-identified queer performers had appropriated and expanded the techniques of deconstructionist performance developed during the previous decade (by the Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, and Mabou Mines, among many others) in order to take possession of a mode of self-presentation that at once asserts and problematizes identities and desires. (67)

Realism has certainly guaranteed heteronormativity, which David Halperin considers a form of life that comprises a number of interrelated elements, fused into a single style of social existence [that] defines a horizon of expectations for human life, a set of ideals to which people aspire and against which they measure the value of their own and other people’s lives. (450)

Realism is its ideal representational form, with its descriptive sureties, mimetic stability, and settled horizon of expectations. It is a closed system that resists, repels, and finally forbids the doubleness, ‘either/orness,’ fuzziness, and uncertainty of queerness.

Reconsidering Bertolt Brecht I am not proposing that we stop doing ‘plays’ in favour of abstract works that align with Lehmann’s Eurocentric notion of the post-dramatic. But the radical stance of much work that may be defined as ‘performance art’ can certainly inspire us, as the qualifications required for it often supersede race, ethnicity, sex, gender expression, and ability/disability. What I am proposing is that a Brechtian model—one informed by materialist feminist theory—might serve as both inspiration and guide for the kind of transformations in practice that could refresh the way we conceive of and realise

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department productions; that would reinstate their critical-pedagogical function. As Elin Diamond argued in her landmark work Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater, “feminist theory and Brechtian theory need to be read intertextually” (43). Brecht’s project interlocks readily and logically with that of feminism, allowing gender to be read as a set of cultural functions. Brecht didn’t pay much attention to gender, but “Brechtian technique in feminist hands can fragment the realist drama into component parts and expose its gender assumptions for critical inspection” (Dolan, Feminist Spectator 111). A theatre practice informed by materialist feminist principles inevitably invokes some version of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, usually translated— inadequately, in the opinion of many—as ‘Alienation Effect,’ or ‘A-effect,’ but perhaps best served by the mouthful ‘defamiliarisation’—which serves to challenge the mimetic property of acting that semioticians call ‘iconicity,’ or the conventional resemblance between the performer’s body and the object, or character, to which it refers. This is why gender critique in the theatre can be so powerful… [B]y alienating (not simply rejecting) iconicity, by foregrounding the expectation of resemblance, the ideology of gender is exposed and thrown back to the spectator. (Diamond 45–46)

What would it mean if we were to cast department productions with the explicit aim of disrupting iconicity as it governs the relationship between the gender presentation of the actor and the features of the role? In 1989, in the Comment portion of The Drama Review, Richard Schechner speculated that in order for the professional theatre to accommodate truly non-­ traditional casting practices, it would require “an extreme flexibility that allows for situation-specific decisions regarding when to use, when to ignore, and when not to see race, gender, age, and body type” (10). It is not surprising that he cites Diamond in his article, arguing that “it is more delightful to see the gap [between actor and role] than to mask it” (10). But he further observed that “Brecht’s Verfremdung … where the audience enjoys, and learns from, the dialectical tension between player and played is rarely used in American theatre and dance” (7). One of the key points he made about why a true plurality of expressions in Western theatre cultures is so difficult to achieve is that they are in the thrall of “naturalism,” a term that, “while not objectively determinable, refers to a socioaesthetic tradition dominant in Western arts since the Renaissance,

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that posits daily experience for reality. Attempts to destabilize this faith in daily experience … have only been minimally successful” (6). Schechner lists the values of a Brechtian reformation in the theatre, including the fact that “performers and spectators alike would be more able to see gender, race, age, and body type not as ‘biological destinies’ but as flexible, historically conditioned categories” (10). To fuse these notions productively, one might say that iconicity, the force that guarantees narrative representations in the mode of naturalism—or realism, setting aside the difference between these modes for the sake of expediency—serves the imperatives of heteronormativity. The final link I propose to make in this chain is that between feminist and queer positions, citing the work of Melbourne-based theatre scholar Sarah French. While she writes about queer/feminist Australian performance—outside of my geographical limit—she makes important observations about the theoretical and historical links between feminist and queer theory. She argues that “feminist and queer theatre-makers have a shared stake in interrogating the intersecting identity categories of sexuality and gender, and in critiquing the interrelated discourses of patriarchy and heteronormativity” (1). She too adopts an inclusive conception and application of queer, which refers not only to “non-normative sexualities” but also to “an understanding of identity as unfixed, ambiguous and indeterminate” and to the ways performance is conceived and structured (2). Aiming to supersede long-standing disputes based in identity politics, she argues that “the notion of ‘queer feminisms’ is a useful strategic alliance, one that does not collapse the two terms into one but establishes a productive intersectionality” (ibid.). The works that she analyses tend “to employ Brechtian defamiliarisation or alienation techniques,” even if they “engage their audiences on emotional and visceral levels,” thus eschewing the critical distance that is typically part of the Brechtian regime (28).

Swimming Upstream? While I am proposing that we re-imagine this art form in a Brechtian mode—at least within the somewhat manageable confines of our own departments—I am at the same time fully aware that his theatrical model is very much out of step with the ethos of our time. Neo-liberal capitalist culture could not, perhaps, be more disaffected with, contemptuous of— or even hostile to—Brecht’s interest in the historically aware and critical spectator. Instead it offers ever more enveloping immersions into fictional

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worlds such as video games and blockbuster films, many now in 3D, full of mind-bending computer-generated imagery. The field of virtual reality entertainment is developing rapidly, but of course it is inevitably a solitary experience, and forecloses the collective experience of an audience on which all theatre, not merely the Brechtian version, depends.6 The theatre participates in this larger cultural pattern with its own immersive extravaganzas, such as Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, and The Drowned Man, and knock-offs like Then She Fell.7 Writing in Theatre Journal, Keren Zaiontz argues that such productions engender “a narcissistic spectatorship [that] encourages the viewer to fully engross herself in an artistic production in a way that highlights her own singular relationship to the piece” (407). It is hard to imagine a greater chasm between Brecht’s notion of the audience, fully aware both of its collective status and its capacity for critical scrutiny, and the horde of masked voyeurs rushing frantically after any number of young, very able-bodied, conventionally attractive, conventionally masculine and feminine performers in the environments where Sleep No More is installed. The notion of historicising the past or the present has become an unintelligible concept. Diversity in gender expression will only thrive in the theatre when it is able to accommodate and to embrace a diversity of aesthetic positions. Can we make room for gender dissident performers in the field of theatre in which we all perform in various capacities? Judith Butler asks: “If I am a certain gender, will I still be regarded as part of the human? Will the ‘human’ expand to include me in its reach?” (Undoing Gender 2). Will our concept of theatre expand to include these genders?

Some Queer Theatre History While neither the point nor purview of this work is to set out a pocket history of queer theatre, or of queers in theatre,8 it is important to note the theme of such history’s prime subject, which is the degree to which queer theatre artists have either managed to insert themselves into mainstream 6  See, for example, Sita Popat’s “Missing in Action: Embodied Experience and Virtual Reality,” Theatre Journal 68.3 (2016): 357–378. 7  See http://www.sleepnomore.com/#share and http://thenshefell.com/ and also note that even the latter website resembles the former (accessed 14 July 2017). 8  I draw the reader’s attention to Queer Theatre in Canada, ed. Rosalind Kerr (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2007) and Still Acting Gay, John Clum (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).

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theatre production or resorted to becoming theatre makers themselves. The theatre, like other forms of representation, has been both a refuge and a place of exclusion for queer people. As Alan Sinfield notes, it “has been a particular site for the formation of dissident sexual identities” (Out on Stage… 1). But also, as Jill Dolan has observed, “for much of American and British history, mainstream theatre produced by noted playwrights had no place for healthy, self-actualized gay men and lesbians” (Theatre and Sexuality 8). I believe it is important to re-remember the foundational moments in our recent history, given that the powers that prompt us towards cultural amnesia are so powerful and pervasive in this digitised age. For example, many younger gay men today have no concept of the fact that a plague emerged in the penultimate decade of the last century that killed untold thousands of their forbears, as one might call them, including many dance and theatre artists; or that the movement that led to guaranteeing their civil rights, including their right to marry, emerged as the direct result of a riot that exploded in a gay bar in New  York City in the summer of 1969—an age ago. Openly queer theatre, or, it is more accurate to say, gay theatre, was forced violently into existence in the Western world because of these two watershed phenomena, the Stonewall uprising the AIDS epidemic; one a sudden, explosive rupture, the other a slow-moving wave that resulted in a terrifying implosion. John Clum observes that post-Stonewall gay drama is “about finding a place in society where a gay man can safely not act straight. It is about the experience of being gay as seen from the inside” (160). It is a great irony of our history that only a decade or so after the riot in Greenwich Village which spawned the movement for gay and lesbian pride—and the empowered theatre that was an efflorescence of that movement—an appalling, lethal, and seemingly unstoppable illness that affected mainly gay men began to unfold slowly in key sites in the US, and produced a crisis threatened to undo all that movement’s work for visibility, acceptance, and civil rights. For many right-leaning, Fundamentalist Christian Americans AIDS was undeniably God’s punishment for all that rampant gay hedonism of the post-Stonewall decade. According to Clum, the phrase that captures the meaning of the ‘AIDS drama,’ a sub-genre that emerged in response to the plague, is “to change and not forget …. Change is moving toward an affirmation of love, a physical and spiritual embrace that overcomes the internalized homophobia and fears of commitment that were the detritus of the past” (62).

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I begin this book with a passage from Perestroika, the second play of Tony Kushner’s overwhelming diptych, Angels in America. Its appearance on Broadway—as well as its production all over the world—marked, as John Clum noted, “a turning point in the history of gay drama, the history of American drama, and of American literary culture” (257). The work, whose very subtitle, “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” conveys its claim to centrality of expression, “removes from the closet once and for all the enlivening relationship of gay culture and American theater” (ibid.). As David Savran has noted, among its many accomplishments was its triumphant ‘mainstreaming’ of gay theatre, in which the plays’ core arguments are aligned with the principles of “liberal pluralism,” which “does far more than tolerate dissent. It actively enlists its aid in reaffirming a fundamentally conservative hegemony” (124). It seems to me, in retrospect, that it was the plays’ richly satisfying imagery and audacious theatricality that concealed their essential investment in traditional American ideals, and in the narrative of American exceptionalism and triumphalism. Roughly five years after Kushner’s resounding début on Broadway young Matthew Shepard died of his injuries after being brutally beaten, tied to a barbed-wire fence and left for dead.9 I connect these events to serve the reiterated theme of contradiction and complication in this subject area. Then, as now, triumphs and tragedies seem to share the same time if not the same space—Wyoming is a long way from Manhattan—and alternate in the headlines. And, in the era of the general turn to the right that is taking place all over the Western world, the situation of queer people and their right to self-expressions of all kinds retain a new note of vulnerability and cannot be taken for granted. As many have noted, we cannot become complacent about minority rights: once achieved, they must be safeguarded by dint of continual vigilance and activism. I reiterate Jill Dolan’s observation from my introduction: “presuming the power of ‘arrival’ can be a trap …. Political history demonstrates how easy it is for dominant culture to backslide into normativity as its default mode” (Theatre and Sexuality 82–83).

9  To complicate matters even further, of course, Moisés Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater researched, developed, and, in 2000, produced The Laramie Project out of this tragedy. The play went on to achieve phenomenal success, in particular in college and university productions.

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Queer Instances The point of this book is not to debate the relative merits of queer assimilation into the heteronormative mainstream versus safeguarding queer cultural specificity. If question is ‘Do we want a seat at the big table?’ or ‘Do we want to stay at our own little table off to one side?’ the answer might be: both. Is gay and lesbian culture a function and consequence of oppression? To me the answer is an incontrovertible ‘yes,’ as is the case with many oppressed and marginalised groups. Are various elements of its vast array of facets and features worth retaining and celebrating, even if the oppressive forces that gave rise to them are, on balance, waning? I leave that question to any number of individuals, families, and communities that choose to grapple with it. But I am bound to consider this question: is there something about what I will have to call queer theatre that makes it distinctive? That forms a common denominator among all its disparate expressions, and that might offer a productive haven for queer theatre artists-in-training? I therefore conclude this chapter by sketching some examples of queer theatrical expression for instructors and their queer-acting students: where are such young artists entering the field likely to find mentorship, professional opportunity, and success? I consider a number of contemporary queer theatre entities in North America, whose work operates in the areas the term summons: how are forms of queer theatre enacted? And what are the social and material circumstances that condition them? I noted earlier the long-standing regime of American cultural imperialism with which Canadian artists, audiences, funding bodies, and commentators have had to contend—and still do—and so I propose by way of redress to focus primarily on the Canadian context. This is actually a bit of a cheat, given the status of Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, the country’s only queer theatre company, founded in 1979. As Jill Dolan notes, Buddies “remains one of the most visible gay producing organizations in North America” (Theatre and Sexuality 26). Buddies is in fact the oldest and biggest queer theatre in the world, at the time of writing celebrating its fortieth anniversary. Founded by Sky Gilbert, “playwright, poet, actor director, provocateur and drag queen extraordinaire” (Gilbert, This Unknown… 235), and two fellow theatre graduates from Toronto’s York University, it moved from venue to venue until it arrived in its current home in the city’s gay village in 1994. The historic building at 12 Alexander Street, a municipally owned property, has an illustrious past: it once housed Toronto

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Workshop Productions, a venerable theatre company known for its politically left collective creation,10 and therefore an appropriate ancestor for Buddies. Until he departed in 1997, Gilbert was the company’s provocative and outspoken artistic director, and part of the company’s mandate was to produce his work, which often challenged conventional form, as well as being explicitly, sometimes outrageously, queer in content. As theatre scholar Robert Wallace notes, Gilbert replaces the conventions of realistic theatre with overt theatricality, disposing of ‘inner truth’ for the candid performance of ‘lies.’ His approach is not new: indeed, it owes much to the theories of Bertolt Brecht, Vsevelod Meyerhold and Antonin Artaud … as well as to the traditions of circus, music hall, cabaret and burlesque. (Wallace, This Unknown… 17)

Once again we see that when queer experience is rendered as performed representation, it tends to invoke forms that exceed the realist frame. And, perhaps as a consequence of his frequent performance in social spaces as his drag character Jane, Gilbert’s work from the 1980s and 1990s also prefigured the various strategies for disrupting the divide between audience and performer that have become widespread in the first decades of this century: “Frequently his plays suggest that the border separating on- and off-stage life is ambiguous, if not arbitrary” (16). In Theorizing a Queer Theatre: Buddies in Bad Times, Wallace traces the evolution of the company, which first came out as gay, then amended that self-nomination to include lesbian, then redefined itself as queer in a variety of ways. Indeed, the fledgling company had nothing necessarily to do with gay experience; its objective was, in staging adaptations of poetry, “to explore the relationship of the printed word to theatrical image” (Wallace, This Unknown… 14). Wallace recounts that in 1985, with the inauguration of its 4-Play Festival, two commissioned works by lesbians and two by gay men, “Buddies officially came out as a theatre company openly engaged in the production of work by and about lesbians and gay men” (Theorizing… 144). It has continued to re-invent itself, expanding its self-­definition in ways that are both productive and problematic. 10  See http://www.canadiantheatre.com/dict.pl?term=Toronto%20Workshop%20 Productions%2FTWP (accessed 31 March 2019).

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J. Paul Hilferty, developing Wallace’s model further, argues for three distinct phases in the company’s self-identification and expression, from “Radical Queer” to “Inclusively Queer” to “Sexually/Aesthetically Queer.” The “Radical Queer” disposition arrived with the launch in 1988 of QueerCulture, a diverse multi-week festival of production across media staged in various venues. By 1992 the festival “had grown to encompass thirty-two events at ten different venues across the city including film, theatre, visual arts, music, literary readings and dance” (Wallace, Theorizing… 146). In his artistic director’s message for the 1993 festival programme guide, Gilbert wrote: “Let’s talk about the word Queer. Because it doesn’t always mean gay or lesbian. It means sexual, radical, from another culture, non-linear, re-defining form as well as content” (qtd. in Wallace, Theorizing… 147). The company had embraced an aggressive, oppositional queer self-definition, which animated its programming overall. Its mission statement from 1995–1996 reads as follows: Buddies in Bad Times Theatre is an artist-run, non-profit, queer theatre company committed to the development and production of radical new Canadian work. As a pro-sexual company, we celebrate difference, and challenge the professional theatre experience by blurring and reinventing boundaries between: artistic disciplines, performer and audience, gay and lesbian, queer and straight, male and female, good and bad. (Wallace, This Unknown… 25n3)

It is easy to imagine that work abiding by these criteria, with the emphasis on explicit sexuality, might alienate or even offend those with more conventional tastes, regardless of self-identification. That is, as in the case of Matthew Jocelyn’s re-invention of CanStage, the habitus embraced by Gilbert and associates, such as long-time board president Sue Golding (Hilferty 241), may have confounded the horizon of expectations of much of the theatre’s predictable constituency, gays and lesbians in downtown Toronto. On the “Our History” page of the company’s website, one finds this statement: “Under the always provocative cross-dressing Gilbert, Buddies in Bad Times courted controversy and offended many” (Buddies…). But acquiring and renovating prime real estate entails huge risks for arts organisations, and this radical position proved to be unsustainable. After moving into the extensive spaces of 12 Alexander Street Buddies “was forced to move from a challenging, political and radically queer paradigm,

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to one that amicably marketed itself with subscription seasons, and solicited private and corporate sponsorship” (Hilferty 242). Under the artistic leadership of Sarah Garton Stanley (1997–1999) and David Oiye (1999– 2008), the directors who came after Gilbert, the company moved into phase two of its evolution, “Inclusively Queer.” According to Hilferty, this became a matter of survival: “the company was running a deficit and was teetering upon bankruptcy” (243). The reconfigured mandate, in place from 1997 to 2004, reflected these shifts. The objective was to produce and present Canadian—understood to mean inclusive—“lesbian and gay theatrical expression,” rather than the radical, confrontational “queer” version. The emphasis was on professionalism, excellence, and entailed— for the first time—the launch of a new “youth initiative” (ibid.). In staging co-productions and offering rentals to high-profile companies the company reached out to the gay and lesbian community, and to Toronto theatre-­goers in general. In de-radicalising ‘queer’ for the sake of survival Buddies had become mainstream. According to Hilferty’s schema, the third stage of the company’s evolution, “Sexually/Aesthetically Queer,” arrived as a result of the soul-­ searching associated with its twenty-fifth anniversary, when the mandate was adjusted yet again. ‘Queer’ was interpreted in two ways: 1. QUEER, referring to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered identity encapsulates the core of our organization. Buddies is a queer-run organization committed to representing the LGBT community by supporting its artists, and by telling its stories. 2. QUEER, referring to anything different or outside of the norm … Buddies is dedicated to work that is different, outside the mainstream, challenging in both form and content. (Mandate 2004, qtd. in Hilferty 247) This sounds very much like what Gilbert articulated in relation to the QueerCulture Festival, but, I suppose, with the edge significantly blunted. Indeed, while Hilferty applauds this commitment to queer communities, broadly understood, as well as to cutting-edge Canadian theatre, he is “troubled by an invocation of queer that is so open that the term is almost meaningless” (250). It is not surprising that Sky Gilbert has had some things to say about this drift towards inclusivity, which may come at the cost of relevance. In the essay after Hilferty’s in the same volume he laments the fate of queer

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theatre—as he conceives of it—in the age of neo-liberal capitalism’s supremacy: “Mainstream culture consumes the alternative, and normalizes it with lightning rapidity. And since queers are the only ones who really cared about queer culture in the first place—when they stop caring it will disappear” (Gilbert, Writing Gay… 263). But this disposition serves my argument admirably; such a polyvalent model of ‘queer’ chimes with my own open-ended concept of the term, whose expressions both call forth and overlap with Lehmann’s notions of the post-dramatic. I believe that young, queer actors and theatre makers will profit from this expansion of possibilities. (And, as I argue in my final chapter, such an adaptable and inclusive definition of ‘queer’ also serves the work of playing the other-than-human in this age of climate crisis.) Brendan Healy ran the company from 2009 to 2015, and in an article for Canadian Theatre Review he detailed the ways in which ‘queer theatre’ was still an essential designation. He recalls that when he took over the company in 2009, he was asked why a queer theatre was ‘still’ necessary, “and it was a question that never went away over the course of my tenure. I could probably write an essay entirely devoted to the homophobic implications that underlie that line of questioning” (84). He argued that while queer theatre celebrates difference, it also breaks down barriers (ibid.) and gives queer people permission to play with their identities, “in the spaces that exist between gender and sexual binaries” (85). Gilbert may have felt vindicated by much of what Healy wrote, because its basis in a trenchant critique and in activist politics is unmistakable. For example, the fourth item on his list of seven reasons why Buddies was still a vital player on the scene was that queer cultural expressions require protection. I quote the section at length because it is incisive, eloquent, and fearless: Mainstream culture is a force that appropriates, depoliticizes, homogenizes, and neutralizes countercultures. The cultural progression from fringe to mainstream is part of a larger political process that is always at play. It is a way for power structures to assimilate cultural currents that potentially threaten its [sic] position. I believe that queer culture is currently undergoing this process. I see the queer theatre at Buddies as a resistance to this. The company rejects a conception of equality that assumes that freedom is about minorities adapting to, and becoming acceptable to, “straight/normal” society. (ibid.)

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According to Healy, Buddies can endorse a range of expressions under a queer banner while still safeguarding its edginess. The fifth item on his list, giving voice to the dead, is particularly poignant, given that “our dead and our history have long been suppressed, silenced, and hidden” (ibid.). Gilbert would also be gratified to consider Healy’s sixth reason for queer theatre’s continuing relevance: “Queer Theatre Liberates the Body” (86). Echoing Foucault—I imagine—he notes that “one of the defining characteristics of systems of power in the Western world has been the regulation of sexuality and the restriction of physical pleasure as a form of social control” (ibid.). Queer theatre’s commitment to the centrality of the body, and its capacities for pleasure, is part of what makes it “subversive and disruptive” (ibid.). As many queer scholars and activists have warned, the advent of marriage equality has done little to mitigate our culture’s profound fear and distrust of queer bodies and the sexual practices with which they are associated, despite the fact that such practices are potentially part of sexual expression generally. Healy’s seventh and final point has to do with that vastly overused word, ‘community.’ But he thinks of it as a verb rather than a noun; that Buddies, as a queer theatre, creates communities around performed representations that are “subversive, challenging, and alternative” among people “who are underrepresented, invisible, and ignored. By forming these communities, queer theatre provides a sense of belonging, solidarity, and strength to people who are often isolated and disempowered” (86). And Healy concludes, intriguingly, by quoting the very words Gilbert used to describe the expressions of QueerCulture which I cited earlier, that queer “means sexual, radical, from another culture, non-linear, redefining form as well as content” (86). Speaking of ‘community,’ it is vital to note that from its inception Buddies has produced a series of festivals that have given an untold number of queer artists access to performance space and production support. This includes the Rhubarb Festival of new work, which dates from 1979, as well as QueerCulture, but also Strange Sisters, the lesbian cabaret, and Hysteria: A Festival for Women. The company has also consistently fostered new work by young playwrights, and engaged in various youth initiatives (Buddies).11

11  I count myself among the many Toronto artists who profited from this largesse. My work was presented a number of times by Buddies in Bad Times, including works based more

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On the company’s website the current director, Evalyn Parry, who took over in 2015, is described as “an award-winning queer, feminist director, writer, performer and musician, her innovative and collaborative work is inspired by intersections of social justice, history and auto/biography” (Buddies). She came from within the organisation, having directed the company’s Emerging Creators’ Unit for ten years. And the company has maintained its commitment to an elastic notion of queer signification (Hilferty 247). According to its current mission statement, the company creates vital Canadian theatre by developing and presenting voices that question sexual and cultural norms. Built on the political and social principles of queer liberation, Buddies supports artists and works that reflect and advance these values. As the world’s longest-running and largest queer theatre, Buddies is uniquely positioned to develop, promote, and preserve stories and perspectives that are challenging and alternative. Buddies achieves artistic excellence through its mainstage season programming, artist-­ residency program, and youth-based initiatives. Buddies serves a broad segment of the population who share a passion for theatre that celebrates difference. (Buddies in Bad Times)

For an American counterpart to Buddies, almost as venerable, similarly engaged with notions of ‘queer,’ but focusing on lesbian subjectivities, one looks to Split Britches in New York City. Indeed, for young lesbian actors and theatre makers, there may perhaps be no more inspirational model than this company, co-founded in 1980 by Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw, and Deb Margolin. The following material is derived from the “About” page on the company’s website: Shaw and Weaver began their work at the WOW Café (Women’s One World), a venue for women’s/ feminist/lesbian theatre and performance that they co-founded. Since then they have become “two of the foremost figures in queer performance art and lesbian identity.” Once again, the identification of the work as queer places it in the territory of the post-dramatic: “Our work spans theatre, live-art, solo performance, workshops, [and] digital media … It relies on moments rather than plot, relationships rather than story.” Split Britches’ work universalises the lesbian subject, taking “the presence of a lesbian on stage as a given.” As they say, their work has remained tenaciously ‘downtown,’ which has meant its commitment to exploration has in ‘dance’ or ‘theatre.’ Such mentorship was animated by generosity of spirit and a genuine interest in experimental practices.

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been unaffected by involvement with the burdens of managing expensive ‘uptown’ real estate. Another inspirational American figure is Taylor Mac, a queer performer/theatre maker whose artistic inheritance and inspiration may be traced to Charles Ludlam, pioneer of the Ridiculous Theatre. As Sean F. Edgecomb writes, Ludlam “developed the Ridiculous form by writing, directing, and appearing in twenty-nine original plays for his Ridiculous Theatrical Company (RTC) between its founding in 1967 and his untimely death [from AIDS] in 1987” (549). The Ridiculous Theatre warrants spelling with capital letters because it established a new hybrid wherein features of the avant-garde were fused with “camp, clowning and drag” (ibid.). As Edgecomb notes the Ridiculous emerged at the same time as gay liberation itself, and “was one of the first fully realized queer theatre forms in the United States” (ibid.) Offering pointed social satire, it employed the kinetic panic of nineteenth-century farce while trading in a pastiche of high art and low comedy, as I recall from performances I attended both in New  York City and when the company toured to Vancouver, Canada.12 Ludlam produced a postmodern version of Clown, a genre established by Jacques Lecoq, and which forms a strain of his international influence. As Edgecomb writes in an entertaining footnote, the clown “is an overarching type that may include, but is not limited to, comedians, comics, fools, jesters, picaros, mimes, tricksters, idiot savants, sage fools, natural freaks, made freaks, drolls, farceurs, Harlequins, pranksters, wags, and wits” (n2, 549). Of particular interest to me in the case of Taylor Mac is his fusion of queer performance practices, drag, and politically directed clowning. As Edgecomb notes, “Mac provocatively adopts and extends Ludlam’s Ridiculous, employing it as a tool for political satire and radical social commentary” (550). The Face of Liberalism, a mash-up of original songs, parodies, and storytelling (555), bravely addressed the American government’s overreaching, heavy-handed, and misguided response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, more or less taboo even years after the event. “Performed from May to October 2003 in the basement of the Slide bar on the Bowery in New York’s East Village, The Face of Liberalism was arguably the first 12  Ludlam’s Camille was based on La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils that in turn formed the libretto for the opera La Traviata. It remains in memory as the pre-eminent camp performance: Ludlam played the title role in ‘gender-fuck’ drag—in a wig and dress but with his chest hair clearly visible—and was at once hilarious and heart-breaking.

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theatre piece to interrogate and satirize the climate of fear and resultant xenophobia that … came from the Bush White House following 9/11” (554). But to conclude I return to the image of the young queer-acting student about whom I speculated in my introduction: she will, if her desire is strong enough, perhaps find her way to some kind of practice in performance. But it is likely that the only route open to her will be on the margins of the theatre culture, in small companies and on the Fringe festival circuit. Such actors may find their way to—or invent for themselves—small companies that operate bravely on the margins of the field. An inspiring example of this is Zee Zee Theatre Company in Vancouver, British Columbia, run and founded in 2008 by two young queer theatre artists, Cameron McKenzie, its managing artistic director, and his husband Dave Deveau, playwright-in-residence and associate producer. Both are graduates of highly regarded post-secondary Canadian theatre programmes: Mackenzie received his training at Studio 58 in Vancouver, a very forward-thinking conservatory programme that, while established to train actors-for-hire, also focuses on developing students’ creative potentials. It has always made room for the non-conforming actors—including gender non-conformists—in its cohorts, those who are difficult to cast in the industry for which they are being trained. Deveau holds a BFA from the theatre programme at Toronto’s York University and an MFA in Playwriting from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. As their website states, the company is “devoted to telling small stories in the lives of the marginalized.” Their work is mostly queer-themed, and includes such plays as Nelly Boy, written by Deveau: “An examination of those exploring the space in between genders, Nelly Boy perhaps best represents the kind of work the company creates: provocative, engaging, challenging and heartfelt.” My Funny Valentine is a solo performance based on the murder of Lawrence King, a fifteen-year-old gay student at a junior high school in California who was shot to death in February 2008 after sending a Valentine to another boy. Writing in Newsweek Ramin Setoodeh described the shooting as “the most prominent gay-bias crime since the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard” (“Young, Gay…). Nyet: A Cabaret of Concerned Canadians was staged as a protest against the anti-gay legislation of the Putin regime. It is intriguing to note that both Mackenzie and Deveau have alter egos as drag queens and perform at various alternative club venues in Vancouver.

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This is where gender dissident queer theatre artists may feel most comfortable and have the most agency: they must make their own work—and often construct the platforms on which to show it—because there is little room for them in mainstream theatre. I contend that it is the theatre that must change to accommodate such dissident artists; the art form only stands to become richer in consequence. What are the prospects of achieving the kinds of radical change for which I am advocating? As humans we are condemned to press for change, regardless of the obstacles we face or the likelihood of our efforts being rewarded with success. In the next chapter, I take on—because I must— the biggest obstacle we as humans face, and the one with perhaps poorest odds for a positive outcome. But I conclude here by quoting Duke Senior from As You Like It:      Sweet are the uses of adversity      Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,      Wears yet a precious jewel in his head. (Act 2, Scene 1, Evans et al.)

CHAPTER 7

Acting Queer Ecology: Extensions and Excursions

In this concluding chapter, I take what is either the logical next step in my argument or a great leap away from it, depending on one’s perspective. This book has been about ‘queering’ the acting academy, a set of approaches that, reiterating an observation from my introduction, may come “to signify the continual unhinging of certainties and the systematic disturbing of the familiar” (Giffney and Hird 4). To me the logical extension of considering embodied representation that defies the gender boundary is one which seeks—inasmuch as such a thing is possible—to defy the human/non-human binary. In what follows I attempt to bring animal studies and queer ecology into conversation with acting pedagogy. It is hoped that this ultimate move in the project of supporting gender dissidence in actors’ formation might serve a purpose that is bigger than the needs and rights of sexualised minorities, or any other set of minorities, or any other discursive area, for that matter, given the unprecedented predicament in which we find ourselves. We are living in an era that has been dubbed the ‘Anthropocene,’ a term “widely used since its coining by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000 to denote the present interval in which many geologically significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activities” (Subcommission…). This term, now in wide popular use, acknowledges that humans have transformed the planet’s earth, water, and air in ways that have irrevocably changed their composition and configuration. Consequently we are facing—in particular due to our impacts on the © The Author(s) 2020 C. Alexandrowicz, Acting Queer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29318-5_7

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c­limate—an unprecedented environmental crisis. As Tim Flannery has warned, “humanity is now between a tipping point and a point of no return, and only the most strenuous efforts on our part are capable of returning us to safe ground” (43). He defines tipping point as that at which climate change is causing measurable damage and the point of no return as the place beyond which nothing can be done to reverse destructive effects that will ultimately render human life on earth untenable. The 2018 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warns that we have less than twelve years to make radical changes to our energy systems and economies or face irreversible catastrophic effects.1 The title of Naomi Klein’s book on the climate crisis, This Changes Everything, describes the position in which many people, including scholars and artists, find themselves today: how can it be business as usual? How can one not address one’s work—in whatever field one operates—to this subject? This includes the practice of theatre, both as an art form and mode of educational inquiry. Una Chaudhuri has written that “the imaginative and representational work of making art has an enormous role to play in making this unprecedented crisis visible, audible, and felt. … [W]e argue that theatre is a uniquely powerful site for the kind of thinking called for by the crises of climate change” (Research Theatre… ix). But one must ask: can any art form logically address itself to this unprecedented crisis? Does it not defy representation? Or to be more precise: does it not render the radical meaning of art-making invalid? One way of describing the making of good art might be that it is about finding the right questions to ask in relation to its theme(s). Didacticism, we believe, belongs to agitprop: art reduced to and in the service of ideology, which we tend to dismiss as simplistic, two-dimensional, and hollow. The climate crisis, albeit overwhelming and complex in its manifestations, has arisen from specific identifiable causes and presents us with clear ethical choices. If we choose to represent it are we not inescapably engaging in activism rather than theatre? Perhaps that is what theatre in our time must become. As I concluded in the previous chapter, we must, as artists, as people of conscience, contend with this predicament because we cannot do otherwise. Expanding our awareness and practice of theatre in the academy in response to the crisis seems like an imperative for another reason, and that 1  See https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-warmingmust-not-exceed-15c-warns-landmark-un-report (accessed 25 March 2019).

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is that students have begun to grapple with the climate crisis in their work, and, as has been the case in my department, student theatre-makers may approach faculty members for guidance in terms of dramaturgy and method. I predict that this need in the student population will increase as the generation of school children currently engaged in ongoing strikes for climate action proceed to post-secondary education.2 The professional theatre is beginning to grapple with the crisis, albeit mostly on the margins: The 2017 iteration of the conference of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research, held in Toronto, was called “Performing the Anthropocene.” Montreal-born Playwright Chantal Bilodeau, based in New York, is the artistic director of the Arctic Cycle, which “uses theatre to foster dialogue about our global climate crisis, create a positive vision of the future, and inspire people to take action” (“Our Mission”). Her company is part of an international venture called Climate Change Theatre Action, which stages readings and performances of plays about climate change.3 Meanwhile, in the UK, as Julie Hudson notes, writing in New Theatre Quarterly in 2012, there has been a “rapid escalation of interest in climate change on the stage” (260). But to take a step or two back: what do the fortunes of queer people in actor training have to do with climate change? Apart from the obvious fact that the crisis changes everything the issue is one of discrimination, in which, of course, this work aims to intervene. For many years animal and environmental studies scholars have been using the term ‘speciesism,’ or “discrimination against individuals on the basis of their species membership …. The concept was coined in the early 1970s by analogy to racism, sexism and classism” (Corbey and Lanjouw 1). Animal studies scholar Cary Wolfe argues that denying the subjectivity of the non-human means while decrying all other forms of discrimination is hypocrisy (1). He notes the degree to which findings over the last twenty years in a wide range of disciplines have provided evidence of the extraordinary transferability of the criteria by means of which we determine subjectivity—for something called ‘personhood’—among a wide range of non-human species (ibid.).

2  See https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-47231271/greta-thunberg-theswedish-teen-inspiring-climate-strikes (accessed 25 March 2019). Swedish student Greta Thunberg is truly remarkable. 3  See https://www.thearcticcycle.org/ccta-2017 (accessed 15 June 2017).

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Queer Ecology In the years since the turn of the millennium an intriguing hybrid has opened up, operating at the intersections of various disciplines, including literature, philosophy, women’s studies, queer studies, and animal and environmental studies. Two notable edited volumes are Queering the Non/ Human (Giffney and Hird) and Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Erickson and Mortimer-Sandilands). Various components of these discussions have great potential as refreshing and informing sources in rethinking approaches to the actor’s formation, and to performance overall. Queer ecology, based in a rigorous understanding of post-Darwinian evolutionary biology, links queer theory’s cultural critique of heteronormativity to recent scientific studies that challenge the ideological fiction of a heteronormative natural order by documenting the vast array of reproductive mechanisms and gender and sexual behaviours found in the natural world. (Chaudhuri, Stage Lives… 168)

One of its principal theorists is Timothy Morton, who connects the various binary- and boundary-busting moves of queer studies with the observable interpenetrations and fuzzy borders found in natures, both human and other-than-human. We are largely made up of entities that are, strictly speaking not-us, a biological fact that defeats the notion of the unitary subject: as Jennifer Frazer notes in Scientific American, our mitochondria, essential to oxygen combustion, “contain their own DNA separate from [our] cells’ own nucleic DNA, and that mitochondrial DNA looks suspiciously like bacterial DNA.” And, speaking of bacteria, our lives depend on the populations of them—in their trillions—that thrive in our guts and other internal organs, in our mouths and on our skins. The latest research shows that our microbiome may play a crucial role in our brain function.4 Morton’s notion of the “ecological thought” forms the basis of my argument here, in which I aim to connect his theorising with a queered notion of theatre training, hoping to make, if not the “fantastic bang” that he speculates about (Ecological Thought 18), but rather, in more modest Canadian fashion, a combustion of some sort nonetheless. What is “the 4  See https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(18)300974 (accessed 28 March 2019).

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ecological thought”? I quote this in order to demonstrate a number of things: first, the breadth of Morton’s thinking on a topic that is thought to be located within the purview of the scientific disciplines, strictly defined; second, its potential relevance to aesthetic expressions of all kinds, but in particular to preparing for and engaging with performance; and third, its implication regarding matters of gender and identity: [E]cology isn’t just about global warming, recycling, and solar power—and also not just to do with everyday relationships between humans and nonhumans. … It has to do with capitalism and what might exist after capitalism. It has to do with amazement, open-mindedness and wonder. … It has to do with concepts of space and time. It has to do with delight, beauty, ugliness, disgust, irony, and pain … It has to do with race, class, and gender. It has to do with sexuality. … It has to do with society. It has to do with co-­ existence. (2)

Why not just ‘ecological thought,’ or ‘an ecological thought’? Morton insists that “there is a particular kind of thinking that I call the ecological thought … Moreover, the form of the ecological thought is at least as important as its content. It’s not simply a matter of what you’re thinking about. It’s also a matter of how you think” (4, emphasis in original). In other words, he is giving a name to a kind and quality of cognition that is a potential of human consciousness. Morton further argues that the effects of the Anthropocene have included damage as much to the psychic as to the physical environment—that “they have had an equally damaging effect on thinking itself” (4). It is our very ways of thinking that must be repaired, as much as that polluted waterways must be remediated, toxic soil removed from sites where tailings ponds have failed, and greenhouse gas emissions drastically reduced. And this process of cognitive transformation may be usefully applied to the paradigms that have governed our values and methods as acting pedagogues and practitioners. Morton reminds us that “ecology shows us that all beings are connected. The ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness” (7). It is in this spirit that he draws from, reflects upon, and makes use of a vast array of sources: a quick glance at the first page in his index shows the inclusion of Giorgio Agamben, Laurie Anderson, Gregory Bateson, William Blake, Louise Bourgeois, the Buddha, George W.  Bush, John Cage, Captain Beefheart, Rachel Carson, the Cure, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Darwin, and Miles Davis (161). Art is as much a source

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of his inquiry into the blunders that have brought us to the edge of the precipice as part of his set of proposals for some route away from it. Therefore, ecological thinking is as much to do with art and the humanities as with ethics, politics, and science, which, he observes, “would benefit from more grounding in philosophy and training in modes of analysis developed in the humanities” (7). He consistently makes claims that might anger traditional practitioners within scientific disciplines, but they reflect his own academic background, which is in English and philosophy, with a focus on the works of Shelley.5 He has done his homework, however, and is fully schooled in the discourses that pertain to the terrain where he is digging, that is, evolutionary biology and its cognates. (In this way he reminds me of some of the activists in ACT UP—AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power AIDS—in the 1980s who found they had to become auto-­ didacts in chemistry and molecular biology because those with expertise and professional accreditation in these fields were not doing the kind of research that might lead to lives being saved. They too were facing a bio-­ crisis that defied divisions between disciplines and areas of agency.6) Morton sums up Charles Darwin’s foundational theory of evolution as “a sprawling system of tiny, incremental differences in phenotypes, brought about through random DNA mutation, [that] accounts for the existence of living organisms” (Ecological Thought 118). He returns repeatedly to Darwin’s texts, finding in them a wealth of evidence in support of thinking queerly about the dispositions of the bio-world whose processes they describe. Queer studies’ anti-essentialist view of sexuality and gender is supported by evolutionary theory, which also “is anti-essentialist in that it abolishes rigid boundaries within and between species” (Guest Column 275). Urging that we recognise notions of intimacy and interdependence in the macro-biome of which we are a part, Morton speaks for a view of ecology “which would suppose a multiplication of differences at as many levels and on as many scales as possible” (ibid.).7 Among other traits, he has a sense of humour and uses the term “satisficing: if it doesn’t kill you … you can keep it, whatever it is” (Ecological Thought 85). One ponders, for example, the bizarre head of the  See https://english.rice.edu/faculty/timothy-morton (accessed 25 March 2019).  See How to Survive a Plague: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2124803/ (accessed 16 June 2017). 7  For a vast collection of evidence in support of seemingly ‘queer’ instances in the nonhuman world, see Biological Exuberance, Bruce Bagemihl (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). 5 6

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­ ammerhead shark: how and why did it evolve? No other shark possesses h such a strange feature, and yet it seems to confer no measurable advantage over any other shark species. It is instead a marker of difference that might remind us of visible, but otherwise meaningless, differences in our own species. Rejecting the usual metaphor of the ‘web of life,’ Morton proposes instead the image of a mesh, an “open-ended concatenation of interrelations that blur and confound binaries at practically every level: between species, between the living and the non-living, between organism and environment” (ibid.). And he proposes that in this mesh “[a] vast profusion of gender and sex performances can arise” (ibid.). He declines to use the term ‘animal’ and prefers an ungainly but evocative and useful replacement, the “strange stranger”8: This stranger isn’t just strange. She, he, or it—can we tell? how?—is strangely strange. Their strangeness itself is strange. We can never absolutely figure them out. … Do we know for sure whether they are sentient or not? Do we know whether they are alive or not? … After all, they might be like us. And what could be stranger than what is familiar? As anyone who has a long-term partner can attest, the strangest person is the one you wake up with every morning. (41)

This acceptance of the strangeness of intimacy is at the core of performers’ experience: what can be odder than a line you may have said on stage every night for weeks, or that look your scene partner gives you in response to it? This capacity to abide productively with not-knowing, to be able to respond to whatever gestures may be on offer, or simply to absorb the presence of some being, human or otherwise, has much to teach us—or to remind us—about the nature of the strange art form in which we engage, and how it could be made more inclusive as a function of its strangeness. What is a ‘person’? Who or what qualifies for ‘personhood,’ and therefore for inclusion in the schemes of theatrical representation, which are concerned with the predicaments and struggles of living beings, and that until now, perhaps, have been restricted to living human beings? Morton turns again to Darwin: “The Descent of Man is crystal clear: nonhumans can reason and imagine; they have a sense of beauty and wonder” (70). He 8  Morton admits this term is his translation of Derrida’s arrivant, from the latter’s “Hostipitality,” [sic] in Acts of Religion, ed., trans., and intro. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002), 356–420.

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then summons the Turing Test9 for artificial intelligence to support an argument about radically expanding notions of what constitutes ‘personhood.’ This test “suggests that subjectivity might be a performance. The test pits a human against a nonhuman (say, some software), both hidden from view. If the interviewer can’t distinguish between them in a reasonable time … then for all intents and purposes, the being is a person” (71). Or rather, to be economical about it, that the entity is “not a non-­ person” (ibid.). How could this be extended to include the strange stranger? As he argues, “loving the strange stranger has an excessive, unquantifiable, nonlinear, ‘queer’ quality” (79). It is here that these concepts meet and intersect—or interpenetrate—given that ‘strange’ and ‘queer’ are essentially synonymous terms, as one finds in the Oxford English Dictionary.10 We are all ‘strange strangers’ to each other, as well as to non-human persons. A cornerstone of Morton’s argument, in this and other works,11 is that the ecological thought supersedes ‘Nature,’ whose opposite has been ‘Culture,’ a divide which has led to a profound disjunction in our cultural inheritance between the human and non-human. Donna Haraway coined the term naturecultures in order to portray the interpenetration of each realm by the other, a fusion that seeks to heal the binary (Companion Species 1). But we are stuck with a term that, like bodymind, simply reminds us of a profound conceptual failure. In Ecology Without Nature, Morton theorises that Nature may be read by means of opposing metaphors aligned with gender: “Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration” (5). However, in The Ecological Thought, published three years later, Morton identifies Nature with notions of masculinity: Rugged, bleak, masculine Nature defines itself through extreme contrasts. It’s outdoorsy, not ‘shut in.’ it’s extraverted, not introverted. It’s heterosexual, not homosexual. It’s able-bodied—‘disability’ is nowhere to be seen, and physical ‘wholeness’ and ‘coordination’ are valued over the spontaneous 9  This was named for and invented by mathematician Alan Turing http://www.psych. utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/turing.html (accessed 6 July 2017). 10  See http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/view/Entry/156236?rskey=MJOYb n&result=2#eid (accessed 6 July 2017). 11  See Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007).

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body  … Nature is aggressively healthy, hostile to self-absorption …. Masculine Nature is the operating system of the authoritarian personality. (81–82)

The point is that both ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ concepts and readings of Nature preclude our ability to achieve kinship with the ‘strangely strange,’ and thus to escape from the tyranny of both the animal/human and male/female binaries. This conceptual framework could feed a transformed set of ideas and practices about performance and preparing to perform: as I explored in Chap. 5 the actor may attempt to perform anything if equipped with a particular collection of tools appropriate to the purpose. Because of his trans-disciplinary schooling, Morton provides some assurance for those of us in the fine arts academy who may question the validity of what we do in the face of the pervasive and relentless effects of neo-liberal economic doctrine: Art’s ambiguous vague qualities will help us think things that remain difficult to put into words. Reading poetry won’t save the planet. Sound science and progressive policies will do that. But art can allow us to glimpse beings that exist beyond or between our normal categories. (Ecological Thought 60)

I cannot think of a clearer or more concise endorsement for the idea that art has a crucial role to play in the transformations that must take place if we are to save ourselves, and the place that a queered perspective on performance can make as a fraction of that contribution. As he notes, “art can help us, because it’s a place in our culture that deals with intensity, shame, abjection and loss. It also deals with reality and unreality, being and seeming” (10). Morton examines various art objects that to him enact and articulate aspects of the ecological thought. This eclectic list is drawn from poetry, including works from the Romantic canon, from pop music, visual and digital art, and film. But there is a deafening silence here: he includes no references to works in the media we know as ‘dance,’ theatre,’ or ‘performance,’ that depend upon the highly problematic thing we call the Body. This seems to underline Chaudhuri’s argument that the theatre is “the least environmentally aware, most eco-alienated, and nature-aversive of all the arts of the Western world” (Stage Lives… 102) and can never be about anything but the human. There is no mention made of contemporary or postmodern dance in his work, which is surprising, given its potential—going all the way back to

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the work of Alwin Nikolais, and, later on, that of Pilobolus, in the last century12—to portray images that defy and transcend that which is recognisably human. When one considers the pioneering work of Merce Cunningham and his postmodernist progeny, one may argue that dance has been able to produce effects in some compelling field where abstraction abides—even given the social inscriptions the body cannot escape— and to represent and reveal a space where the expressions of our primate body overlap with textures, shapes, and kinetic elements from the environment that surrounds it. This has potential as an informing influence in the quest to find a queered, post-Anthropocentric orientation for theatre. But perhaps Morton is offering an opening here if one reads his words in terms of performance: “To reach out into a shared world is not to transcend one’s physicality but to become conscious of its determinacy. The more you think about the body, the more the category of nature starts to dissolve” (Ecology Without Nature 107). The transformations we wreak upon the body, the accidents to which it is liable, as well as its susceptibility to the very poisons we introduce into the bio-world we exploit and pollute, all seem to point to the notion that the body is porous, opens out to its surroundings, and this therefore makes reference to the live space between perceiver and perceived in the moment of performance: “One solution to the paradoxes of the body is thus to turn it into the environment itself, reconceived as a kind of inverted deity, a form of natural supernaturalism” (108).

Performing the Ecological Thought How do we allow the notion of life as a ‘mesh’ to inform our working approach to embracing diversity—in the queer sense—in theatre and performance? Actors spend much of their time trying to assimilate themselves to that which is in some way ‘strangely strange.’ If our plan is to consider how we might re-make the theatre and the pedagogies that support and feed it in order to be as inclusive of naturally occurring human differences as possible, ought not we expand our view to take in the other-than-­ human? This seems to be the destination to which the queering of actor training is leading us. As Chaudhuri asks, “How might we practise, think and write theater—and make art—that is aligned with the turbulent plan12  See http://uvic.kanopystreaming.com/video/world-alwin-nikolais-program-1 for evidence in support of this point (accessed 4 July 2017).

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etary present, in which not only humans and other animals but also rivers oceans, coastlines, topsoils, groundwater, forests, ice, air, and the atmosphere itself are in a state of constant crisis?” (2017, xiii). Wendy Arons, writing in Theatre Journal in 2012 and  citing Judith Butler, explicitly connects notions of gender with the non-human: “we might see the doing of nonhuman in terms similar to the way Butler conceptualizes the doing of gender: as an act that fabricates a reality and essence through performance” (577). She goes on to include another frontier sub-discipline in this discussion of the post-human, that of ‘vibrant matter,’ as theorised by Jane Bennett in her book of that name: Each human is a heterogeneous compound of wonderfully vibrant, dangerously vibrant, matter. If matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated …. Such a newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers will not solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of being inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations. (3)

It is intriguing to note that the word ‘mesh’ appears in this passage: carrying on with the image offered by Morton, she seems to be suggesting a turn to traditions of thought that have largely been exiled in our post-­ Cartesian Christian tradition. This book is not a critical analysis of recent theatrical work about human relations with the other-than-human; I am concerned with pedagogical processes, not dramaturgy per se. But I note a number of examples here for reasons that will become clear. Arons analyses three recent American plays in the light of both queer ecology and vital materialism: Wallace Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colors, Mark Rigney’s Bears, and Eric Coble’s My Barking Dog. Shawn’s play portrays a dystopic future in which humans, animals, and vegetative life have a kind of equivalency. It is also very much about sex, and could not be more bravely queer in its disposition: “In this play, polymorphous pleasure (in the form of self-­gratification, oral sex, anal sex, sadomasochistic sex, sex with animals, children, and in nearly every other form Shawn can imagine) is the name of the game” (572). Rigney’s play offers another vision of life after end of civilisation as we know it and features three characters, all of whom are bears: “Growl Bear, an older male; Timmy, a younger male; and Suzie Wild Bear, a female

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who has just been transferred to their zoo from another one. The action takes place just as human civilization seems to have collapsed in the aftermath of economic crisis” (576). My Barking Dog features Melinda and Toby, two down-at-heel, disenfranchised urban unfortunates whose lives are transformed by their relationship with a coyote who appears on their fire escape one night: Melinda begins feeding the coyote hamburger every night and then starts to implement a revolutionary plan to return the coyote’s ‘natural’ habitat to him. Toby, on the other hand, has an intimate encounter with the coyote that leaves him pregnant with interspecies pups and, as a result, deeply enmeshed in the human/nonhuman political ecology. (579)

Once again, in the queerest of all possible turns, we are presented with a relationship in which all conceivable boundaries have been demolished. Seeking to draw these three plays onto the same visionary string, Arons speculates that the future looks to be one in which human/nonhuman relationships have been radically horizontalized, liquefied and hybridized. These are fantasies, of course, but queer ecological fantasies serve an ideological, political, ecological purpose: they open us to the big, disorienting, challenging implications of what radical coexistence, cooperation, and enmeshment might mean to us, now and in the future. (582)

But in all these instances, the non-human is fixed at the level of text, rather than being taken up in the psychophysical body of the actor. They form part of “Western theater’s traditional characterology, according to which viable dramatic identity is forged in a long, lonely, and above all verbal journey” (Chaudhuri, Stage Lives… 114, emphasis in original). Another play in a similar vein is Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo, whose stage directions explicitly state that the actor playing the eponymous predator not engage in any overt imitation: “TIGER—Big. Tiger wears clothes. Nothing feline about him” (5). Evidence of this can be seen in video clips of the late Robin Williams’ memorable interpretation of the role.13 It is obvious that no one can—or should be able to—determine either the form or content of theatre artists’ work. But what if, as part of the  See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eUyIiYhyo0 (accessed 4 July 2017).

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project of mounting a theatrical response to the present environmental crises, actors were to attempt actually to portray tigers, bears, and coyotes? The actor’s task is, frequently, to confront, absorb, and represent that which is strange, queer, and strangely strange. A whole array of features may attach to all deeply queer ventures. As the editors of Queering the Non/Human state, “the unremitting emphasis in queer theoretical work [is] on fluidity, über-inclusiveness, indeterminacy, indefinability, unknowability, … and that which is unrepresentable is an attempt to undo normative entanglements and fashion alternative imaginaries” (Giffney and Hird 4). I recommend that we extend this set of descriptors to queer theatrical work. Will we fail? Probably. But the point in fact may be to fail, and to fail spectacularly, as the famous Beckett aperçu, often misquoted, urges: “Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again” (8). This seems illogical, if not absurd, in our ‘success’-obsessed culture. But, as Jordan Tannahill reminds us, taking risks is at the heart of any expressive venture, and embracing the possibility of failure is a condition of risk-taking: There’s a prevailing, predictable theatre that’s risk averse and wary of failure, and there’s a dark-horse theatre that’s predicated on risk and failure as preconditions of a transformative live event. And it is the latter of these two theatres that will keep the art form vital … in a mediated age where the merits of liveness will be questioned as never before. (13)

In The Lives of Animals, J.M. Coetzee’s influential text on human/ animal relations, his protagonist Elizabeth Costello argues that, speaking of the power of Ted Hughes’ poetry, “there is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another” (35). The character articulates precisely the challenge I propose we in the theatre assume and address: By bodying forth the jaguar, Hughes shows us that we too can embody animals—by the process called poetic invention that mingles breath and sense in a way that no one has explained and no one ever will. He shows us how to bring the living body into being within ourselves  … He ripples within us, he takes over our body, he is us. (53)

Literature offers other instances of human and other-than-human intersubjectivity that can support, instruct, and inspire us. The following

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is from a review of French writer Jean Giono’s novel Hill, written in 1929 and recently re-translated by Canadian poet Paul Eprile: “In Hill, everything is alive. The same feverish energy pulses through plants, animals, hills, people, sky. There is a human drama, but really there is a human and hill and plant and water drama” (Bush 117). Can human performance hope to achieve something equivalent to this that is neither risible nor unintelligible? Bush goes on to note that in this novel the landscape “is itself in constant, metamorphosing motion, one in which, through insistent metaphor, everything alive is continually and almost overwhelmingly connected to everything else” (118). This description summons both Morton’s notion of the mesh and Bennett’s vision of vibrant matter. And as a physical theatre pedagogue, it reminds me of the effects that a group of actors is able to achieve—and that I have observed countless times—in passages of sustained improvisation using all of the Viewpoints, in what is called an ‘open Viewpoints session’ (see Chap. 5). Architecture and Topography—which capture the elements of the physical environment—are added to the corporeal inputs required by Gesture, Shape, Kinesthetic Response, and Spatial Relationship together with the temporal factors determined by Tempo and Duration. Viewpoints improvisations can be performed in any space; a studio, theatre, hallway, sidewalk, or the small botanical garden that is part of our very green campus at the University of Victoria, where students may enact psychophysical responses to soil, sunlight, rocks, fences, shrubs, trees, grasses, and birdsong, as well as the tractors and other equipment the staff use on the property. But, as I have also noted, what we do in the course of the actor’s formation is one thing; what we propose to insert into the marketplace of theatrical representations is quite another.

Making “Species Theatre” How to make theatre that responds to the terrifying, accelerating onslaught of climate change? As Una Chaudhuri notes, it dwarfs human senses of scale and temporality (Research Theatre 24–28). The work of Chaudhuri and her collaborators, on the linked topics of animal studies and climate change, points to the possibility of new approaches to acting pedagogy and how these may feed professional practice. Chaudhuri argues for the establishment of what she calls “Species Theatre”:

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In an era of climate change and ecological catastrophe, Species Theatre seeks to rethink and re-imagine the divide between the human and nonhuman. What if, rather than radically separating ourselves from animals and plants—allowing a privileged few into our living rooms while we ignore, kill, or slaughter the rest—what if, instead, we let animals and plants deep into our consciousness? What if we see each organism, however different, as an ancestor? As a fellow survivor? … Species Theatre endeavors to give agency to other species—by embodying them, by telling stories from their point of view, and by detailing their experiences in relation to the human experience. (Research Theatre 45)

This is defined variously, both in terms of the intra-human and the inter-­ species, and its multiple meanings only make it more useful. On the first point the objective is “to create a new awareness and experience of human life as species life, a mode of being as fully defined by the material and biological factors of existence as by sociopolitical or psychological ones” (Stage Lives… 139). On the second, it is about (re-)establishing the other-­ than-­human within the frame of the stage, and, in awareness of the mesh that contains all of us strange strangers, finding ways to absorb and re-play those others. Marvelling at the astonishing representation of the main non-human character in War Horse, both as a mechanical device and as a work of human performance, Chaudhuri notes, this is a story about how hard it is to know the other animals, and yet how vital, how rewarding, how literally unspeakable and therefore how theatrically necessary it is to try. The amazing animals of War Horse perform a mode of interspecies encounter and knowledge that could make the Theater of Species an essential site in the ongoing revaluation of animals in contemporary culture. (Stage Lifes… 192, emphasis in original)

She recounts the origins of Species Theatre in The Animal Project in 2004, a collaborative enterprise that began as a workshop with professional artists and was then remounted as a credit course in “the Playwrights Horizons Theater School, a training program of the Department of Drama at NYU. Twelve students took the course for credit, participating as actors or as part of the creative team” (“Animalizing…” 1). As far as she can tell “The Animal Project was the first self-conscious theatrical engagement, in the United States, with the new academic field known as Critical Animal Studies” (2). The fact that it was a collaboration between theatre students and professionals is especially inspiring and instructive. The work was

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developed in response to four texts, two of which I have already cited: Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto and J.M.  Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals. Years later, the same methods were invoked as part of the Ecocide Project, a multi-phase creative process with a professional cast and creative team that resulted in a play about climate change entitled Carla and Lewis (Research Theatre… 44). Chaudhuri reports that the most “original and productive of the ideas we dealt with” (14) in the project of becoming-animal was to think of it as a kind of seizure or possession. These metaphors recall the kind of psychophysical processes at work in the physical approaches to acting which I explored in Chap. 5, in particular the Rasaboxes. To me the crucial question—as always, and as Chaudhuri notes—is how to make the journey from the uncanny and inspiring moments of improvisation, which are by definition transitory, to the elements of a vocal and physical score that can be captured, repeated, and rendered as text/choreography/stage direction. Of course, thousands of shows have been constructed from improvisations, but anyone who has supervised one of them knows that the cost of fixing performance text out of the evanescence of improvisational moments is that much is lost: fantastic accidents happen in rehearsal but cannot be repeated. I invoke again the work of Jacques Lecoq in order to argue that we have been working in these ways and with these materials for many decades, while ignoring their potentials and implications; or rather, such potentials may be coming into clearer focus now that the crisis we have made is advancing alarmingly upon us. Lecoq’s pedagogy is full of excursions of the ‘imagining body’ into the realm of the non-human. In the first year of the two-year programme of training he established at the L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, students play a huge variety of non-human beings, substances, and processes: “The third phase of work with the neutral mask consists of identifications … I ask each student with the mask on, to become the different elements of nature: water, fire, air, earth” (Lecoq 42–43). “We go on to analyse the movements of nature: elements, materials and animals” (83). Lecoq’s colleagues and followers have established a pedagogical tradition based on these approaches, and the aesthetic philosophy from which they grew lives on in the work produced by companies founded by his graduates. Martha Ross is a Toronto-based theatre artist, director, and teacher, who, with fellow Lecoq alumna Leah Cherniak, founded Theatre Columbus, a company that for thirty years focused on original work in the

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spirit of ‘serious comedy.’ She recalls the plethora of non-human inspirations undertaken at the School: I remember that we worked a lot on the four elements, and then colours, and then dynamics of light (for example summer light), and then man-made materials, like paper uncrumpling, or something more forceful like fireworks or popcorn. Also wood splitting, an egg breaking on hot pavement, and my favourite, a sugar cube dissolving! And then animals: I don’t remember exactly which ones but we did a lot of creatures: insects and snakes and on up the food chain … birds … primates … I think you can identify with absolutely anything that moves and find its dynamic. (Conversation with Martha Ross, 19 June 2017)

Another notable Toronto-based graduate of Lecoq’s visionary pedagogy is theatre maker Dean Gilmour, who co-founded his company, Theatre Smith-Gilmour, in 1980 with his wife Michele Smith, herself a Lecoq alumna. Over its lifespan, the company has created forty-four shows, eighteen of which were original plays.14 Between 1999 and 2001, the company created a show that unfolded in multiple versions called Chekhov’s Shorts, based on Chekhov’s short stories. It was performed a number of times in Toronto and then toured internationally, winning numerous awards, and it included the performance of a dog by one of the female actors. To this day, it remains in my memory as one of the most arresting, convincing, and powerful theatrical evocations of the other-­ than-­human I have seen. I recall that it was a poignant and poetic tribute to canine life, portrayed in human flesh, rather than a trick or a cartoon. Such, in my view, is the power of Lecoq’s pedagogy, and its potential for professional performance. Perhaps the transformations we require may be obtained by circling back on decades of physical theatre pedagogies with new insights in hand regarding how to situate them, not solely as pedagogical devices, but as methods of generating content. (Like many teachers around the world I employ methods derived from Lecoq, albeit indirectly: in 1991, I participated in a four-week workshop in the neutral mask with Philippe Gaulier in London, in which we responded to a similar range of non-human improvisational prompts: various non-human life forms, substances such as sulphuric acid, water in its various states, as well as weather phenomena. Gaulier was a student of  See http://theatresmithgilmour.com/ (accessed 3 July 2017).

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Lecoq who later became an instructor at his school, before launching his own career as a teacher, performer, and playwright.15) Lecoq’s influence has been enormous: there are theatre companies, artists, and teachers all over the world whose approaches to practice have been shaped by his methods and essential aesthetic position (see Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre, Chamberlain and Yarrow, eds.). The American Method has itself resorted to Lecoqian uses of the imagination, but they are applied, of course, to the purposes of finding the most accurate and compelling human portrayals. Steve Vineberg, in Willy Loman and the Method, reminds us “that [Lee J.] Cobb’s preparation for the role [of Willy] relied heavily on a Method improvisation known as ‘the animal exercise,’ and the animal he chose to study for Willy was the elephant” (157). This is a very different exercise than, say, experimenting with notions of the human-becoming-elephant, as Chaudhuri proposes in Research Theatre… (44–45). Engaging in such techniques without considering how they might transform practice now seems like a liability, not merely a limitation. Chaudhuri goes so far as to say that “the roots of our ecological crisis lie in … the literalistic mimesis upon which the modern theater’s most successful aesthetic—realism—rests” (Stage Lives… 36). To put it bluntly: has the validity of the play—as we commonly understand it—expired in the face of the climate crisis?

Connection to Indigenous Epistemology A dramaturgy that animates the queer ecological thought connects logically and readily to Hans-Thies Lehmann’s notions of the post-dramatic: both likely trade in fragmentation, dislocation, non-linearity, abstraction, the grotesque, and the equivalency of text and image. But such a dramaturgy might also connect to indigenous epistemology. At the time of writing a remarkable dance-theatre work entitled Bears is touring to various mid-sized theatres in Canada, after an award-winning first production in Edmonton, Alberta, in 2015. Written and directed by Matthew McKenzie, who is of Métis, Cree, and Ojibway heritage,16 it was 15  See http://www.ecolephilippegaulier.com/ (accessed 26 March 2019). And for more on Gaulier’s pedagogy, see Kendrick, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 2.1 (2011): 72–85 and Purcell-Gates, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 8.1 (2017): 46–60. 16  See http://www.canadiantheatre.com/dict.pl?term=MacKenzie%2C%20Matthew (accessed 27 March 2019).

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produced by a small Edmonton-based company called Punctuate! Theatre17 in association with Alberta Aboriginal Performing Arts. The work takes on the hugely contentious issue of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion in British Columbia, set to increase the flow of highly toxic diluted bitumen to the coast, and thence to tankers bound for China. Clearly a work of environmental protest, it recounts the journey of an indigenous oil patch worker who is on the run from the police—we never find out why—as he makes his way along the proposed pipeline route. He is searching for—and hoping to merge with, to become—the grizzly bear: “By the time he reaches the Pacific, Floyd has experienced changes—his gait widening, his muscles bulging, his sense of smell heightening…” (“Bears”). But, while essentially an extended monologue, this work clearly operates in the realm of post-dramatic: the actor who plays Floyd narrates his actions in the third person and therefore embodies two characters simultaneously. He is accompanied by a chorus of eight female dancers, whose choreography and choral speech bring everything he describes to imagistic life on the stage: flora, fauna, earth, and water. My estimation of the piece, which I saw in February 2019, is that while failing in some important ways—a second actor who plays Floyd’s mother is barely included in the action, and some of the movement lacks the gravitas the story demands—the piece is an important break-through in terms of both its form and its disposition towards climate protest. And the fact that mid-­ sized regional theatres are presenting it is noteworthy. Timothy Morton connects the ecological thought to the notion of the Trickster found in many indigenous cultures: “When we approach the idea that all sentient beings are equal and free, we discover the Trickster. The ecological thought gets along just fine with the Trickster” (Ecological Thought 82). He observes that he is advocating for modes of thinking and being with which non-Western cultures have engaged for millennia: “Ancient animisms treat beings as people, without a concept of Nature. Perhaps I’m aiming for an upgraded version of animism” (8). Aware of the loaded nature of this term, he elsewhere decides to use animism, “to prevent people from thinking of it as another belief system, in particular a system that implies something about living rather than nonliving being” (110). But that is precisely how it functions to this day among many peoples around the world. Jet Bakels, who did fieldwork in Sumatra with two tribes, the Mentawai tribesmen, who are hunter-gatherers, and the Kerinci,  See http://www.punctuatetheatre.com/bears-info (accessed 27 March 2019).

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who are rice farmers, makes the following observations, by now familiar, but produced from the point of view of anthropology: A mingling of Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions underpins Western attitudes by postulating that man is the crowning achievement of creation, and the only living creature possessing a rational soul and moral personhood. Fed from this source, the perception that a deep gap separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom persists to this day, despite Darwinist and genetic arguments to the contrary. (157)

By contrast, “the Mentawaians … attribute a personal soul and moral personhood not only to animals and plants, but to virtually all aspects of their surroundings: stones, houses, ropes, canoes, trees, and so on. [They] thus live in a universe where harmony is sought and constantly negotiated” (157–159). In one belief system and its set of practices—rituals intended to address and interact with the other-than-human—one finds the theorising of Bennett and Morton, and one is put mind of long-­ standing traditions that have been imperialised and subjected to genocidal practices within the borders of the US and Canada. And perhaps this is where my argument finally needs to go; to the paths that may open before us in the theatre(s) of the West if we may take instruction from indigenous ways of knowing. This is an appropriate move given that many indigenous cultures are at the forefront of battles against what Naomi Klein has called “extractivism” (161–187), and also because individuals who correspond to our notions of ‘queer’ have formed part of the social fabric of many indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Qwo-Li Driskill et al. note that two-spirit or two-spirited is an umbrella term in English that (1) refers to the gender constructions and roles that occur historically in many Native gender systems that are outside of the colonial binaries, and (2) refers to contemporary Native people who are continuing and/or reclaiming these roles within their communities. It is also … meant to be inclusive of those who identify as two-spirit or with tribally specific terms, but also LGBTQ Native people more broadly. (Sovereign Erotics 4)

Susan Billingham notes that, like the word ‘queer’ in contemporary North American culture, “‘two-spirit’ is a recuperated term. It is cross-­ cultural by definition, first, because many First Nations had specific, intra-­ cultural words for gender variance, and secondly, because it emerges

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post-contact” (113). Such individuals, whose gender identity, role, and/ or sexuality were variants, were known collectively to anthropologists as berdaches … such roles were more widespread than was previously believed, occurring in every region of the continent … The berdache was a biological male (or female) who identified with and adopted the social functions and activities more typically associated with the ‘opposite’ sex. (114)18

In some cultures, such individuals were accorded high status, and certain rights and privileges accrued to them because of their perceived association with the divine. Billingham notes their social function “as mediators, not only between male and female, but also between the physical and spiritual realms, frequently fulfilling a ceremonial function (e.g., shaman, visionary, healer, or artist)” (113–114). Queer Cree playwright Tomson Highway echoes this observation in his introduction to Two Spirit Acts: Queer Indigenous Performances: “These ‘spiritual hermaphrodites’ … were the artists, the priests, the visionaries. They had … not only a sacred but an essential role in the community” (xvi). Two-spiritedness thus defied at once many of the terms of Christian settler colonialism, in addition to Christianity itself: its investment in the male/female binary, and its alienation from the other-than-human. But in summoning this term, I am dipping both feet into hot water, not only as a white settler Canadian, but also because ‘two-spirit’ is a contested term among Indigenous queer studies scholars themselves. In a separate co-edited volume Qwo-Li Driskill et  al. consider the complexity of the topic and the relative failure of language to address it: “All of the available terms are to us equally ambiguous and contested” (Queer Indigenous Studies… 3). But they are willing to accept both ‘two-spirit’ and its overlap with ‘queer’: “When linked, queer and Two-spirit invite critiquing heteronormativity as a colonial project, and decolonizing Indigenous knowledges of gender and sexuality as one result of that critique” (ibid.). How long must one study or practise a craft, discipline or art form before one can claim to be its adept? Five years? Ten years? Twenty? We can learn about indigenous epistemologies from elders, artists, and 18  This is a complex topic, on which research continues to unfold. See, for example, Will Roscoe, Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998) and Walter L. Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1986).

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s­cholars, but must beware always of the perils of cultural appropriation, debates about which continue to rage in Canada, as well as in other settler regimes.19 Perhaps the only reasonable and respectful manner of integrating such ideas into our work is to take inspiration from them, but to revisit and re-examine such impulses towards the other-than-human within our own cultural traditions. Tomson Highway very helpfully uses the term pantheism in his observations about Indigenous spirituality: In Pantheism, contrariwise, the idea of divinity has no human form. It is simply an energy, a ‘great spirit’ that functions like an electric bolt that shoots its way through the universe animating everyone and all that it touches or passes through, which is one reason why pantheistic languages don’t have a ‘he’ or a ‘she.’ In that system, therefore, we are all he/shes. (xv, emphasis in original)

The word points to a long-standing philosophical tradition in the West, which is far too complex to explore here in any detail. But in general, and as a way of both informing my discussion and to support the argument I am making, “pantheism may be understood positively as the view that God is identical with the cosmos, the view that there exists nothing which is outside of God, or else negatively as the rejection of any view that considers God as distinct from the universe” (“Pantheism”). This can be traced in many sources that form the literary and philosophical canon. One is put in mind of the Duke’s famous speech at the beginning of Act II, Scene I of As You Like It:          And this our life, exempt from public haunt,          Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,          Sermons in stones, and good in everything.          I would not change it. (Evans, G. Blakemore et al. 376)

How might we physicalise the meanings of texts such as this, in the Imaginary Body from the Michael Chekhov work, in the endless possibilities of Viewpoints improvisations, in the abstraction-generating plan of Laban, and in the radical transformations of self that the pedagogy of Lecoq offers to the actor?

19  See, for example, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/the-cultural-appropriation-debate-is-over-its-time-for-action/article35072670/ (accessed 4 July 2017).

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Our current emergency is such that we are obliged to summon our capacity to identify with the myriad forms of organic life on this earth. If any inspiration were needed to bolster this argument—in which one must acknowledge the crucial differences and similarities between us and other strange strangers—one might turn to Barbara Smuts’ account of her work with baboons, and her friendship with her dog Safi, which forms her response to J.M. Coetzee’s fictionalised lectures in The Lives of Animals (107–120). At one point in her career, she spent a week with the late Dian Fossey, who spent many years working with the mountain gorillas of Virunga.20 Smuts recounts an extraordinary encounter with an adolescent female who had been named Pandora: Unexpectedly, she stood and moved closer. Stopping right in front of me, with her face at eye level, she leaned forward and pushed her large, flat, wrinkled nose against mine. I know that she was right up against me, because I distinctly remember how her warm, sweet breath fogged up my glasses, blinding me. I felt no fear and continued to focus on the enormous affection and respect I felt for her. Perhaps she sensed my attitude, because in the next moment I felt her impossibly long ape arms wrap around me, and for precious seconds, she held me in her embrace. Then she released me, gazed once more into my eyes, and returned to munching on leaves. (114)

20  See https://gorillafund.org/who-we-are/dian-fossey/dian-fossey-bio/ (accessed 4 July 2017).

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Index1

A Acting pedagogy, 3, 8, 13, 14, 24, 114, 117, 121, 123, 126 casting against type, 95, 152 and the digital age, 30, 43 and diversity, 11, 137, 154, 176; gender expressions, 47, 81, 110, 111, 136, 137, 139, 154 drag as pedagogical tool, 94 gender bias in, 12 Hollywood’s influence on, 71 movement for actors, 5, 10, 29, 75, 115, 122–125, 135, 137 post-secondary education, 5, 6, 8, 11, 13, 29, 31, 70, 165 problems in, 14, 40, 80 ‘queering’ of, 124, 127, 167, 170, 176 reinvention of, 10, 31, 48, 71, 124, 137, 150, 152, 170, 183, 188 scene study, 123, 136 and transgender movement, 96, 110, 115

See also Climate crisis; Laban Movement Analysis (LMA); Queer ecology Active Analysis, see Stanislavski, Konstantin Actors, 60, 70, 125, 127, 132, 179 butch actors, 53, 90, 91, 95, 149 ‘effeminate’ actors, 5, 8, 57 female actors, 32, 40, 57, 91, 121, 138, 139, 149, 183 gay actors, 52, 59, 60, 65–70, 105, 137; playing straight roles, 58, 60, 66, 70 gender dissident actors, 8, 10, 12, 110, 141, 149, 154 gender non-conforming actors, 67, 137, 165 heterosexual actors, 65, 69, 70; playing gay roles, 65, 69, 70 lesbian actors, 5, 52, 60, 66, 90, 137, 163 male actors, 45, 69, 121, 139, 148 marketability of, 59, 69, 180

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 C. Alexandrowicz, Acting Queer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29318-5

205

206 

INDEX

Actors (cont.) non-binary actors, 110 self-transformation of, 141 transgender actors, 6, 110n21 See also Queer theatre, artists and actors Actor training, 11, 13, 32, 75, 132, 135, 137, 169 avoiding prejudice, 50 and body image, 45 for cinema, 50 discrimination in, 12 distinction from theatre education, 21 in Europe, 125 and gendered behaviour, 33, 118, 119, 121 gender normativity in, 13, 33, 149 hierarchy in, 122 in North America, 125, 130, 132, 134 sex and gender in acting discourse, 5 in support of gender expressions, 6n4, 10, 31, 48, 82, 97, 130, 135, 137, 165, 167 See also Chekhov, Michael; Cognitive neuroscience; Copeau, Jacques; Lecoq, Jacques; Stanislavski, Konstantin Adrian, Barbara Actor Training the Laban Way (book), 135 Agitprop, 168 AIDS, 1, 59, 60, 155, 164 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), 172 AIDS drama, 155 in cinema, 63 crisis, 4, 59, 60, 63, 155, 172 pre-AIDs days, 61 Alias, Maite, 93

American Method acting, 23, 129, 132, 138, 184 the ‘animal exercise,’ 184 problems with, 129 American Psychological Association, 15, 39, 43n4 American Society for Theatre Research, 13 Androgyny, 20, 47, 52, 55, 111 Animal studies, see Queer ecology Anthropocene, 167, 169, 171, 176 Araki, Gregg Living End, The (film), 62 Arcand, Denys Le Declin de l’Empire Americian (book), 27 Archives of Sexual Behavior, 35 Arctic Cycle (theatre company), 169 Aristotle, 32 Poetics, 130 Armstrong, Richard, 76 Armstrong-Morris, Greg, 70 Arons, Wendy, 177, 178 Arriaga, Norman, 1 Artaud, Antonin, 127, 130, 158 Arts Club Theatre (theatre company), 142 Bed and Breakfast (play), 142 Arzner, Dorothy, 53 Association for Theatre in Higher Education, 13, 136 Toronto conference (2004), 11 Audience collective experience, 154 emotional engagement, 135, 153 heteronormative gaze, 12, 54, 65, 67, 68 mainstream, 65, 66, 70, 83, 147, 150 North American, 63 participation, 93, 152 and performer, 93, 135, 143, 158, 159, 176

 INDEX 

queer, 51, 56, 57 role of, 67, 93, 141, 148–150 straight, 62, 92 Auslander, Philip Liveness (book), 24n13 Austin, J.L., 116 B Bagemihl, Bruce Biological Exuberance (book), 172n7 Bakels, Jet, 185 Baker, Ken, 67 Barba, Eugenio, 127 Barrios, Richard, 55, 63, 68, 91 Bartenieff, Irmgard, 117 Baur, Gabriel, 94 Venus Boyz (film), 92–94 Beckett, Samuel, 179 Belize (character), 1, 7 Bem, Sandra, 18 Bem Sex Role Inventory, see Open Sex Role Inventory, The Bennett, Jane, 177, 180, 186 Benshoff, Harry, 49 Bergling, Tim Sissyphobia: Gay Men and Effeminate Behavior (book), 20, 84 Bersani, Leo, 40 Bertozzi, Elena, 42 Billingham, Susan, 186, 187 Bilodeau, Chantal, 169 Binary breaking/confounding of, 170, 173 gender, 2, 11, 24, 27, 57, 90, 161 human/non-human, 24, 167, 173, 175, 178, 179 nature/culture, 174 race, 73 regime of, 101, 175 sex, 19, 161, 175, 187

207

Bisexual, 22, 105, 160 and body image pressures, 45 in cinema, 90 men, 45, 84 Black, Rebecca, 38 Blair, Rhonda, 23, 132–135 Actor, Image, and Action, The (book), 132, 133 See also Cognitive neuroscience Bloch, Susanna, 135 Bogart, Ann, 128, 132 Bond, James, see Hollywood Bottoms, Stephen, 114, 115 Sex, Drag, and Male Roles (book), 94, 114 Bourdieu, Pierre, 25, 30, 31, 33, 48, 50 capital, 31, 32; cultural capital, 30–32, 94; embodied capital, 31; objectified capital, 31 doxa, 123, 124, 132 field, 31, 32, 50, 59, 123, 146; field of power, 31 habitus, 32, 33, 38, 48, 50, 59, 82, 115, 123, 128, 129, 143, 145–147, 159 Logic of Practice, The (book), 30, 32 Bowles, Charles, 127 Boyd, Paul, 67 Boys Don’t Cry (film), 6 Brando, Marlon, 57, 58 Brecht, Bertolt, 10, 14, 126, 132, 144, 151–153 collective mode, 154 epic theatre, 144 feminist (re)considerations, 151, 152 theatre reformation, 24, 151, 153 theory, 24, 144, 152, 158 Verfremdungseffekt or Alienation Effect, 24, 152, 153 Breen, Joseph, 54

208 

INDEX

Brennan, David, 45, 84 Broadway, 30, 70, 145, 156 See also Hollywood Brokeback Mountain (film), 65 Brown University, 99 Brunskell-Evans, Heather, 100 Bryusov, Valery, 148 Bucs, Hillary Haft Objectives, Obstacles, and Tactics in Practice (book), 121 Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 91, 147, 157–163, 162n11 4-Play Festival, 158 history, 157–163 meanings of ‘queer,’ 158–160, 162 self-definition, 158, 159 Burt, Ramsay, 8, 10, 74, 76 Male Dancer, The (book), 76 Bush, Catherine, 180 Butch, 8, 73, 86, 87, 91, 94, 102 butch lesbian, 99, 102, 106 in cinema, 53 dyke, 86 invisibility of, 92 in popular entertainment, 92 in theatre, 95 transgender butch, 94 Butchphobia, 20, 53, 86, 90, 92, 99 Butler, Judith, 2, 10, 15, 25, 40, 73, 81, 83, 93, 114, 116, 117, 150, 154, 177 analysis of drag, 115, 116 Bodies that Matter (book), 81, 116 Gender Trouble (book), 3, 16, 17, 19, 81, 116 Undoing Gender (book), 96 C Caged (film), 53 Calarco, Joe Shakespeare’s R & J (play), 148, 149

Callahan, Carey, 99 Camp, 21, 81, 93, 164 ‘camp performance,’ 81 ‘camp speech,’ 81 caricatures, 83 in cinema, 54 discourses of, 93 Canadian Association for Theatre Research, The (organization), 11 Canadian Stage, see CanStage Canadian Theatre Review (magazine), 11, 161 CanStage (theatre company), 145, 147, 159 Capitalism, 43, 171 and neo-liberalism, 153, 161, 175 Capote, Truman, 78 Carnicke, Sharon Marie, 128, 129, 148 Stanislavsky in Focus (book), 132 Case, Sue-Ellen, 117 Catholic Church Legion of Decency, 55 Celluloid Closet, The (documentary), 52, 53 Chamberlain, Franc, 127 Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre (book), 123 Chappell, Drew ‘Theatre Education in the Academy’ (article), 13 Chaudhuri, Una, 24, 168, 175, 176, 180–182, 184 Research Theatre (book), 184 Chekhov, Anton, 123, 127 Seagull, The (play), 123 Chekhov, Michael, 14, 127, 132 acting technique, 127, 130, 132, 136; Imaginary Body, 130, 188 Archetypal Gestures, 130 crossover with Laban, 130 Psychological Gesture, 130

 INDEX 

relationship to Stanislavski, 127 To the Actor (book), 130 See also National Michael Chekhov Association (NMCA) Cherniak, Leah, 182 Cho, Margaret, 80 Christian belief and colonialism, 187 effect on cinema, 55 Cinema and capitalist culture, 154 film noir, 56 heteronormativity in, 51, 66, 70 independent queer films, 63 queer people on screen, 23, 49, 51; 1960s–70s, 61; 1980s–90s, 61; 1990s, 63; 2000s, 64; early 20th century, 52, 54, 56, 70; inter-and post-war years, 57; present day, 68 talkies, 54 See also Hollywood Climate Change Theatre Action (organization), 169 Climate crisis, 168, 182, 189 and acting pedagogy, 24, 161, 169, 171 role of art, 175 and theatre, 24, 25, 168, 169, 180, 184 Clown, 126, 164 as object of ridicule, 52, 83 political, 164 post-modern (Lecoq), 164 Clum, John, 22, 70, 83, 137, 149, 155, 156 Acting Gay (book), 148 Still Acting Gay (book), 22, 148, 150, 154n8 Clurman, Harold, 128 Cobb, Lee J., 184 Coble, Eric

209

My Barking Dog (play), 177, 178 Code-switching, 78, 136–137 in terms of gender, 136, 137 in terms of race and ethnicity, 80 Coetzee, J.M. Lives of Animals, The (book), 179, 182 Cognitive neuroscience, 23, 130, 133–135 and actors, 134, 135 ‘emotions’ vs. ‘feelings,’ 134, 135 mind/body, 121, 133, 134, 174 mirror neurons, 134 See also Blair, Rhonda Cohn, Roy, 1 Cole, Paula Murray, 130 Colonialism and binaries, 186 cultural (American), 50, 145, 157 and indigenous peoples, 186 of indigenous peoples and culture, 49, 186, 187; decolonization, 187 Comedy, 90, 91, 93, 142, 164 ‘serious comedy,’ 183 sit-com, 64, 91, 142 stand-up, 80, 90, 91 Compulsory heterosexuality, see Heteronormativity Copeau, Jacques, 14, 126, 127 Vieux Colombier theatre and school, 126 Corff, Bob, 69 Costello, Elizabeth, 179 Cox, Laverne, 6, 110n21 Crawford, Cheryl, 128 Crecente, Brian, 41 Crisp, Quentin, 53, 86 Crowley, Mart Boys in the Band, The (film), 61 Cruising (film), 61 Pacino, Al, 61

210 

INDEX

Crutzen, Paul, 167 Cuesta, Michael L.I.E. (film), 64 Cultural capital, see Bourdieu, Pierre, capital Cunningham, Merce, 176 D Dalton, Lisa, 127 Dance, 25, 31, 75, 132, 149, 152, 155, 163n11, 175, 185 and the body, 175, 176 contemporary, 175 and effeminacy, 75 and homosexuality, 59 modern, 129 post-modern, 175, 176 professional, 4 and theatre, 5, 144, 145, 147, 184 Darwin, Charles, 170–172 Darwinsim, 186 Descent of Man, The (book), 173 Davies, Steven, 61, 64, 66 Davies-Arai, Stephanie, 99–101, 107 Day, Doris, 58 de Acosta, Mercedes, 52 de Beauvoir, Simone, 39, 86 Second Sex, The, 86 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 3 Deer, Cécile, 124 Degeneres, Ellen, 91, 91n10 Deitch, Donna Desert Hearts (film), 62 Del Giudice, Marco, 35 Delaria, Lea, 91 Derrida, Jacques, 3, 25 Acts of Religion (book), 173n8 arrivant, 173n8 Margins of Philosophy (book), 3 Descartes, René, 133 post-Cartesian Christian tradition, 177

Deveau, Dave, 165 Devor, Aaron, 18, 19, 97, 102, 103, 105 Diamond, Elin, 10, 117, 152 Unmaking Mimesis (book), 24, 152 Dinella, Lisa, 38 Dolan, Jill, 10, 12, 118, 149, 155–157 Theatre and Sexuality (book), 7 Drag, 52, 62–63, 66, 83, 93, 94, 111, 114–116, 120, 138, 142, 149, 164 Casanova Club, 93 drag king, 23, 85, 86, 92–94, 114–115 drag queen, 1, 82, 84, 86, 94, 114, 157, 158, 165 female impersonator, 82 ‘gender-fuck,’ 164n12 ‘G.I. drag,’ 56 workshops, 115, 122 Drama Review, The (journal), 130, 152 Dramatic theatre, 141, 143, 144, 149, 178 See also Post-dramatic theatre Driskill, Qwo-Li, 186, 187 Duke Senior (character), 166, 188 Dumas fils, Alexandre La Dame aux Camélias (book), 164n12 Dunye, Cheryl Watermelon Woman (film), 62 E Early Frost, An (TV show), 63 Ecocide Project, The, 182 Carla and Lewis (play), 182 Ecological thought, see Queer ecology Edgecomb, Sean F., 164 Effeminacy, 5, 8, 40, 52, 57, 73–77, 83, 84, 87, 118, 136, 137 See also Effemiphobia; Femininity

 INDEX 

Effemiphobia, 5, 19, 21, 37, 40, 52, 74, 77, 83, 84, 90, 118 and misogyny in gay men, 78, 83–86 Ellen (sit-com), 91 Elliott, Robin, 92 Ellis, Havelock, 86n4 Enlightenment philosophy, 50 Environmental studies, 169, 170 Environmental theatre, 24 Eprile, Paul, 180 Erickson, Bruce Queer Ecologies (book), 21, 170 Evans, Mark, 137 ‘neutral’ body, 137 Everett, Rupert, 66, 105 F Fanon, Frantz Black Skin, White Masks (book), 85 Farmer, Brett, 22 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 63 Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 16 Feder, Stephen, 102, 103 Gender Diversity Clinic at Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, The, 102 Femininity, 3, 6, 8, 18, 19, 46, 50, 74, 75, 82, 85, 86, 88, 89, 94, 95, 99, 101, 111, 135 and casting, 8 in cinema, 52, 53, 62, 69 conventional notions of, 53, 90, 91, 137, 154 ‘feminine’ male, 23, 40, 54, 57, 68, 74–76, 78, 85, 86, 94, 136 flamboyant, 1 marketability, 94 and movement, 114, 117–119, 121, 122 and ‘Nature,’ 175 See also Effeminacy

211

Feminist considerations, 10, 87, 101, 152, 163 backlash against, 46 critique of realism, 24, 150 feminist theory, 15–17, 25, 39, 81, 86, 151, 152 gender in ‘post-feminist’ era, 47 and queer theory, 153 second-wave, 45 See also Butler, Judith; Diamond, Elin; Dolan, Jill; French, Sarah Fierstein, Harvey, 52 Fine, Cordelia, 15, 16, 27, 47, 100 Delusions of Gender (book), 46 jeer pressure, 38 Flannery, Tim, 168 Foliaki, Tammie, 38 Foster, Jodie, 66 Foucault, Michel, 2, 25, 162 Frazer, Jennifer, 170 Frears, Stephen My Beautiful Laundrette (film), 63 French, Sarah, 17, 116, 117, 153 Staging Queer Feminisms (book), 115 Fuss, Diana Inside/Outside: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (book), 2 G Gardiner, Judith, 90, 111 Gardiner, Meghan, 138, 139 Gates, Phyllis, 58 Gaulier, Philippe, 183 pedagogy, 184n15 Gay, 1, 2, 5, 22, 45, 59, 76, 78, 84, 105, 158, 160 and body image pressures, 45 in cinema, 23, 49–52, 56, 60, 61, 63–65; ‘buddy film,’ 56; coming out, 60, 66–68 culture, 157

212 

INDEX

Gay (cont.) gay directors, 62 identity and sexuality, 4 ‘pass’ as straight, 78, 113 playwrights, 83, 137, 150, 157, 165, 187 pride, 155 self-loathing, 78, 82 stereotyping in cinema, 52, 65; pansy/sissy, 52, 53, 56 stereotyping in TV shows, 64, 83 ‘straight-looking, straight-acting,’ 82–85 and the term ‘fag,’ 40, 41, 78, 79 and the term ‘queer,’ 22 in theatre, 142, 155, 156, 158, 160 in TV, 64, 83 See also Effemiphobia; Homosexuality Gay Activists’ Alliance, 61 Gay Hollywood: The Last Taboo (documentary), 67, 68 Gender confusion with ‘sex,’ 4, 15, 34, 89, 97 conventional notions of, 119 as culturally/socially constructed, 2, 15, 16, 27, 28, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 77, 81, 93, 97, 100, 113, 114, 116 digital age, mediation in, 28, 29, 34 discourses of, 28 discrimination, 37, 70; in theatre departments, 10, 48; in theatre, film, and television, 9 dissidence, 20, 22, 51, 53, 73, 83, 95, 166, 167 diversity, 11, 12, 34 dysphoria, 95–99, 101–110; distinction from ‘gender non-conformity,’ 95, 101 essentialism, 39, 46, 100, 136

fluidity, 56 gender-based bias, 12 gender confusion, 1, 7 gender expressions, 2, 10, 13, 17–20, 28, 31, 34, 40, 45, 47, 54, 57, 81, 82, 90, 102, 115, 132, 136, 151 gender identities, 17, 18, 20, 35, 36, 93, 95, 100, 101, 106, 110, 136, 187 gender neutrality, 47 gender presentation, 10, 12, 15, 19, 20, 51, 120, 137; and casting, 8, 69, 152; and relation to power, 29 gender roles, 20, 28, 39, 56, 89, 95, 114 hierarchy in, 82, 86, 87 and hormone physiology, 37, 46, 114 non-conformity, 20, 23, 28, 33, 53, 65, 90, 95, 97, 101–103, 105, 108–111, 137, 186; in cinema, 90 normativity, 9, 12, 27, 32, 39, 51, 73, 86, 149 performance, 9, 10, 12, 24, 41, 80, 81, 85, 86, 92, 93, 115–118, 122, 136, 137, 175; and drag, 85, 92–94 performativity, 22, 32, 53, 81, 82, 86, 116; distinction from ‘performance,’ 81, 115–117 pronouns, 20, 96, 102, 111 psychosexual identity, 4, 18 purported influences of biology, 45 and race, 1, 2 regime of pink and blue, 23, 28, 33–36, 36n2, 38; breaking free of, 47; effects on development, 37, 38; marketing strategies, 38; See also Princess phenomenon

 INDEX 

reveal parties, 34 and sex, 3, 5, 17, 23, 33–35, 46, 81, 88, 96, 108, 116, 186 sex/gender system, 17 stereotyping, 34, 37–39, 41, 42, 46, 47, 119, 137 unlearning/relearning of, 114, 116, 118 See also Binary; Femininity; Masculinity; Sex; Sexuality Gender baseline, see Gender home Gendered movement, 23, 113–115, 117–121 as learned behaviour, 114 Gender-fluid, 110 Gender home, 20, 82, 136 Gender normativity, see Heteronormativity Gender-queer, 20, 97, 110 Gender Recognition Act, 96 Gere, David, 74–76, 85, 113 Gerestant, Dred (drag character), 93 Gieseler, Carly, 34 Giffney, Noreen Queering the Non/Human (book), 21, 170, 179 Gilbert, Sky, 157, 158, 160–162 Jane (drag character), 158 Gilmour, Dean, 183 Giono, Jean Hill (book), 180 Glee (TV show), 67, 83 Golden, Julia, 39, 40 Goldey, Katherine L., 46 Goldie, Terry, 4, 114 Gombrich, Ernst, 147 Goode, Joe 29 Effeminate Gestures (dance), 75, 76, 79 Grace, Della, see Volcano, Del LaGrace Greek mythology, 88, 89 Griffin, Sean, 49

213

Groff, Jonathon, 66 Grotowski, Jerzy, 14, 125, 127, 134 Group Theatre (collective), 128 Guthrie Theater, 142 Gyllenhaal, Jake, 64, 65 H Habitus, see Bourdieu, Pierre Haines, William, 52, 54, 56 Halberstam, Judith (Jack), 22, 85n3, 86–90, 100, 115 Female Masculinity (book), 85, 94 Hall, Michael C., 70 Halperin, David, 2, 22, 85, 93, 151 How to Be Gay (book), 59n3, 84, 93 Handley, Miriam Lord Chamberlain Regrets, The (book), 55n2 Hapgood, Elizabeth Reynolds, 129 Haraway, Donna, 24 Companion Species Manifesto, The (book), 182 naturecultures, 174 Harris, Neil Patrick, 70 Haynes, Todd Far From Heaven (film), 64 Poison (film), 62 Hays, Will, 54 Healy, Brendan, 147, 161, 162 Herzog, Katie, 107 Heteronormativity, 3, 12, 19, 51, 73, 77, 86, 90, 91, 150, 151, 153, 157, 170, 187 and patriarchy, 12 re-inscription of, 34, 54 in theatre departments, 9 Heterosexuality, 3, 4, 12, 19, 79, 80, 83, 101, 174 in cinema, 51, 54, 55, 58, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67, 70 on TV, 83

214 

INDEX

Heterosexuality (cont.) in video games, 41 Hi, Are You Single? (solo drag show), 142 Highway, Tomson, 188 Two Spirit Acts (book), 187 Hijra people, 109n20 Hilferty, J. Paul, 159, 160 Hiller, Jeff, 69 Hines, Melissa, 35–37, 42 Hird, Myra J. Queering the Non/Human (book), 21, 170, 179 Hitchcock, Alfred Rope, 2, 57 Hodge, Alison, 13, 125 Hollywood, 19, 30, 32, 49, 54, 58, 59, 61–63, 67, 69, 91, 127, 128 Academy Awards, 6n4, 65, 69 censorship, 55 cultural/social force of, 51, 71 discrimination in, 6n4, 54, 55, 57, 67 gender ambiguity in, 52, 53 history of queerness in, 50, 51, 61 homophobia in, 23, 51, 54, 57, 61, 62, 65, 68, 90 James Bond (character), 66, 69 Production Code, the, 54, 55, 57, 60 women in, 53 See also Broadway; Cinema; Homophobia Homophobia, 19, 21, 51, 64, 68, 82–84, 156, 161 in cinema, 67 internalized, 155 and pressure to appear masculine, 45 See also Butchphobia; Effemiphobia; Hollywood Homosexuality, 2, 28, 61, 63, 83, 96, 101, 174

bullying and harassment, 28 in cinema, 50, 51, 58, 61, 62, 68 coming out, 6 and effeminacy, 74 in Iran, 7, 100 oppression and violence, 2, 7, 76, 77, 156, 157, 165 and psychiatry, 4 in relation to heterosexuality, 3 social discrimination, 28, 54 See also Gay; Lesbian Horton, Edward Everett, 52 Hudson, Julie, 169 Hudson, Rock, 57–60, 68 death, 60 Hughes, Ted, 179 Humphries, Barry, 83 Hymans, Joe, 58 Hysteria: A Festival for Women, 162 I Ibsen, Henrik, 123 Doll’s House, A (play), 123 Improvisations, 41, 93, 129–132, 182–184, 188 Indigenous epistemology, 24, 184–189 animism, 185, 186 pantheism, 188 and the term ‘queer,’ 186, 187 and theatre, 186 Trickster, 185 two-spirit, 20, 22, 109n20, 186, 187; as an indigenous term, 22, 186, 187 Internet, 29, 98 addiction to, 28, 29 bullying, 28 deleterious effects of, 28, 29 digital age, 8, 155 Facebook, 29 smartphone culture, 29, 135

 INDEX 

social media, 34, 59, 98 Ivory, James Maurice (film), 63 J Jacoby, Jennifer Wallace, 39, 40 Jarman, Derek Edward II (film), 63 Jauss, Hans Robert, 146, 148 reception theory, 146 Jocelyn, Matthew, 145–147, 159 Joel, Daphna, 16 Joseph, Rajiv Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo (play), 178 Journal of Applied Physiology, 15 Journal of Gender Studies, 34 Juliet (character), 8, 95, 148, 149 K Kalin, Tom Swoon (film), 62 Kandel, Eric, 147 Kant, Immanuel, 147 Keefe, John, 10, 122 Physical Theatres (book), 122 Kelly, Patsy, 53 Kerr, Rosalind Queer Theatre in Canada (book), 145n4, 154n8 Kerrigan, Warren J., 52, 56 Kidman, Nicole, 90 Cold Mountain (film), 53n1 Killing of Sister George, The (film), 61 Kilroy, Wil, 127 King, Lawrence, 165 King, Zach, 77 Kirillov, Andrei Path of the Actor (book), 132 Klein, Naomi, 186

215

This Changes Everything (book), 168 Knebel, Maria, 129 Kushner, Tony, 7, 137, 156 Angels in America (play), 1, 156 Perestroika (play), 1, 156 L Laban, Rudolf, 117–121, 130, 135, 188 See also Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), 23, 51, 87, 88, 117, 118, 136 and acting pedagogy, 121 Action Drives, 120–122, 130; Wring, 121, 133 Effort Factors, 119–120 Still Forms, 117–118 La Cage aux Folles (musical), 83 Lamb, Warren, 117 Landau, Tina, 128, 132 Lang, k. d., 92 Drag (music album), 92 Lashed but not Leashed (solo drag show), 142 League of Resident Theatres (LORT) (organization), 142 Lecoq, Jacques, 24, 125–127, 182 actor training methods, 24, 125–127, 182–184, 188 aesthetic philosophy, 24, 182 auto-cours, 126 clown, 164 influence of, 182–184 L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, 126, 182 Moving Body, The (book), 126 playing the non-human, 182, 183 See also Gilmour, Dean; Ross, Martha

216 

INDEX

Ledger, Heath, 64, 65 Lee, Ang, 64 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 143–145, 149, 151, 161, 184 Postdramatic Theatre (book), 143, 144 Leit, Richard, 44 Lepage, Robert, 145 Lesbian, 2, 22, 52–53, 86, 87, 90–92, 101, 105, 160, 163 butch, 99, 102, 106 in cinema, 23, 49–53, 60, 61, 63, 65, 90, 91; coming out, 52, 60, 66, 68; ‘lesbian chic,’ 62 coming out, 92 culture, 62, 157 directors, 62 discrimination against, 107 pride, 155 as teenagers, 99 and the term ‘queer,’ 22 in theatre, 142, 155, 158, 160, 163 in TV, 64; coming out, 91, 92 See also Homosexuality Liberace, Władziu Valentino, 78 Licensing Act, the, 55 Lipton, Dave, 58 Littman, Lisa, 98, 99, 108 Livingston, Jennie, 94 Paris Is Burning (documentary), 62 Loman, Willy (character), 184 Longtime Companion (film), 63 Lorca, García Yerma (play), 133, 135 Los Angeles, 51 Ludlam, Charles, 164, 164n12 Camille (play), 164n12 See also Ridiculous Theatre L Word, The (TV show), 62 Lynch, Jane, 90 Lynde, Paul, 78

M Mac, Taylor, 164 Face of Liberalism, The (play), 164, 165 See also Ridiculous Theatre Mack, Marlo, 108 Mackenzie, Cameron, 165 Maddow, Rachel, 92 Magnetic North Theatre Festival, 11 Mann, William, 52, 54, 56, 57 Marchiano, Lisa, 96, 97, 99–101, 104, 106, 108, 109 Margolin, Deb, 163 Margolis, Ellen Politics of American Actor Training, The (book), 11 Markland, Bridge, 93 Masculinity, 3, 18–20, 40, 44, 46, 50, 52, 55, 57, 58, 60, 74, 75, 78–80, 83–90, 94, 99, 101, 109, 111, 115, 120, 135 aggressive, 1 conventional notions of, 136, 137, 154 hypermasculinity, 80 marketability, 69 ‘masculine’ female, 23, 53, 85–90, 92, 94, 100, 149 and movement, 114, 115, 117–119, 121, 122 muscularity, 23, 44, 45, 84 and ‘Nature,’ 174, 175 objectification of, 44, 83 purported traits of, 88 for queer men in cinema, 66, 69 toxic masculinity, 88 Maton, Karl, 32, 33 McFarren, Cheryl Rethinking Affective Memory (dissertation), 129 McKenzie, Cameron, 165 McKenzie, Matthew

 INDEX 

Bears (dance-theatre work), 184, 185 McKinnon, Kate, 90 McKinnon, Scott, 64 McMurtry, Larry, 64 Meyer, Richard, 58, 60 Meyer, Walter, 105 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 14, 127, 132, 158 Miller, D.A., 2, 55 essay on Hitchcock’s Rope, 2 Minnick, Michele, 130 Misogyny, 41, 68, 78, 82, 84, 99, 107 See also Effemiphobia Mitchell, John Cameron, 138 Hedwig and the Angry Inch (film), 64, 70, 138 See also Yitzhak (character) Modern Family (TV show), 63, 83 Moisés, Kaufman Laramie Project, The, 156n9 Money, John, 4, 114 Moore, Robert, 31, 32 Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona Queer Ecologies (book), 21, 170 Morton, Timothy, 24, 170–177, 173n8, 180, 185, 186 Ecological Thought, The (book), 174 Moscow Art Theatre (theatre company), 127, 128 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, The (MPPDA), 54 Movement for actors, see Acting pedagogy Muñoz, José, 89 Murray, Simon, 10, 122 Physical Theatres (book), 122 Musicals, 83, 132, 138, 141, 145

217

N Nacino, Joseph, 92 National Gay Task Force, The, 61 National Michael Chekhov Association (NMCA), 127 Naturalism, see Realism Natyasastra (text), 130 Nazimova, Alla, 52 Nelson, Charles Reilly, 78 Nestruck, Kelly, 146 Newlove, Jean Laban for Actors and Dancers (book), 135 Nguyen, Athena, 86 Nichols, Mike Angels in America (TV show), 64 Birdcage, The (film), 83 Nikolais, Alwin, 176 Non-binary, 97, 110 Novarro, Ramon, 52 O O’Connell, Mark, 67 O’Donnell, Rosie, 90 Oiye, David, 160 Omasta, Matt ‘Theatre Education in the Academy’ (article), 13 Open Sex Role Inventory, The, 18, 88 Orange Is the New Black (TV show), 6, 63, 82, 91, 110n21 Orton, Joe, 83 Orwell, George Nineteen Eighty-Four (book), 116n3 Ossana, Diana, 64 Oz (TV show), 63 P Paglia, Camille, 68 Panet, Brigid

218 

INDEX

Panet, Brigid (cont.) Essential Acting (book), 136 Pangborn, Franklin, 52 Pansexuality, 22 Parent, Mike, 44 Parish, James Robert Hollywood Book of Scandals, The (book), 67 Paris Is Burning (film), 94 Parry, Evalyn, 163 Pascoe, C.J., 85 Dude, You’re a Fag (book), 40, 83 Paterson, Eddie ‘From Shakespeare to the Super Bowl’ (article), 24n13 Patriarchal culture, 12, 41, 42, 53, 65, 82, 85, 86, 88, 91, 99, 174 and consumerism, 38, 42 and women, 174 See also Capitalism; Heteronormativity Pelletier, Pol, 145n4 Performance art, 94, 114, 151 queer, 163 Personal Best (film), 62 Philadelphia (film), 63 Philosophy, 170, 172 didacticism, 168 existentialism, 86 metaphysics, 3 Physical theatre and physical acting, 4, 10, 122, 125, 130, 134, 180 ALBA Emoting technique, 135 Chekhov technique, 136 instructor training in, 183 movement theatre, 146 rasa and Rasaboxes, 130, 131, 136, 182 Viewpoints, 130–132, 136, 180, 188 Pierce, Charles, 83 Pillow Talk (film), 57

Pilobolus (dance company), 176 Plato, 3 Playwrights Horizons Theater School, 181 Popat, Sita, 154n6 Post-dramatic theatre, 143–147, 151, 161, 184 and queer theatre, 145, 146, 148–151, 163 See also Dramatic theatre; Lehmann, Hans-Thies Post-modernism, 21, 164, 176 Powers, Mala, 127 Pride Toronto, 22, 45 Princess phenomenon, 23, 40, 42 Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (film), 83 Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (PACT) (organization), 142 Prosser, Jay Second Skins (book), 136 Proulx, Anne, 64 Psychological realism, 10, 12, 24, 124, 129, 133, 134, 143 and PTSD, 129, 134 and Stanislavski, 129, 130, 133 Punchdrunk (theatre company), 154 Drowned Man, The (play), 154 Sleep No More (play), 154 Punctuate! Theatre, 185 Pye, Valerie Clayman Objectives, Obstacles, and Tactics in Practice (book), 121 Q Quebec, 9, 79, 145 cultural expression, 9, 145, 145n4; queer, 145 Quiet Revolution, 145, 145n4 Queer as Folk (TV show), 63

 INDEX 

Queer culture, 93, 157, 161 vs. mainstream culture, 161 QueerCulture Festival, 159, 160, 162 Queer ecology, 24, 170–176, 178, 184 and animal studies, 170, 176–181 application to acting pedagogy and training, 167, 175, 177, 180, 182 and Darwinism, 170, 172 and ‘ecological thought,’ 170, 171, 174–180, 185 as hybrid discipline, 167, 170, 172, 177 ‘mesh,’ 173, 176, 177, 180, 181 ‘nature’ vs. ‘culture,’ 174 speciesism, 169 ‘strange stranger,’ 173–176, 179, 181, 189 Turing Test, 174 ‘vibrant matter,’ 177, 180 See also Species Theatre Queer Eye (TV show), 64 Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (TV show), 64 Queer theatre, 91, 141, 142, 145, 147, 150, 151, 153–155, 157, 158, 160–161, 164 actors, 161 artists, 157, 165, 166 celebration of difference, 159, 161 and community, 162 empowerment, 163, 165, 166 exceeding realism, 158 gay theatre, 155, 156, 158, 160 lesbian theatre, 158, 160, 162, 163 in North America, 157 students, 157, 165 subversion and resistance, 161–163 See also Buddies in Bad Times Theatre; Ridiculous Theatre Queer theory and studies, 2, 16, 17, 21, 24–25, 150, 153, 170, 187

219

critique of heteronormativity, 170 and evolutionary theory, 172 on marriage equality, 162 the term ‘queer,’ 21, 22, 161; as problematic, 22 See also Butler, Judith; Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky R Race, 1, 9, 33, 73, 142, 151–153, 171 Black Lives Matter, 50 and class, 87, 143 and gender, 2 hierarchy in, 85 and queerness, 63 Racism, 68, 80, 142, 169 and sexism, 1 stereotyping, 80 Ravenhill, Mark, 137 Reagan, Ronald, 59 Realism, 128, 141–148, 150–152, 158, 184 critique of, 24 and gender and sexuality, 149–153 gender dissidence in defiance of, 141, 149 and North American regional theatres, 141, 143, 145 well-made play, the, 143 See also Dramatic theatre Reich, Stephanie, 38 Reinelt, Janelle, 117 Renaissance, the, 152 Renaud, Lissa Taylor Politics of American Actor Training, The (book), 11 Rhubarb Festival, 162 Ribot, Théodule, 133 Rich, Frank, 60 Ridiculous Theatre, 164 and gay liberation, 164

220 

INDEX

Ridiculous Theatrical Company (RTC), 164 Rigney, Mark Bears (play), 177, 178 Rodenburg, Patsy, 120 Roscoe, Will Changing Ones (book), 187n18 Ross, Martha, 182, 183 RuPaul Charles, 83, 114 RuPaul’s Drag Race (TV show), 83 Russell, Craig, 83 Russo, Vito, 52 Celluloid Closet, The (book), 62 S Same-sex marriage, 6 legalization of, 6n1 Sanbonmatsu, John, 41–43 Sandler, Barry Making Love (film), 62 San Francisco, 100 Savage, Dan, 77, 78, 82 Savran, David, 21, 22, 62, 150, 151, 156 Schechner, Richard, 10, 130, 152, 153 performance theory, 10 ‘Rasaesthetics’ (article), 130 See also Physical theatre and physical acting, rasa and Rasaboxes Schneider, Rebecca, 50 Scientific American (magazine), 170 Scribe, Eugène, 143 See also Realism, well-made play, the Sedaris, David, 77–79 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 2, 17 Epistemology of the Closet, 2, 17 Semiotics, 3, 25 Serano, Julia, 107 ‘Destransition, Desistance, and Disinformation’ (article), 105, 106

Setoodeh, Ramin, 67, 165 ‘Straight Jacket’ (article), 66 Sex assigned at birth, 2, 16, 17, 95, 100 biological, 37, 97, 100 denotations, 15 distinction from ‘gender,’ 15–18, 97, 100, 116 as an effect of gender and vice versa, 16, 37 as a socially assigned category, 16, 46 See also Fausto-Sterling, Anne; Fine, Cordelia; Gender; Joel, Daphna Sexism, 37, 66, 94, 169 in cinema, 57 neurosexism, 47, 100 Sex Roles (journal), 38 Sexuality in cinema, 52, 55, 61, 66, 68 and gender, 21, 28, 153, 172, 187 non-normative, 153 normative, 19 orientation, 2, 6, 9, 16, 19, 29, 33, 40, 57, 58, 66, 79, 80, 86, 101, 105 regulation of, 162 in theatre, 159 Shakespeare, William, 95, 123, 149 As You Like It (play), 166, 188 King Lear (play), 123 Romeo and Juliet (play), 95 Shaw, Peggy, 163 Shawn, Wallace, 177 Grasses of a Thousand Colors (play), 177 Shellard, Dominic Lord Chamberlain Regrets, The (book), 55n2 Shepard, Matthew, 156, 165 Shore, Daniel J., 149 Sinfield, Alan, 150, 155

 INDEX 

Singing, 25, 31, 92 Skwiot, Suzee, 34 Smartphone, see Internet, smartphone culture Smith, Michele, 183 Smuts, Barbara, 189 Smyth, Ron, 79, 81 al-Solaylee, Kamal, 146 Soviet Bloc and censorship, 55, 129, 133 influence of, 128 investment in realism (theatre), 128 Putin regime, 165 Spacey, Kevin, 66 Species Theatre, 180–184 Animal Project, The (workshop / course), 181 and indigenous epistemology, 184, 185 and the post-dramatic, 185 Spectatorship, 33, 49, 60, 93, 131, 141, 147, 148, 150–153 horizon of expectations, 146–148, 150, 151, 159 immersive theatre, 154 narcissism, 154 Speech acts, 116 Split Britches (theatre company), 163 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 14, 127, 128, 133 Active Analysis, 129 actor training methods, 128, 129, 132, 134 affective memory, 132, 134 audience, 148 method or system, 128, 129, 132 misunderstanding and misappropriation of, 128, 129 Soviet investment in realism, 128 translations of, 129 See also American Method acting; Carnicke, Sharon Marie;

221

Knebel, Maria; Psychological realism Stanley, Sarah Garton, 160 Steensma, Thomas, 105 Steiger, Jeffrey, 46 Stella, Cari, 89, 105, 106 ‘One Year off Testosterone,’ 106n19 Stevens, Lara ‘From Shakespeare to the Super Bowl’ (article), 24n13 Stewart, Kristen, 90 Still Forms Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) Still Forms, 121 Stoermer, Eugene, 167 Stonewall riots, 84, 155 Strange Sisters (lesbian cabaret), 162 Strasberg, Lee, 128 Streep, Meryl, 32 Studio 58 (theatre training school), 124n4, 165 Sutton, Grady, 52 Swank, Hilary, 6n4 Sweet, Elizabeth, 37, 47 T Talbot, Margaret, 96, 103, 110 ‘About a Boy’ (article), 100, 101, 109, 110 Tannahill, Jordan, 9, 24, 142, 143, 146, 179 Theatre of the Unimpressed (book), 142 Tashman, Lilyan, 52 Tectonic Theater (theatre company), 156n9 Theatre, 32, 125, 141, 144, 148, 163n11, 175 and censorship, 12 departments, 5, 9, 10, 31, 123–125, 124n4, 150, 152, 153, 169

222 

INDEX

Theatre (cont.) Early Modern, 149 in Europe, 145, 146 film and television, influence on, 9 gender bias in, 12 gender dissident narrative and characters, 12, 150 and gender subversion, 5, 24, 131, 149, 152 masculinity in, 83 in the 19th century, 24, 164 in North America, 145; Canadian, 146 North American, 9, 24, 144; American, 152, 156, 163, 164; Canadian, 145, 146, 157, 159, 160, 163 present-day reconfiguration of, 143, 146, 147, 150, 152, 154, 166 professional, 4, 9, 12, 14, 31, 152, 159, 169 as the ‘queerest’ art, 150, 151 queer exclusion, 155 regional, 141, 142, 145, 146, 150, 185 as a site for dominant cultures, 12, 143, 146, 150 theatrical expression, 9, 141, 143; queer, 147, 157, 160 in the 20th century, 14, 125, 127 in the 21st century, 128, 149 ‘Western’ theatre tradition, 95, 123, 149, 152, 178 See also Climate Change Theatre Action (organization); Physical theatre and physical acting; Post-dramatic theatre; Realism Theatre Columbus (theatre company), 182 Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (journal), 13 Theatre Journal (journal), 50, 154, 177

Theatre pedagogy, see Acting pedagogy Theatre Smith-Gilmour (theatre company), 183 Chekhov’s Shorts (play), 183 Theatre Topics (journal), 13 Thelma and Louise (film), 65 Thomson, David, 68 Thomson, Sylvia, 29n1 Thorpe, David, 69, 77–81 Do I Sound Gay? (documentary), 68, 76–78, 82 Thunberg, Greta, 169n2 Tomboy, 53n1, 83, 86, 87, 91, 99 in cinema, 53 sexuality of, 86 See also Degeneres, Ellen; Kelly, Patsy Tomlin, Lily, 90, 91 Toronto Life (magazine), 146 Toronto Workshop Productions (theatre company), 158 Torr, Diane, 23, 111, 114, 115, 136, 137 Danny King, 115, 120 drag, 115 ‘Man for a Day’ workshops, 23, 94, 114, 115, 118, 136, 138 relation to LMA in drag work, 117–120, 122 Sex, Drag, and Male Roles (book), 94, 114 Transgender, 6, 22, 73, 94–97, 99, 101, 102, 104, 107, 108, 115, 160 activism, 96, 100, 103, 105, 107, 110 coming out, 97, 98 discrimination and violence, 107 and gender-queer, 20 increase in numbers, 96–98, 100, 101, 108 ‘invert,’ 86n4 invisibility of, 96, 106, 107

 INDEX 

Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), 98, 99 and the sex/gender system, 18 suicide rates, 7, 96, 103, 107 teenagers, 98, 103 trans boys, 100, 104 trans children, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102n18, 103, 104, 108 transgender butch, 94 transgender spectrum, 111 transgender theory, 100 trans men, 6, 92, 94, 107 trans women, 6, 63 See also Gender, dysphoria; Transsexual Transgender Children and Young People (book), 107 Transgender Studies, 18, 97 Transitioning, 6, 19, 22, 97–99, 102, 103, 105–110 ‘affirmative’ approach, 107 complete transition, 95, 104 desistance, 104–105, 107 de-transitioning, 96, 105–107, 110 gatekeeping, 102, 107 hormone therapy, 19, 94, 104–106, 110 medical transition, 19, 97, 98, 102, 104, 105, 107, 109, 110 and mental health, 98, 103, 106 partial transition, 94 puberty blockers, 103, 104 social transition, 101, 102, 102n18, 104, 108 Transparent (TV show), 6, 63 Transphobia, 83, 96, 106, 107 Transsexual, 19, 22, 97, 101, 136 and the binary, 19 distinction from ‘transgender,’ 19, 97 and the term ‘queer,’ 22 See also Transgender Transvestite, 76, 83

223

Tremblay, Michel, 145n4 Troche, Rose Go Fish (film), 62 Turing, Alan, 174n9 See also Queer ecology, Turing Test Twenge, Jean iGen (book), 29 Two-spirit, see Indigenous epistemology U United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC), 168 V Valentino, Rudolf, 52 Van Anders, Sari, 46, 109, 121 Van Sant, Gus My Own Private Idaho (film), 62 Video games, 41 and capitalist culture, 154 effects of, 23, 41–43 and gender, 42 and patriarchy, 41 and sexism, 42 violence in, 42 virtual reality, 154 Vineberg, Steve ‘Willy Loman and the Method’ (article), 184 Voice, 69, 75, 79, 80, 82, 120–122, 124 and class, 80 Francophone Quebecers, 79 ‘gay voice,’ 68, 76–79, 81 gendered, 76, 79 lisp, 79 and masculine communication, 120 Standard American Melody, 69 workshops, 76

224 

INDEX

Volcano, Del LaGrace, 94 von Krafft-Ebing, Richard, 86n4 W Wagner, Jane, 91 Wallace, David, 67 Wallace, Robert, 145, 158, 159 ‘Theorizing a Queer Theatre’ (article), 158 War Horse (play), 181 Weaver, Lois, 163 Webb, Clifton, 56 Weisgram, Erica, 38 West End, 137, 145 Westheimer, Ruth, 60 Wexler, Bruce, 33, 43, 103 What Remains (dance/music/poetry fusion), 142 Wild Excursions Performance (theatre company), 5 Wiles, David Eulus, 12, 95, 150 Beyond Race and Gender (chapter), 9 Will and Grace (TV show), 63, 83 Williams, Walter L. Spirit and the Flesh, The (book), 187n18 Willson, Henry, 58 Willy, Loman (character), 184 Wilson, Robert, 148 Wilson, Thomas, 8n10 Wodaabe men, 101n17

Wolfe, Cary, 169 Women’s studies, 170 Wong, Wang, 35–37, 42 World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), 102, 105, 106 Standards of Care (SOC), 16, 95, 102–104, 102n18, 109n20, 115 World War II, 49, 56 WOW Café (Women’s One World), 163 Written on the Wind (film), 58 Y Yale Repertory Theatre, 142 Yarrow, Ralph Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre (book), 123 Yitzhak (character), 137–139 Yoshino, Kenji Covering (book), 80 Z Zaiontz, Keren, 154 Zee Zee Theatre Company, 165 My Funny Valentine (play), 165 Nelly Boy (play), 165 Nyet (play), 165 Zellweger, Renée Cold Mountain (film), 53n1