Lazlo Pearlman

Paper: Meat Magic: Grotesque-ing my Transbody at “The Box”

In popular culture ‘Grotesque’ is most often considered synonymous with ugly, disgusting, and monstrous; the abject Other against which we define the Self. However, what most intrigues me about the Grotesque are the ways in which what it signifies, according to Sarah Cohen Shabot, is not a rejected other at all, but the postmodern subject, the actual ambiguous nature of existence itself: “interconnected, intertwined and total,” and at the same time “plural, heterogeneous, dynamic, fluid and changing.” Can the/my Transbody onstage function as a theatrical illustration of the intersubjectivity of all bodies? All bodies and identities are double, hybrid, between living and dying, between and among genders. Could the Transbody, as the Grotesque, have the potential to create a heightened representation or experience of something that is, in fact, universal?


Presented at: Bodies: Flesh, Performance, Media, Disgust and Desire
June 21 2012, Birkbeck College, London

www.feonaattwood.com/blog/

The body and the way it is represented is the focus of continuing debates about beauty, desire and disgust, respectability and reality. The mediation of bodies and the ways in which it is increasingly possible to refashion bodies through a range of technologies is a source of concern to many. The body in a state of transformation or transgression or as a site of self-control is the focus of many popular texts. Some kinds of bodies have come under particular scrutiny; those of fashion and glamour models; porn performers and 'perverts', showgirls and burlesque dancers. Ideal and freakish bodies excite intense fascination. This seminar investigates presentations and representations of a range of bodies and examines how we might read them. It is organized by the Onscenity Research Network and funded by the AHRC.



Paper:  Stripping Bare and Telling Lies:

Looking at my own practice-as-research, this paper works through Michel Foucault’s ideas of bio-power and Judith Butler’s book Giving an Account of Oneself to then detail and explore the subversion of confessional culture via the use of the nude transsexual body and the technique of telling lies in “autobiographical” performance. As a female-to-male transsexual performer, there are expectations of me. Because I am using my body and my self as theatrical material, it seems I need to confess my identity, to give an account of the road I took to get to who I am. If I don’t confess, I am told, my audience won’t ‘understand’ my ‘other’ identity, and this must be the ultimate goal of performances by non-normative artists. But I don’t want to confess my identity, and I am not interested in making work about genders or sexualities. In this paper and in my performing work I use my naked transsexual body and the expectations of my trans identity to explore how the surprise of my body’s “truth” and the veil of the lie could be modes of generating experiences outside of, and indeed confounding to, confessional culture, experiences of intersubjectivity in my spectator-participants.



Presented July 5th, 2012 at a Conference on Confessional Culture that took place over two days (5th n 6th July) at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia:

arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/conferences/confessional-culture/

Dolan Cummings, the editor of Culture Wars, describes confessional culture as "an increasing blurring between public and private, and a concern to expose and reveal our "true selves". Though the act of confession is nothing new, the rise of reality television and web 2.0 means our culture is increasingly publicising the private, and using the media to expose ourselves and others. The conference looked at the effect of confessional culture on a range of media and discourses, in order to understand and unpack the manifestations, history and impact of this growing and evolving phenomenon.