There is the notion of Judith Butler grouping queer community through “fields of desire and physical vulnerability.” The idea of using vulnerability as a defining factor within queer identity strikes me as beautiful.
Social power relations and precarious circumstances are not a sign of difference, but a symbol of becoming. (Vgl. Queer Art)
Drag makes obvious the performative quality of everyday subjectification. It can thus reveal a vertain volatility and create space for agency.
Brecht propose a way of theatre that is non-self-evident, one that “breaks the 4th wall” and reveals whatever prerequisites traditional theatre takes for granted or expects the audience to do so. He is concerned with “a liberation of illusion.” (Queer Art p.68).
In a way this is revealing what constitutes the given moment and its complex relations. It is peeling away at the layers, and in synchronicity with ruinology, becomes an observation of powers of effect, of what is usually omitted or taken for granted or as pre-requisite.
When we think of queer representation and empowerment as different from wanting to parallel heteronormative forms of being, and expand it towards this broader scope of queer sensibility (including chosen family, embracing a completely other starting point and relationality to the world around us) then this epic theatre (I want to say ecstatic, meaning “standing beside oneself” but I think that name is only used by Lorenz in Queer Art, not by Brecht himself...) could inform an approach to queer identity that is non-self-evident. What does that mean? When I speak of self evidence in queerness, in my understanding, that would be an unquestioning life and identity. What forms of “queer” forms of expression are self evident? Can I create artistic distance from myself and those in order to make them obvious?
In a way, puppets and representations of bodies make tangible this gap between an I and identity. “Undoing” as in Butler’s sense what it means to be a self, through projecting relations onto the other of the puppet.
Free person and authoritarian phony. - Stefan Brecht
The authoritarian phony is a version of a “good citizen”. Unquestioningly following rules, in a way the institutional theater Stefan Brecht’s Father critiqued before.
“An a.p. approximates a
robot who accepts preprogrammed wishes and ideas as his own, thus
consigning himself to others: “He then acts out a role-identity not his
at all” (31). An a.p. takes things seriously and attributes meaning to life.
He is value and achievement oriented, and accepts standards of conduct
as objectively valid (31). He seems to be a Fordist high performer, whose
values can still be discovered everywhere today. ”
“In opposition, “The f.p. is erotic, socially self-assertive, playful and ima-
ginative. His erotic and self-assertive inclinations are social and coin-
cide – two facets of his love/hate, selfish/other-oriented, life-affirming/
life-destroying interest in the personality and reactions of others – fa-
cets of the same natural propensity to relate personally to others, physi-
cally and mentally, thereby to come to be somebody” “