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ralowe's review against another edition
4.0
i started reading this book as the same time as a friend who is interdisciplinary without a focus one could perhaps coax into the category of performance studies. perhaps part of that disciplinary porosity is due to the thought initiated in this text. peggy phelan spends very little time actually dealing with what could strictly be described as performance art. what she does is a lot more interesting, trying to pull the performative aesthetic from other art forms: drama, painting, photography. this is what's truly amazing about this text and i feel like an asshole for four-starring it. i'm four-starring it because i don't want to agree (which is not necessarily the same as saying that i don't agree) with one of her premises on the nature of performance. in the middle of reading this i realized that fred moten's work was largely written in response to her notion that performance is distinct from reproduction. this is something i want to believe in, but on the other side of this idea is moten's amazing work, where in blackness is performance and its continual reproduction is not only inevitable but is the basis for a radical tradition. part of my aesthetics is currently hinging upon the notion that a performance remains autonomous from reproduction, but things are a lot more complicated than that. i am tremendously grateful to phelan for presenting this argument although... ugh. i'm torn. also to nitpick there's a possibly uncomfortable element of essentialism which doesn't feel completely worked through in her description of gender in *paris is burning*. that was actually making it very difficult to read and confusing, and felt at odds with her use of derrida elsewhere: it's her use of the idea of mimicry and at more than one point i couldn't tell if she felt woman could claim no body's sign as origin. is it the writing?
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