Butch Noir

This article puts the generic concept of “butch noir” in dialogue with queer theories of temporality. Reworking the 1980s performance category of dyke noir that was used to describe a particular style of lesbian experimental work, butch noir is defined by its “having-already-been-read-ness”—a temporal dynamic by which queer subjects are generated through their anticipation of other people’s readings of them. This concept captures both the specificity of an anticipatory butch mode and the temporal belatedness that inaugurates subjectivity itself. Elaborated through close readings of the performance work of lesbian icon Peggy Shaw (Split Britches), the article focuses on her reflective monologues in Must: The Inside Story, a collaborative show (with Clod Ensemble) combining a noir aesthetic with the iconographies and desires of the anatomy theatre. Through a series of close readings, situated theoretically and historically, the article demonstrates the significance of butch noir to theorizing the place of the anticipatory in queer cultures, as well as to understandings of the strangeness of time for the modern subject whose place in language has always already been read.

“When Elephants Are in Must”: Peggy Shaw, Acts of Trans/fer, and the Present Future of Queer Desire

Performed three months after performance artist Peggy Shaw nearly died from a stroke, the 2011 production of Must in Amherst was infused with the exigencies of the present: Shaw “must” perform Must in order to pass her butch legacy onto the next generation of queer and trans folk in the audience.

Naked Truth: Theatrical Performance and the Diagnostic Turn

In a fashion that harks back to the birth of naturalistic drama, but also reflects contemporary anxieties about the etiolation of the real, the forensic capabilities of theatre have become, in the last two decades, the primary focus of theatrical attention. Reconsidering landmark works and rhetorical frames that helped to establish verbatim, virtual and in-yer-face theatre, this article explores the ways in which these key works and genres deploy, and attempt to jam, theatre's diagnostic machinery. The article contextualizes that machinery in relation to the medical underpinnings of naturalism, the growth of theatrical reflexivity from Pirandello to Beckett to Blast Theory, and the televisual phenomena of crime-scene investigation and fly-on-the-wall ‘reality shows’. In the final section I move to address two works which are explicitly about diagnosis, but which, in signal and purposeful ways, evade diagnosis: Must, by American performance artist Peggy Shaw and British company Clod Ensemble; and If That's All There Is, by UK-based company Inspector Sands.

Seeing Deb Margolin: Ontological Vandalism and Radical Amazement

Playwright and performer Deb Margolin's contributions to contemporary American theatre over the course of her now 25-plus year career have been eclectic. In the 1980s and early '90s she performed with Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver as the feminist performance troupe Split Britches, for which Margolin did much of the writing, based on the trio's improvisations and experiments. In the interstices of her work with Split Britches, Margolin built her own career as a solo performer and playwright. In her autobiographical Index to Idioms, premiered in 2005, and in conversation with Jill Dolan, Margolin addresses her process, politics, and pleasures in performance and playwrighting.