Posing fragments of flesh and story: Choreographic self-portraiture and the sexuate subject

Abstract

To situate and perform the body through self-portrait choreography is to position the self in conversation. In asking what might emerge from this moment - as work, play and theory - I harness this/my body, in its history and its gestures, as individual voice and listener. In exploring the constitution of image and how an embodied interiority might be displayed and re-read through solo performance as sexuate voice, Posing Fragments of Flesh and Story: Choreographic Self- Portraiture and the Sexuate Subject looks toward the individual body as the sight and site of genealogical performance. Through this research I have moved from the concentration (and exhaustion) of the female body as image ideal, toward the body that speaks. Within the context of my research the term ‘sexuate’ can be understood as an individual and subjective engagement with sexual difference. Acknowledging a personal, biological and genealogical construction as separate from definitively penned histories, the term ‘sexuate’ is employed as a means to locate a corporeal presence within a contemporary society that persists in privileging vision as the way to know another. Sexuate subjectivity, as harnessed by the individual, is understood through this research as the encompassing and individual acknowledgement of the biological and genealogic histories of both sexes. That ‘man’ and ‘woman’ have altering voices through which they, consequently, speak their histories. Employing the Irigarayan notion of the sexuate subject, my research looks to the stories untold, voices unspoken and bodies unseen. And as a woman I focus on the voice and re-telling of ‘her’. Because as her, I cannot presume the speaking of him… And in speaking myself, I cannot presume to also speak you. And yet, through my voice I wonder if you may find yours. In Posing Fragments of Flesh and Story the body, as sexuate subject, exists beyond its representation as an image based ideal, and looks toward the body as the historical storyteller inscribed by experiential stigmata. This research seeks the examination and episodic articulation of autobiographically based fictional narration and choreographic gesture that resists the assignment and consumption of image. The solo performance works, as self-portrait choreographies, serve alongside this written theses [ i.e.thesis ] as the palpable articulation of the research.