Abstract
ABSTRACTEmploying a sci-fi inspired aesthetic, queer, black, trans artist, boychild presents audiences with a future vision of human embodiment. Strobe lighting makes her appear fragmented or as if she were a hologram. An electronic light flickers behind her teeth. Her eyes are obscured by whited-out contact lenses. boychild’s is a body interfaced with technology. She is imaged as non-human, cyborgian. Whilst boychild considers her onstage persona to be female, her body reads ambiguously. Transgressing demarcations between the supposedly polarised categories of organic/machine, male/female, the queer form of embodiment she presents is posthuman. Implementing the theoretical principles of Rosi Braidotti’s anti-humanist concept of the posthuman and Donna Haraway’s cyborg politics, I argue that boychild’s engagement with the posthuman does not end with aesthetics, rather it extends to the plotting of a posthuman politics, posing a radical challenge to heteronormative body politics. Theorising boychild’s lip-synch performances, I argue for her style of performance as a technologised form of ventriloquism, as she ‘speaks’ with the voice of another or the voice of another speaks through her. Using Mladen Dolar’s and Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytical philosophies in conjunction with Steven Connor’s literature on ventriloquism, I unpick the intricacies of presence and power inherent to her ‘voice’ and indicate its broader political implications.
Highlights
Positioned ‘on the frontline of enquiries into what our culture is and where it is located
Implementing the theoretical principles of Rosi Braidotti’s anti-humanist concept of the posthuman and Donna Haraway’s cyborg politics, I argue that boychild’s engagement with the posthuman does not end with aesthetics, rather it extends to the plotting of a posthuman politics, posing a radical challenge to heteronormative body politics
My analyses have attended to: boychild’s layering of gender identifications, the technological augmentation of her body, her cross-species boundary-breaching, and embodiment of multiple avatar forms, before focussing on her use of an acousmatic ventriloquial voice, a voice which appears as part object, not fully integrated into the bodily whole
Summary
Positioned ‘on the frontline of enquiries into what our culture is and where it is located. I indicate these similarities so as to argue for boychild’s highly stylised lip-synch performances as re-presentations of the ritual practices of spirit possession/voice channelling (re-aestheticised via the sci-fi inspired visual language of the posthuman), and to reinforce my argument for the sense of spirituality that permeates the work (a spirituality which is layered with both Western and non-Western religious references). Boychild’s ‘voice’ can be considered an ‘autonomous voice-body’, as per Connor’s conception of the vocalic body, and she can be interpreted as incarnate surrogate or host, as a fantastical bodily projection formed out of the autonomous operations of that voice Rather than use her own voice, performing as channeller of an ‘autonomous’ voice-body presents boychild with the opportunity of exploiting that voice’s more-than-present power. If the reason for one’s exclusion from that system is because one ‘has no body’, one such challenge might be to develop new, alternative ways of being
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