From the theater of cruelty to the queer performance. Aesthetics and politics of the drag king workshops ; Du théâtre de la cruauté à la performance queer. Esthétique et politique des ateliers drag king

Abstract

How and why do some contemporary body practices that take place at the crossroads of aesthetics and politics give to the critics of the sexual order a dimension that is both experiential and experimental? How do they produce meaning and effects that are susceptible of questioning the dominant rational order? These are the questions that guide the present research work. To answer them, I focus on a specific practice that operates as a tool to the feminist struggle: the drag king workshops. I propose here to analyze them at the light of a decentered reading of Antonin Artaud's theater of cruelty. This reading relates the artaudian notion of cruelty to the notions of performance and performativity to highlight the creative and potentially subversive dimension of a corporal and collective practice. By relating aesthetic transformation and political engagement, this work on a "political travestying practice" explores the critical dimension of a kind of questioning our own corporal positions reflecting the scale of privileges and oppressions constituted by the dominant régime of rationality.My approach to these questions is also a situated approach, hence the autobiographic dimension of the process I propose here. Artaud has been a harsh critic of the logical and aesthetical forms of "western" rationality. That is why his reading can be useful to think the western closure. In fact, from my own position as a sudaka, a Colombian migrant, taken within a complex colonial history, I articulate, through my reading of Artaud's thought and itinerary the critic of the sexual order and the critic of a dominant rationality. Faithful to a conception of the consubstantial connections between aesthetics and politics, as well as between practice and theory, I put on stage my encounter with Artaud and his own encounter with Mexico, a double encounter that informs my reading and my experience in the drag king workshops. ; Comment et pourquoi certaines pratiques contemporaines du corps, qui se déroulent au carrefour de l'esthétique et ...