Desireé D. Rowe

Valerie Solanas and the Queer Performativity of Madness

Accusations of madness have long been hurled at queer and feminist bodies, and typically when people are deemed mad, they are granted little agency. This article attempts to read madness as potentially agentic when it manifests as what we call a “queer performativity of madness.” Using the writing of and rhetoric surrounding Valerie Solanas, the infamous radical feminist known for shooting Andy Warhol, we develop the notion of a queer performativity of madness and show how historical figures like Solanas read against the binary oppositions that often create our understanding of sexuality, reason, and politics. Though madness does not always supply agency, we suggest that rethinking madness offers fruitful resources for feminist and queer theory.

The Critical Lede: New Media and Ecological Balance

As co-hosts of the podcast The Critical Lede (TCL), we find ourselves at a moment where new media projects are bursting onto the scene of not only communication/ performance studies but also all fields of academe. That we find ourselves in the midst of this explosion calls for reflexivity on the potentials that new media projects open as well as problematics that might ensue as we sort out how to keep our traditional print/stage heritage vibrant while simultaneously making room for scholarship that works outside of this framework.

Roses and Grime

There is a print in my office of this quote. I stop, occasionally, to think of what it means to others. In relation. The framed print hangs next to an 8x11 color photograph. The spatial proximity between the photo and print are important to me. The photo is an enlarged image of my father Al’s bicep. I bought a gaudy shiny black frame to offset the rugged masculinity of the image—a big muscular, hairy arm. At the very top of the picture you can see two of my father’s fingers as he lifts up the sleeve of his shirt.

Beyond the Talk-Back: Performing Autoethnography and the Functions of Critique

Reflecting on my own experiences with talk-backs and audience responses, this manuscript uses metaphor to map the functions of autoethnographic performance critique. Through an exploration of vulnerability within performance, I turn to three key areas: theoretical accessibility, performativity, and accountability in order to chart how to engage in critique of performance autoethnography.

Autoethnography as Object-Oriented Method

On my desk sits the well-worn stapler I smuggled in an old printer paper box from my last job. “This is MY stapler,” I thought as I tucked it into a back corner of one of the non-descript boxes that lined my office wall. The dull black paint is worn away where the space between my thumb and pointer finger holds it. It’s not like the new one that sits in my desk drawer; this one is a well-oiled relic from the past that moves smoothly and requires very little attention.

Please Don’t Use the Restraints Forgetting, Failure, and Childbirth

The end of the story is all you care about. So, let’s get that out of the way first. Penelope Jane was born on March 23rd. She was healthy. The trauma of that day still resonates within my body, called into being through subsequent visits to the hospital and a review of my own medical records from that day. A life-threatening fever and 9 hours of pushing led to a powerfully negative birth experience, one that I am consistently told to just forget. After she had a weeklong stay in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), I have a healthy daughter. In this article, I use auto/archeology as a tool to examine my own medical records and the affective traces of my experience in the hospital to call into question Halberstam’s advocacy of forgetting as queer resistance to dominant cultural logics. While Halberstam explains that “forgetting allows for a release from the weight of the past and the menace of the future” I hold tightly to my memories of that day. This article marks the disconnects between an advocacy of forgetting and my own failure of childbirth and offers a new perspective that embraces the queer potentiality of remembering trauma.

I Should've Done Target Practice: Why Valerie Solanas Missed

Through performative writing, this article seeks to tell the story of Valerie Solanas. Solanas, the woman most notoriously known as the shooter of Andy Warhol, has had little media exposure that does not frame her outside of the violent female assassin trope. (Auto)ethnographic writing, coupled with theoretical interludes via footnotes, works to retell Solanas’ story. In this way this article is telling three stories: the main narrative of Solanas, the footnoted theoretical narrative, and the author’s relationship to Solanas.