Frederick C. Corey

Performing sexualities in an Irish pub

The performance of same‐sex desire in Dublin, Ireland, occurs not in the theatre but in a pub called “The George.” Recent changes in Irish legislation have deleted all references to English constructs of “buggery,” and now the Irish are in the process of reconstructing sexual identity. The purpose of this essay is to describe how queer, gay, lesbian, and homosexual identities are performed at The George. The analysis, drawing on social constructionism, nomadic science and performance studies, focuses on the space of the performance rather than its verbal text.

Personal narratives and young men in prison: Labeling the outside inside

Young men in prison constitute a unique population living with a dichotomous identity. Inside the prison, and from a dominant cultural perspective, the young men are criminals. In their communities, they are the “homeboys.” This essay explores the complications of identity in the context of a communication education course in performing personal narratives. The naming of the criminal, the criminal body as a site of punishment, urban mythology, and language are issues addressed. The analysis is based in principles of labeling, class struggle, and corporal punishment. The essay argues for the construction of personal narratives that are based in the identity of the story teller as a homeboy rather than a criminal.

Martha Graham's re‐vision of Jocasta, Clytemnestra, and Medea

Martha Graham based a number of her choreographic works on Greek tragedies, and in so doing reinterpreted the patriarchal dramas from a female perspective. This essay is an examination of these revisions in three of Grahams ballets: Night Journey, Clytemnestra, and Cave of the Heart. The analysis suggests that in her portrayal of Greek tragedies, Graham reveals a feminist consciousness, both as a revisionist and as an artist who is recreating the female perspective in a patriarchal society.

Tim Miller's Body (of Work)

Tim Miller has established himself as a critical voice in the development of gay male culture in the United States. For over twenty years, Miller has used performance as a way of addressing US policy, AIDS activism, community building, and the importance of private lives in public contexts. This essay is a tropological analysis across Millers oeuvre. Themes analyzed include the clean, anal body; whiteness, maleness, and their (unnamed) privileges; suffering, pleasure, and self-making; roles of an audience-as-community; and rhetorics of justice.

Two Measures of Audience Response to Performance

Two measures of audience response to performance of literary texts were constructed and tested. The first measure is a coding system created for analyzing audience response to open‐ended questions. The ten categories proved useful in discriminating responses across performances, but need further work in clarifying their relative importance and interrelationships. The second measure is a quantitative, scalar measure that provided five clear factors, good reliability, and useful discrimination. The Identification factor, however, needs additional clarification.

Performance and Politics: An Interview with Tim Miller

Tim Miller is an artist, activist, and teacher who, through text and performance, creates awareness and initiates change on matters related to gay male culture, American patriotism, and civil liberties. The material from the interview has been edited and organized around four themes: marriage equality for gay men and lesbians in the United States, the evolution of his work over the past 35 years, relationships between performing and teaching, and a rhetoric of patriotism—past, present, and future.

When Performance Brings Us Through

Performance can bring us through the events that make life difficult. The challenges are sometimes chronic and at other times acute acts of dislocation. Performance, both as specularity and reflective speculation, is a way of coming to terms with pain, loss, sorrow, self-deprecation, and scars. The four essays in this issue of Text and Performance Quarterly offer diverse but compelling instances of performance bringing us through experience. The body—a site of turmoil, disruption, and angst—is a beautiful place to be. In “Epistle and Episteme: Yee Sookyung’s The Very Best Statue and the Art Object as Social Space,” Claire Maria Chambers works from the assumption that art is socially enacted, in some instances as an embedded feature of the work and in others as a necessary component of specularity. She examines the knowledge creation generated by Yee Sookyung, a Korean artist who asks her viewers to encounter heuristic spaces where culture, religion, and gender are interrogated. Focusing on the importance of spaces as “invitations to encounter,” Chambers evokes the space of art as “a grave upon which mourners leave flowers, stones, and mementos, the ritual of encounter populates the space and endows absence with portence.” Hers is a somber rhythm, in contrast to Christopher J. Gilbert, who, in “Standing Up to Combat Trauma,” reports on humor as a way of bringing us through the effects of war. His subject is the stand-up comedy of Bobby Henline, a veteran who was severely injured in combat. His skin was burned, limbs severed, body disfigured, and rhetoric ignited. While Chambers takes on the feminine, Gilbert pursues the masculine. What does it mean to “man up” in the aftermath of combat? He analyzes the way Henline “reroutes combat trauma toward a pleasurable affect” and “combats the trope of the ‘broken man’ by working in and through, rather than against, stereotypical constructions.” War is tyrannical, and it is challenging for veterans to find the space to show themselves, each other, and audiences how it is possible to move onward.

A Hundred Years After the Rump Session

2014 marks the centennial celebration of the National Communication Association, the academic organization under which this journal is published. The association was born of unrest, displeasure, and determination: “Dissatisfied over the diminished importance of speech instruction within departments of English, seventeen speech teachers withdrew from the council [National Council of Teachers of English] to form the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking” (Kidd). In his history of the discipline, Herman Cohen uses a more vivid description when he notes that the academic association under which Text and Performance Quarterly (TPQ) is published “was founded in a ‘rump session’ by a group of seventeen Middle Western, predominantly Anglo-Saxon males” (35). Rump sessions, like rump departments and rump parliaments, are too often underappreciated and undervalued. They are after-meetings, events that take place following the primary attraction, and they frequently provide a space for the mobilization of dissent. Scholars and practitioners of performance studies are not, by and large, uncomfortable with dissent—or its mobility. In many cases, the “rump sessions” are upfront, with a frequent “rump in your face” posture, dissidents welcome. The 2014 collection of TPQ (Volume 34) has continued this tradition of pushing boundaries, embracing discord, giving voice to dissidents, and publishing original scholarship that explores and advances performance as a vital component of human communication. The year began with a special issue on performance and rhetoric, a profoundly appropriate start for this centennial year. In 1914, the discord between elocution and public speaking was loud and furious (Cohen 1–12), and a hundred years later, under the editorial direction of Mindy Fenske and Dustin Bradley Goltz, the discord has emerged as spirited inquiry, conversation, and analysis. The following two issues contained research on a range of topics: disabled veterans, posthuman pedagogy, race in the Olympics and in historical films, dance as sexual exploitation,