Stacy Holman Jones

Telling Stories: Reflexivity, Queer Theory, and Autoethnography:

This essay focuses on intersections of reflexivity as both an orientation to research and a writing practice that brings together the method of autoethnography and the paradigm of queer theory. Taking seriously autoethnography’s and queer theory’s commitments to uncertain, fluid, and becoming subjectivities, multiple forms of knowledge and representations, and research as an agent of change, we write a series of reflexively queer personal texts. These texts ask us—as writers and readers in a community of scholars—to question our desire to name and claim stories and to embrace the gifts and challenges of open texts and the importance of reflexivity as we test the limits of knowledge and certainty.

(M)othering Loss: Telling Adoption Stories, Telling Performativity

This piece explores how telling adoption stories—to and of birth mothers, adoptive mothers, and their children—perform both the failures of language and the pleasures of repeating and rewriting tales of birth and placement, of the fictions of families. I consider how adoption stories spin not only tales of loss and fractured identities but also open-ended narratives of self and parent-child relationships. I use the languages of adoption, feminist and poststructural theories of subjectivity and performativity, and my own experience of adoption and family to tell and tell on the adoption story. And I wonder an adoption storys potential to (m)other loss and speak other narratives about adoption, its subject(s), and the force and possibility of storytelling.

Living Bodies of Thought The “Critical” in Critical Autoethnography

There is a vital, yet often unrealized relationship between storytelling and critical approaches to autoethnography. Where autoethnography brings the personal, the concrete, and an emphasis on storytelling to our scholarship, it often leaves us wanting for clear and powerful theoretical frameworks for understanding how such stories help us write into or become the change we seek in the world. Critical theory provides us with such frameworks, though it is often dismissed as jargon-laden, difficult, and impersonal. The “critical” in critical autoethnography reminds us that theory is not a static or autonomous set of ideas, objects, or practices. Instead, theorizing is an ongoing process that links the concrete and abstract, thinking and acting, aesthetics, and criticism in what performance studies scholar Della Pollock describes as “living bodies of thought.” This essay engages a practice of performative and queer storytelling that links the concreteness, risk, and poetry of autoethnographic stories with th...There is a vital, yet often unrealized relationship between storytelling and critical approaches to autoethnography. Where autoethnography brings the personal, the concrete, and an emphasis on storytelling to our scholarship, it often leaves us wanting for clear and powerful theoretical frameworks for understanding how such stories help us write into or become the change we seek in the world. Critical theory provides us with such frameworks, though it is often dismissed as jargon-laden, difficult, and impersonal. The “critical” in critical autoethnography reminds us that theory is not a static or autonomous set of ideas, objects, or practices. Instead, theorizing is an ongoing process that links the concrete and abstract, thinking and acting, aesthetics, and criticism in what performance studies scholar Della Pollock describes as “living bodies of thought.” This essay engages a practice of performative and queer storytelling that links the concreteness, risk, and poetry of autoethnographic stories with the powerful intellectual and political commitments of critical theory as one example of critical autoethnography as a living body of thought.

Burnt: Writing Torch Singers and Torch Singing

This article responds to Phillip Auslander’s call for performance studies scholars to engage analyses of popular music performances, particularly those that consider the performers themselves. The author takes Auslander’s tripartite scheme for the performer—performance interaction as a starting point for looking at how torch singers and torch singing are heard, understood, fixed, loved, reviled, and dismissed. In contrast to musical performers and performances as conscious constructions of purposeful identities (separate from the musician as person), the torch singer and her performances are understood as an inevitable collapse of person, performance persona, and character. This is particularly evident in discussions of Billie Holiday’s performances of torch songs and the antilynching anthem “Strange Fruit,” as well as commentary on her love life and sexuality.This article responds to Phillip Auslander’s call for performance studies scholars to engage analyses of popular music performances, particularly those that consider the performers themselves. The author takes Auslander’s tripartite scheme for the performer—performance interaction as a starting point for looking at how torch singers and torch singing are heard, understood, fixed, loved, reviled, and dismissed. In contrast to musical performers and performances as conscious constructions of purposeful identities (separate from the musician as person), the torch singer and her performances are understood as an inevitable collapse of person, performance persona, and character. This is particularly evident in discussions of Billie Holiday’s performances of torch songs and the antilynching anthem “Strange Fruit,” as well as commentary on her love life and sexuality.

Emotional Space: Performing the Resistive Possibilities of Torch Singing

Torch songs are standards—musical forms and formulas that recount the pain and suffering of unrequited love. But torch songs are also sites—interpretive spaces waiting to be filled by a performance. As such, torch singing is at once a product and producer of action—a site for concerted connection, deliberation, and contention. The resistive possibilities of a song of unrequited love are generated in the singing, in how a performance of a standard creates new spaces, new movements, and new meanings.

Crimes Against Experience

Scott proposes that literary approaches offer us one way to read how identities are discursively constituted and understood as and of experience. She encourages us to read for and write how histories (personal, political, and social) are constructed and constructive. This article focuses on how difference, knowledge production, and witnessing produce identities as “not something that was always already there simply waiting to be expressed, not something that will always exist in the form it was given.” In particular, the author considers her experience as a mother alongside Julia Kristeva’s essay “Stabat Mater,” which contrasts Catholic understandings of motherhood and femininity with her own experience of maternity, and Minne Bruce Pratt’s poetry collection Crime Against Nature, which confronts the loss of Pratt’s children following her coming out as a lesbian.

Singing It the Way She Hears It

This introduction situates this special issue on Music and Performance Studies, providing a framework for the analysis of music through the lens of performance studies and offering a preview of the articles in the collection.This introduction situates this special issue on Music and Performance Studies, providing a framework for the analysis of music through the lens of performance studies and offering a preview of the articles in the collection.

“One for My Baby and One More for the Road” Queer Affect and Billie Holiday

This essay considers Billie Holiday’s performance of “One for My Baby,” as an affective lamentation that both moves and creates movement—into another kind of relation, another kind of loving, another kind of bodily intensity. When Billie sings to the bartender, a proxy for an absent other and lost love, “I’m kind of a poet/And I got a lot of things to say/And when I’m gloomy, you simply gotta listen to me/Till it’s all talked away . . . So make it one for my baby and one more for the road/That long, long road,” we experience self-storytelling that creates a relation marked by an a sense of vitality, dependent on mutual vulnerability, and animated within a field of power. Holiday’s “One for My Baby” becomes an occasion for performing queer affective intensity—a corporeal and emotional embodiment that leaves us feeling alive, open, and possible.

Living an Autoethnographic Activist Life

This brief article provides an introduction to this special section on autoethnography as an activist activity and way of life.This brief article provides an introduction to this special section on autoethnography as an activist activity and way of life.

Creativity, Intimate Publics and the Proxemics of Pop Up Poetry Performance

While developing and nurturing creativity is increasingly a centerpiece of economic, cultural and arts policies, notions of what creativity is in an educational sense remain problematic to both policymakers and to the educators who seek to define, measure, and nurture it in their environments. In this chapter we use current research on creativity in education to highlight the ways performance and drama education currently approach the teaching and learning of creativity. We consider a recent relational ‘pop up poetry’ performance that embodies a kind of ‘one-to-one’ applied theatre that draws everyday audience members into relationship with the public poet, and in so doing creates a ‘politics of encounter’ which offers creative, pedagogical and political opportunities for social change. Such methods ask us to reconsider our ideas about the role of creativity in education contexts by claiming public space as a classroom and using performance encounters as creative rehearsal for social change. The ‘intimate publics’ created in such performances engage participants in a person-to-person encounter marked by collaborative learning and creative activism and citizenship.