Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories

by Peggy Phelan

This is a book about the exhilaration and the catastrophe of embodiment. Analyzing different instances of injured bodies, Peggy Phelan considers what sustained attention to the affective force of trauma might yield for critical theory. Advocating what she calls "performative writing", she creates an extraordinary fusion of critical and creative thinking which erodes the distinction between art and theory, fact and fiction.
The bodies she examines here include Christ's, as represented in Caravaggio's painting The Incredulity of St Thomas , Anita Hill's and Clarence Thomas's bodies as they were performed during the Senate hearings, the disinterred body of the Rose Theatre, exemplary bodies reconstructed through psychoanalytic talking cures, and the filmic bodies created by Tom Joslin, Mark Massi, and Peter Friedman in Silverlake The View From Here .
This new work by the highly-acclaimed author of Unmarked makes a stunning advance in performance theory in dialogue with psychoanalysis, queer theory, and cultural studies.

Genres: Queer Studies, Cultural Studies, Theory, Nonfiction, Theatre, Philosophy

200 pages, Paperback

First published February 27, 1997

Reviews

[Margaux Tatin Blanc]

This summer has been quite the trashy novel summer as tbe bad news all around pushed me to "easy reading" (if there is "easy listening" here is the equivalent!) but Peggy Phelan is always a fantastic read... dense with references and deep with thoughts and totally immersed in philosophy and concepts, but always easy to read and fun...
who else would compare the traces of the Rose Theater (Marlowe's theater where he created Tamberlaine) in London discovered in 1989 to an "uncovered rectum" and would include the medical illustration from a 1989 Anatomy atlas?????????
And her first text WHOLE WOUNDS: BODIES AT THE VANISHING POINT is the best writing about Foucault's analysis of the Velazquez painting Las Meninas... and so easy to read and understand... if you could not understand Foucault, read her! you will totally get it, and her vision of the Caravaggio The Incredulity of St Thomas in the same text is just masterful!
ENJOY!

[Marike · Rating 4 out of 5]

very dense and hard to work through with close to no background in psychoanalysis but nevertheless a good brain workout! about grief, mourning, death, performance and temporal art forms (cinema, theatre)