Unmarked: The Politics of Performance

by Peggy Phelan

Unmarked is a controversial analysis of the fraught relation between political and representational visibility in contemporary culture. Written from and for the Left, Unmarked rethinks the claims of visibility politics through a feminist psychoanalytic examination of specific performance texts - including photography, painting, film, theatre and anti-abortion demonstrations.

Genres: Art, Feminism, Nonfiction, Theatre, Theory, Research, Philosophy

207 pages, Paperback

First published January 7, 1993

Reviews

[Jessica Zu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only read one chapter as assigned by my professor. But I will re-read this work in the future. Phelan problemtizes quite a few taken-to-be-true premises in our 'viewing' of theatre, the mutual-gaze, tension between presence and absence, body and movement. The ontology of performance itself is a problematic concept/question. Maybe even more than any other literary genres, theatre's very existence is dependent on the process of re-reading (repetition with a difference)
Re-read for another class on visuality and violence. dense writing.

[Sean Lally · Rating 5 out of 5]

To begin with, I intend to re-read this book. In my first pass-through, I get the sense that Phelan is attempting to identify and theorize certain queer and feminist works that deal with the problem of representation and reproduction in the field of aesthetics. When the field of representation is always-already marked by the white-male gaze, what can art do? How can marginalized artists, who are unmarked within the economy of representation, use, or highlight, this quality of being unmarked? Relatedly, how can these artists avoid (or escape?) the endless process of reproduction (a term that has multiple significations in this text, I think)? The book was written in the early-mid nineties, so a lot of the examples (which include Robert Mapplethorpe and Yvonne Rainer) are drawn from the 80s. In her chapter on Rainer, Phelan notes that the filmmaker occludes the "heroine" -- "the usual object of [the male] gaze" -- from the visual frame, leaving only her voice to haunt the film. Phelan asks, "If presence is registered not through a visible body but through a voice, an invisible but audible consciousness, how are the models of identification between spectators and their screen surrogates challenged?" Phelan continues to pose questions in this vein, aiming to uncover (or recover) the lost data of the unreproducible artworks of performance and attempting to "account for what cannot be reproduced." She continues, "As those artists who have dedicated themselves to performance continually disappear and leave 'not a rack behind' it becomes increasingly imperative to find a way to remember the undocumentable, unreproducible art they made."

[Tia · Rating 4 out of 5]

First and last chapters and Afterword are most interesting! Sometimes Phelan takes certain psychoanalytic tenets as so given as to not thoroughly ground them or their relevance to a particular reading. But the ambition and elegance of the book are most useful; even where I disagree with certain arguments, they become more like places to work from rather than to jettison. Love the turn toward uncertainty in the final pages.

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

前来跪拜大神！！最后一章the ontology of performance简直了……简单犀利、清楚直接！特别有洞见地指出performance的特征，以及它和feminism，psychoanalysis, performativity的千丝万缕的联系。最让我叹服的是她articulate例子的方式，能够把一个performance piece深入浅出地讲得那样好，是我在别处从未见过的，以后我也要向老师学习如何做案例分析哇哇哇

[Clara Jeanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was challenging, stimulating, and endlessly thought provoking. Phelan does a remarkable job challenging the traditional way we have valued subjectivity and identity solely through visual representation. There is this mistaken belief that "representation," in media especially, means more political power when in reality, representation is only a moment of reality, and therefore it produces a consolidated version of reality. This has become problematic in the sense of representing minority groups as it leaves so much to be desired, it implies a certain amount of unknowableness, that can be both liberating and dooming.

She forces us to consider the age old question: What is the relationship between visibility, power, identity, and liberation??

Favorite quotes: "In the clarity of other's absence, we find ourselves."
“If representational visibility equals power, then almost-naked young white women should be running Western culture.”

[Vika Kirchenbauer · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are brilliant and lucid ideas in this book in regards to the politics of visibility that haven't lost in relevance. I have to say though that I struggled to stay generous as a reader in light of Phelan's profoundly transphobic reading of ballroom culture as portrayed in Paris is burning. The obliviously self-assured vision from which she wrote that chapter counters all of her main arguments in my opinion.

[David Blanar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very provocative ideas. My interest is much more ontological than political which may explain why I got less out of this but still the theories on performance are worth considering.

[R Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

re-reading now!