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Text and Performance Quarterly

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Treading Across Lines in the Sand:

Performing Bodies in Coalitional
Subjectivity
Kimberlee Prez & Dustin Bradley Goltz
Published online: 24 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Kimberlee Prez & Dustin Bradley Goltz (2010) Treading Across Lines in the
Sand: Performing Bodies in Coalitional Subjectivity, Text and Performance Quarterly, 30:3, 247-268,
DOI: 10.1080/10462937.2010.481797
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Text and Performance Quarterly

Vol. 30, No. 3, July 2010, pp. 247
268

Treading Across Lines in the Sand:

Performing Bodies in Coalitional
Subjectivity

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Kimberlee Perez & Dustin Bradley Goltz

For all bodies, performance can be a site to untangle and grapple with ones place within
hegemonic structures. Our bodies, the bodies of a WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY and a
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL, come to the stage to negotiate possibilities of joining our
differently situated queer subjectivities through the process of generating and performing
collaborative personal narrative. Through understanding, grounding, and interrupting
the politics of our relation we describe and assert a coalitional subjectivity that
destabilizes intact representations/memories of our own experiences. We do this as a
gesture toward reconfiguring notions of the individual as an always already relational
(and potentially coalitional) subject.
Keywords: Collaboration; Personal Narrative; Queer; Politics of Relation; Coalition
The meanings we make alongside of those we love, particularly across lines of
difference, allow us to remake our assumptions and widen our vision of the
political field. (Carrillo Rowe, Be Longing 36)
If a binational, multiracial, crossgenerational collective can in fact function in the
real world, then maybe its possible on a larger scale to sort out our differences and
cultural conflicts . . . I think thats the kind of utopian impulse that has led me to
work in a collaborative manner. (Gomez-Pena 260)

The turn in performance studies toward the personal has resulted in a significant
corpus of theory and performance text/practice that interrogates the processes,
implications, potentials, and pitfalls of performing personal narrative. Two decades
have passed since Langellier marked the political implications of attention to, and
Dustin Bradley Goltz is at DePaul University, College of Communication, 2320 N. Kenmore Ave., Chicago,
60614. Email: dgoltz@depaul.edu. Kimberlee Perez is at Arizona State University, Hugh Downs School of
Human Communication, Tempe. Email: kimberlee.perez@asu.edu. The authors/performers worked together in
the generation and revision of this essay, and would like to explicitly mark equal contributions, rather
than offering a designation of a lead author. The authors/performers would like to thank Jennifer Linde, Jason
Zingsheim, and Rae Langes for their feedback and support throughout this process.
ISSN 1046-2937 (print)/ISSN 1479-5760 (online) # 2010 National Communication Association
DOI: 10.1080/10462937.2010.481797

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248 K. Perez & D. B. Goltz

theorizing of, the narration of mundane happenings by those on the margins of

discourse (Personal 243). Personal narrative performers negotiate the tensions
within a performative struggle for agency, resistively rendering the margins of
invisibility and silence hyper-visible (Langellier, Two 129). Madisons performance
of possibilities theorizes how performers present and represent Subjects as made
and makers of meaning, symbols, and history (278). Performance theories mark
what personal narrative performance does, potentially producing alternate subjectivities among performers and audiences and imagining alternate public formations
(Langellier, Two; Madison; Mun oz, Stages).
Personal narrative performance is primarily theorized, and criticized, as situated in
a relational context between performer and audience. While critics emphasize the
self-aggrandizing dimensions of personal narratives, thus reifying a narrow focus on
the individual (Schneider; Hantzis), others emphasize the potential of relationality.
Langellier and Peterson argue that personal narrative is a co-constituted production
of self, a self in relation to other, and a communal self. Park-Fuller describes personal
narrative testimony as an artistic declaration of experience, without repentance,
despite constrictive taboos (22), that impacts both the speaker and the listeners
(23). Mun oz considers queer of color solo performers for the ways that their labor
participates in a queer worldmaking that moves in resistance to, and outside of,
violent and exclusionary heteronormative spaces (Disidentifications). Alexander
theorizes generative autobiography from the standpoint of an audience member
who, through an active and reflexive stance, constructs her/his own personal stories.
Alexanders generative autobiography underscores the centrality of relations and the
intersubjectivity inherent in the process of constructing, as well as performing and
audiencing, personal narratives. While these and other personal narrative theories
underscore the relational production and potential of performance, they centralize
the body/text of the solo performer from which an audience participates in resistance
and community.
Our paper extends personal narrative performance using Carrillo Rowes feminist
cultural theory of a politics of relation. While traditional Western theories of the
subject presume the subject is hailed through discourse in order to be recognized,
Carrillo Rowe focuses on the site of our relations, our belongings, as that which
constitutes our subjectivity (Be Longing; Power). In this papear we articulate what
we call a collaborative personal narrative, the construction of first person accounts of
history, experience, and performance process through the dialogic collaboration of
two performers. Collaborative personal narrative involves personal, relational, and
coalitional elements of narrative and performance in a non-linear temporality.
Collaborative personal narrative opens the space for collaborators to become fluent
in one anothers histories as a function of coming to a fuller awareness of our own,
and the relations that connect us (Carrillo Rowe, Power 198). Listening to one
anothers stories is a necessary part of the process of understanding across difference,
and thus the narration of self in dialogue, in discussion, in contestation, and in
collaborative relation is central to our project/process. In collaborative personal
narrative, the focus shifts from the site of the individual personal narrative to the site

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Treading Across Lines

249

of the relation between performers, the process of dialogically constructing narrations

of self and placement of personal narratives into dialogue, underscoring the stories
and the histories that bring them together and pull them apart in their relations with
one another.
The politics of any relations can become wrought with the politics of identity, and
the tensions of identity/relations are significant to our process, our performance, and
the ways our performance is audienced. Although the tensions of identity politics
intervene in the production of our notions of self and other, a politics of relation
resituates subjectivity from the social location of individuals to the relations between
them (Carrillo Rowe, Power). It is a gesture that shifts subject formation from the
individual toward the relational, and toward a coalitional subjectivity. Carrillo Rowe
theorizes the coalitional subject through a politics of relation as that which entails
understanding agency, experience, and consciousness as collective and interrelated
moments within a circuit (Power 11). The political idealism of collaborative
narrative maintains the continual process of reflection, generation, and consideration
of the politics of our relations. In generating collaborative personal narratives,
relations shift and potentially open up spaces for alternate imaginaries as we dialogue
across points that divide and bring us together. Our project conceives of collaborative
personal narrative as contributing toward the potentiality of a coalitional subject,
both between performers in relation and between performers and audiences.
Throughout the remainder of this paper, we consider collaborative personal
narrative through tracing the year-long development of our performance, Lines in
the Sand. The essay moves through the process of generating the text, an analysis of
the performance text, and an analysis of multiple performance contexts. Our
experience and reflection demonstrate the process and potentials of collaborative
personal narrative and how differing performance contexts and audiences contributed to and problematized the performance of a coalitional subject.
Talking About Performance
We never meant to perform; we set out to write an article. Some twenty years ago
Pelias and Van Oosting put forth the notion of A Paradigm for Performance
Studies. While this turn of phrase has been mobilized and often insisted on in
performance studies literature, it remains a question of contention and territory,
intention and potentiality of performance. With an interest in performance as a
critical project, we attempt an argument that renders the critical performance
paradigm redundant and interpretive performance paradigm dangerous. Our
marginal, although also privileged, queer subjectivities motivate our urgency around
performative possibilities, imaginaries, and queer futurity. An interpretive stance
lacks the necessary force that can take us there.
Although our initial inquiry was into history and the proper/ties of performance,
our detour through theory (Grossberg 138, 143) called us back to our bodies, to the
politics of our relations, and ultimately to the stage. The politics of our relations* as
co-authors, loving friends, queers, academics, collaborative and solo performers,

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250 K. Perez & D. B. Goltz

silent and screaming audiencers of one another*bring our differential intersubjectivities together over and across the boundaries of identity politics. We begin as
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY and BROWN-DYKE-GIRL. We mark ourselves in these
politicized positions to emphasize the important, yet often divisive, declarations of
identity. We cannot ever divorce ourselves completely from these strategic and stifling
identities, nor collapse or erase the different ways we inhabit history, privilege, and
space. Our identities are sutured to bodies that move through the world (and our
personal discussions) differently, invoking and contesting differing histories, politics,
and significations. Still, our queer alignment grounds our search for a politicized
us, connection along the lines of queer, race, and gender politics.
Our bodies glare out at us under abstract theories about performance, bringing us
to other, less comfortable questions: How do you feel about, and where do you stand
in relation to, the issue of Mexican immigration? BROWN-DYKE-GIRL is a second
generation bi-racial Mexican American, whose assimilated family is ambivalent about
its ancestry. WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUYs Midwestern origins brought him to the
Southwest with little connection to immigrant or Mexican American experiences.
However disparate our connections to the lived experience of immigrants, we live in a
border state where immigration rhetoric circulates fiercely from multiple standpoints,
intersecting our daily lives, encounters, and discussions, in and out of the classroom,
around university and city spaces, with our families, and with one another. Through
these experiences and reflections, coupled with critical academic and social justice
imperatives, we ground ourselves in this historical moment of Mexican immigration
as the subtext of a critical performance project.
Collaborative personal narrative begins with listening and telling, the construction
and audiencing of personal narratives. At times, we find ourselves aligned as
CRITICAL-SCHOLAR-MAN and CRITICAL-SCHOLAR-WOMAN.1 We find connections as QUEER-CHICANA and QUEER-JEW-GUY, politically positioned
through and against heterosexist/homophobic fundamentalist Christian nationalist
rhetoric. In other moments we collide against and retreat from one another as
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL and WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY, as our differently situated raced
and classed locations and mobilities come to the fore. The complexity of our relations
to one another and to these issues brings us together and pulls us apart. Flesh to flesh,
our bodies stand and our stories dialogue with and through one another in an effort
to materialize a coalitional subjectivity, an US, through a collaborative personal
narrative. Grounded in a politic of queer love and intimacy, we hold desire,
vulnerability, tension, commitment, and a trust that mirrors standing naked in front
of each other, hesitating and exposing shames, hopes, resentments and biases, despite
the fear.
Throughout the performance, we move back and forth between mediated/cultural
discourses and our own personal narratives, examining how discourses produce/
constrain our bodies, our identities, our resistances, our narratives, and our relations.
We reflect the politics of telling and listening not as discrete or polite endeavors, but
as the messy, suspicious, distant, circular, and sometimes parallel ways that we
experience them. As the performance text for Lines in the Sand is both produced by

Treading Across Lines

251

and a demonstration of collaborative personal narrative, the next section of the essay
uses the written text to highlight moments of narrating, audiencing, and interrupting
experience. As we move through the chronology of the text, we interrupt our own
narration to further flush out the implications of collaborative narrative.

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Collaborative Narrative: Performing US

A table and two chairs are downstage center. A projection screen hovers above.
BROWN-DYKE-GIRLs body is thrust onto stage, as if pushed from stage right,
wearing black pants and t-shirt. She moves center, cautious, confused as to where she
is and why she is there. WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY, also in black pants and t-shirt, struts
onstage quickly and confidently, throws one arm around BROWN-DYKE-GIRL, and
addresses the audience as game show host. He grills BROWN-DYKE-GIRL for her
position on Mexican immigration issues. BROWN-DYKE-GIRLs attempts to answer
through personal experience are interrupted aggressively by WHITE-JEW-GAYGUYs ticking clock. This introduction underscores our process, as WHITE-JEWGAY-GUYs familiarity with the stage, privileged mobility and audience engagement,
and masculine linear temporal efficiency in engaging complexity is juxtaposed against
BROWN-DYKE-GIRLs suspicion and frustrations of being interpellated into the
white, masculine rationality of academe. Her inability to answer swiftly is met with a
BOOO and WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY urges the audience to taunt her. Flustered, she
blames mediated representations, but he cuts her of, telling her she has lost the game.
Following a patronizing awwww, the performers turn from one another and move
to the downstage table.
Scene 2 (In its Entirety)
Pulled from under the table, the performers unroll spools of red ribbon, segmenting the
audience into sections, pulled tight across chests, marking crisscrossed barriers between
audience members and the audience/stage. As red-ribbon streams cut the audience
into sections, the video projects mediated depictions of brown bodies crossing the
desert, placed under arrest, and in various places of detention. A prerecorded voiceover
plays:
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: The media coverage of immigration scares me.
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL: Media coverage of immigration scares me too.
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: It makes the walls in my condo feel less secure, the
neighborhood I live in darker, more dangerous.
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL: I feel more and more like Im living in a police state.
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: Filled with seedy characters that keep me up at night.
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL: Like Im being watched when I close the door of my
classroom. When I search the internet, send an email. Check out a library book.
Kiss my girlfriend in public.

252 K. Perez & D. B. Goltz

WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: I know its a scare tactic.

BROWN-DYKE-GIRL: Immigrants dont scare me. Legislation scares me.
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: I know its supposed to make me feel unsafe*to make
me want to take up arms, sign petitions, and vote for legislation to keep those
people out.
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL: Congress scares me. The right wing, gun toting, fence
building, fundamental God-fearing Christians trying to run this country
scare me.
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: Those people.

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BROWN-DYKE-GIRL: The ones that brainwash little children into their army
for God.
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: Those people who are changing our way of life and
disrespecting the social contracts we have come to expect and defend.
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL: I see thousands upon thousands of white breeders procreating like rabbits.
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: I think of thousands and thousands of bodies, piling over
the border, running full speed, running through my streets.
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL: So they can continue the colonial mission thats been
carried out from the time of Columbus. Cortez. Christianity. Conversion.
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: Piling one after another into churches and voting booths
to protect the sanctity of their God-fearing heterosexual bore-fest.
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL: Protecting themselves from the likes of me.

The voiceover and mediated images co-constitute our initial responses to our
inceptive question to one another, How do you feel about the issue of Mexican
immigration? They represent tangled webs of personal experiences and identity
categories of BROWN-DYKE-GIRL [living in and inheriting fear, the queer object of
threat/fear, perceiving surveillance] and WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY [inheriting a fear of
immigrants from the South, threats to white spatial and legislative privilege, and fear
of a growing fundamentalist Christian heterosexist population]. The red ribbon
border interpellates the audience into our discussions as we distance ourselves from
the audience and create divisions within audience sections. Together, the images,
narratives, and red ribbon materialize the initial process of collaborative narrative and
reflect the difficulties of difference and understanding inherent in a coalitional and
alliance project.
Scene 3 opens with BROWN-DYKE-GIRL and WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY wearing
binoculars. Their bodies cross downstage center, working toward opposite corners,
moving along the perimeters, slightly crouched, side stepping to keep each other
visible at all times. Eyes locked in suspicious gazes, BROWN-DYKE-GIRL stops at the
far end of stage right and WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY mirrors her position on stage left.
Back and forth in six interrupting segments, each performer narrates childhood
experiences with race, class, gender, nation and religion. The end of one narrative

Treading Across Lines

253

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blends with the other, as each seeks to engage the audience in my story. As one
speaks, the other gazes upon the speaker through binoculars, inching closer, while
kneeling, lying belly-down and standing. The staging of suspicion, difference, and
distance is juxtaposed with the process of listening and telling personal experience,
marking our point of entry into the collaborative process.
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL: The thin walls that separated the apartments were nothing
like the walls I put up when we drove to town in our orange station wagon with no
bumper for school and church. I didnt like getting up on Sunday for church. What
I hated was the getting there, the before and after. Seeing others seeing us, hearing
them whisper. My dad stopped going. He was raised Catholic. Before they got
married my mom converted to Catholicism and after they were married they
became Lutheran but my dad was never that into it. He got excommunicated.
When we went to church it was without our dad. And people stared. Whispered.
Stage whispered. Mondays were about as fun as Sundays. Every Monday at
parochial school we would stand up and confess whether we had gone to church
the day before. It was humiliating. Recess was worse. I played by myself a lot. But it
wasnt a big school and kids are cruel. Illegal alien. Go back to Mexico. I didnt
always understand it. But I got it. And I never told anyone. I graduated from high
school and stopped going to church.
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: I have to say, as much as suburbia is a nightmare on
everyones street, theres one thing about North Shore Chicago I miss. I had the
luxury of growing up in a world where there were walls in every direction. Now
some of these walls are problematic, as Deerfield was blindingly blond peach fuzz,
blue vein visible, ass white. These are WHITE, White Jews. There was one JapaneseAmerican in my elementary school and one African American, both of whom were
adopted. I knew one black man, Mr. Brown, (that was his name) who cleaned our
house once a week. He would drive into our neighborhood during the day, in his
little orange, beat-up VW Rabbit, and I suspect that if his car lingered past
sundown, the neighborhood watch (which was like the mafia) would have cops on
his ass quicker than my father could pick up a quarter. These arent the walls I liked.
There were other walls. Im just gonna say it and then deal with the repercussions.
In Deerfield, Christians were a very small minority, and it was WONDERFUL!
Wonderful, because if there is one thing that drives me up a wall, its Christians.
Not the do as Christ does, I forgive you brother, God bless, peace be with
you Christians. Im not talking about them, or the Christians who like to get high.
Im talking about the burn in hell faggot kind of Christians, or, the love the
sinner, hate the sin, except for me because somehow my child-molesting is okay in
gods eyes kind of Christians.2 Fuck those assholes. Its a bias. I have it. Im dealing
with it. Fuckers!

Personal narrative is always recounted from a perspective, a re-presentation of a

past experience and a recreation of self (Langellier,Two). However, experience is
a contentious, inflammatory, and slippery site (Carrillo Rowe, Be Longing) and,
in personal narrative performance, we struggle through questions of how to
negotiate, receive and evaluate those texts (Gingrich-Philbrook). Whether the
representation is truthful is less of a concern than the rhetorical and relational
force of the narrative, as our recounting is always strategic and, itself, situated in
discourse (Langellier and Peterson, Shifting). The re-telling is grounded in an

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254 K. Perez & D. B. Goltz

agency that strategically positions the narrator in a particular way and orders their
relations through the telling and retelling (Langellier and Peterson, Story). In
collaborative personal narrative, narratives are generated through telling and
listening. No one narrative is privileged over the other and the dialogues among
narratives highlight the in/stability and construction of narrative representations of
experience. While each narrative stands on its own and breaks with traditions of
not speaking about these things, together in collaborative narrative they appeal to
one another, and then to the audience, for specific reasons. Rather than establish
accounts of the past, in a collaborative narrative, the narrative force remains
focused on the present and how the situated telling participates in, or inhibits, our
relations and identities.
When BROWN-DYKE-GIRL speaks the story of my body, she positions herself as
an assimilated Mexican American subject with gendered and lower classed
dimensions [Illegal alien. Go back to Mexico. I didnt always understand it. But I
got it]. Although her body passes as white, due to the politics of her relation as a
daughter to a brown Mexican American father with a Mexican surname in a German
Lutheran town, she is discursively and bodily marked as different and a non-white
racialized subject. While she may have experienced the pain and vulnerability of
rejection in the schoolyard, her narrative speaks into what many Mexican Americans
mark as the loss of those who inherit assimilation, colonial legacies, and distance
from an ancestral homeland (Calafell; Pe rez-Torres). Choosing to perform her
narrative publicly, she resists the pejorative casting of her body and recuperates her
loss in a decolonial gesture (Go mez-Pen a; L. Pe rez). While she, like others, resists and
heals through grappling with history and speaking into it (Bonin-Rodriguez;
L. Pe rez), her narrative accomplishes beyond the self. She both allows for
identification and belonging with others who occupy similar locations and places
herself in opposition to whiteness. That her passing body benefits from white
privilege is a personal and relational point of tension.
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUYs narrative places his body between intersections of
whiteness, religion, sexuality, and class. While politics of space limit his childhood
interactions with Christians and people of color, Jewish ancestry and identity
coupled with unmarked queer desires and identifications place him in opposition to
hetero/normative discourses. Although master narratives immediately produce the
contours of his white, masculine, and middle-class body within normative
belongings, being Jewish and gay propel him out. Our strategies and desires
emerge through our narratives and place us in suspicious stances toward one
another, even as we listen to one another, and simultaneously appeal for audience
attention. We discover the constrictive taboos in this collaborative space are less
about cultural racism or homophobia than about the ways they collide against
the authority, the hyper-rationality, and the politics of the academic stage we
perform on for one another. Following these narrations, we retreat, not entirely
seamlessly, but in reflexive parody, into our academic personas to find how they
might weigh in on the issue.

Treading Across Lines

255

Scene 4
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY and BROWN-DYKE-GIRL shrug their shoulders, turn away
from one another, and move downstage. Each wears a pair of black reading glasses,
pulling their bodies in tightly toward one another, sitting with erect spines. Parodying
academic performance, they nod with feigned interest, peer over glasses pushed down on
noses, yawn, nod, and stare at their own and each others navels.

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CRITICAL-SCHOLAR-MAN: As a critical scholar I believe that the mediated

images we consume present Mexican Immigrants as unwhole, unhealthy,
uncivilized, and without self-discipline, dehumanizing them while positioning
the assumed white, straight, middle-class, male American in a chair of superiority.
CRITICAL-SCHOLAR-WOMAN: As critical scholars, we must practice methodological reflexivity. Hold ourselves accountable to a community of scholars and to
the lives we represent and speak on behalf of.
CRITICAL-SCHOLAR-MAN: As critical scholars, we must contemplate the
intersectional operations of class, gender, and race. Particularly in this instance,
as race and class are dangerously conflated to evoke a sense of loss of too many
hands in the American cookie jar.

Our parody is a means to reflexively engage critical scholarship in our discussion of

Mexican immigration, yet simultaneously call out the ways these ideas are sometimes
produced in distance. Early in our process, we found ourselves performing for one
another, as well as for our own selves, the ideas and political positions we firmly hold.
Our positions were somehow uncomplicated by, removed from, the complexity of
our own experiences, thoughts, impulses, desires and fears. It was this distance, this
absence of body, which called our scholarly collaboration to the stage. Casting
ourselves as authoritative critical scholars, we sing tunes of social justice with
deceptive ease, erasing the politics of relation between scholars and the bodies from
which and about whom they theorize.
Critical scholar transitions into scene 5, a rant in which ANGRY-PRAGMATICGUY rejects postmodern and poststructuralist theories, inviting the audience to fuck
deconstruction in favor of a good old fashioned binary. The two scenes tease out
tensions between abstract theories and political mobilization. The next scene, Queer
Utopia, is a choreographed dance number wherein each performer interpellates the
other into his/her imaginary through embodying synchronized, stylized movements
from each of our pasts. These include disco, ballet, the hora, ballroom and other
stylized moves. We move back and forth with the other, upstaging, dancing alongside,
embracing and retreating. We welcome the other to play within our imaginations, yet
are always aware of the temporal and limited ways that we can fully embrace the other.
Scene 6 (In its Entirety)
QUEER-CHICANA: My queer utopia has no gays and no lesbians. No womanhating fags who cringe at pussy and no pasty pudgy vegan lesbians who snarl at the
hint of a hamburger. My utopia has tofu and spareribs, cause they both taste good.

256 K. Perez & D. B. Goltz

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And you can eat what you want . . . There will be mandatory reading of queer,
feminist, third world women of color, postcolonial and cultural theory. If this gets
you off you may do so in private or in the various reading groups in my utopia . . .
There will be spirituality, there will be all races, and there will be dancing.
QUEER-JEW-GUY: When I think back to suburban childhood, I sometimes wish I
could go back. Or make a new one! A small suburb filled with Jews, pot-smoking
Christians, atheists, and people of all religions and racial backgrounds, who are all
just Tinky-Winky queer. Throw up four walls, keep the assholes out and let us live
our lives. I believe in coalition, I do, but most coalitions dont believe in me
(awww). And the lesbians, especially the lesbians and dykes of color, must want to
slap my white cranky ass, cause at least I have the option of being narrow and
drawing lines in the sand that dont cut me immediately in half. I know it. And I
know its not right, but sometimes I just dont care. Sometimes. Aww shit, but some
of those right-wing, fundamentalist Christians are really cool. And some of those
stupid fucking assholes are so damn cute!

Having imagined our utopias with and through one another and our embodied
gestures to our pasts, we refocus upon the tensions and collisions in the politics of our
relations. Scene 7 begins with BROWN-BIRACIAL-GIRL sitting passively, staring
blankly, on a stool. WHITE-COLONIZER-GUY aggressively dresses her in a
cheerleading outfit, yanking her dreadlocks into pony tails, and smearing her face
with mascara, rouge, and red lipstick. The video projects images that narrate BROWNBIRACIAL-GIRL: Mexican food, Starbucks cups, and her cutting up and weaving
together Mexican and American flags. Her voiceover narrates the story of her family, of
her loss. The conclusion of her monologue, below, transitions into scene 8.
BROWN-BIRACIAL-GIRL: . . . My stories. My loss. Loss of history. Loss of culture.
Loss of language. Loss of identity. Loss of color. Loss. Loss. Loss.
WHITE-COLONIZER-GUY: Is it yours to lose?

Her vacant stare of passive assimilation and his aggressive makeover persona are
dropped as they make eye contact. BROWN-DYKE-GIRL, now awkwardly painted up in
cheerleading attire, glares furiously into WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUYs eyes, as his final
question and costumed remnants from the previous scene fuel the tensions of scene 8.
Scene 8
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY dresses in hockey gear, holding a hockey stick. Throughout this
scene, they move through a sequence of gendered actions. She cheerleads and he shoots
slap shots and performs aggressive hockey exercises.
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: Just because I know I dont know the right thing, but am
aware of the wrong things doesnt mean anger and fear wont take over.
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL. And while were on the subject, let me ask you about WWII,
the Holocaust*history?!?
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: I wasnt raised orthodox, It wasnt my world, it wasnt my
family, so I cant claim it as a loss. It was never mine! Yes, Im Jewish, but the

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Holocaust is no more mine than anyone elses. Im Jewish from my mother. Im a

part of the culture of Sue.
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL. Is it not yours? Do you not feel a loss? Do you not feel any
sense of connection?
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: Why are you so invested in claiming your Mexican heritage, yet you hide or downplay all the things you were raised with and around?
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL: Because it makes sense of all the shit I was raised around
and in!

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WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: Fine, but by that logic, Ive not only lost orthodox
Judaism, but Poland, and Russia, and the garden of Eden. Its like were
mourning the fucking pterodactyls!
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL: Its just about you and the now and your experience?
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: Why wont you just tell me my anger towards Christians
and my conflicted position on immigration is fucked up and problematic?
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL: Do you not feel any sense of identification?
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: I love that you hid your Starbucks cups in your car before
attending the immigration march. That makes sense to me. Its honest.
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL: So this is about honesty?
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: Maybe Im just super-white and I take care of myself first.
I dont know how to get me out of the way, and to do that seems dangerous.

While WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY does pushups, BROWN-DYKE-GIRL steps on his back,

pinning him to the floor.
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL: I love that you bitch and moan about fucking cat litter and
the neighbors kids, and how as a property owner people should have more
respect than that.
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: The contract I signed growing up is rendered
meaningless.
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL: How is it that you got to own property? Why did you
choose to live there? Why cant you go somewhere else?

BROWN-DYKE-GIRL throws down pompoms. They face one another.

WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: I want control in a world where predictability has
faded away.

WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY comes at BROWN-DYKE-GIRL with hockey stick, and engages

in a tug-of-war.
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL: I believe in coalition but I also experience the gap between
theory and practice. Im sick of talking. I want to do something. I want to talk to
someone else. I want to hang out somewhere else.

WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY angrily pushes the stick forward, releasing it to BROWNDYKE-GIRL.

258 K. Perez & D. B. Goltz

WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: Id like to believe in coalition building, but I dont. Im

better served by the logic of its the right thing to do, because it is and leave it at
that.

WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY yanks his stick back and lowers to his knees. Continuing his
exercises. BROWN-DYKE-GIRL moves behind him, looking down at him.
BROWN-DYKE-GIRL: What about a sense of longing for connection in a life that
didnt make any sense until I got theory? Do I have to be completely interpellated
into your spiritual framework and deny any sense of ancestry?

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WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY: In some ways I dont ever have to put myself in someone

elses shoes. Thats my privilege, and yet, Im so goddamn sick of being reduced
to a Caucasian penis. Yes, there is something to be learned in that, but who the
fuck are you to teach me?

Standing over him, BROWN-DYKE-GIRL grabs the hockey stick and pulls it against his
neck. The stick hovers in tension at WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUYs throat. A shift in their
bodies softens the tension after a moment. The hockey stick becomes a wall they both
cautiously peer over.
SELF-REFLEXIVE-AMERICAN-GUY: Were all cut in half. The entire discourse
cuts us in half, as so many of us are forced into this position of the enemy, the
feared. Yet, in the next discussion, we find ourselves positioned as American as if
my rights are suddenly intact, my golf course is under siege, and my only concern is
the protection of our children. They arent my children! The lines are drawn, and
we become cast, often without our approval, into a fight we never even knew
existed. Once the line is drawn, the game begins to hold it into place, to protect it.
Im supposed to feel a loss once those lines are crossed, and I do. There is a loss
when I want so badly to be 100% against a corrupt and dehumanizing campaign,
and although I speak actively against this campaign, a part of me cant help but
wonder if Ill ever be an American with rights, and if some borders will become less
permanent and some will remain fixed.

Becoming fluent in one anothers histories is neither smooth nor comfortable. We

embody these tensions in performance by morphing into gross exaggerations of our
past experiences; the hockey player fights with the cheerleader as pompoms and the
hockey stick become literal and symbolic weapons between us. In the translation of
this performance to the page, we assign essentialist, limiting, and shifting identities to
ourselves to reflect these exaggerations. Our process that begins with uninterrupted narration of self quickly moves into spaces of interrogation and questioning of
those narrations and how each positions him/herself in them. Collaborative personal
narrative shifts from the self in discourse and history, to the selves and the politics of
our relation. Talking, yelling, struggling across lines of difference we locate and sit
with the gaps between our worlds. We challenge and embrace these tensions in this
slippery politicized space of coalition*a stance that navigates the ongoing
negotiation of critique, love, and difference. In the next scene, our movement
towards the enactment of a coalitional subjectivity is embodied through a sequence of
sculptural tableaux that reference cultural historical moments of nationalist discourse
and response: whiteness and complicity [American Gothic], American imperialism

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[planting the flag at Iwo Jima], cultural revolution and resistance [Kent State
shooting], and fear that marks another wave of anti-immigrant racism and border
securing [September 11, 2001]. With the heat of the tensions and differences of the
previous scene still dripping from our bodies and shortening our breath, our bodies,
marked with difference, move together in politicized critique.
Scene 10
(American Gothic.)

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WHITE-AMERICAN-GUY: Im supposed to fear Mexican immigrants*somehow

believe I will lose something by their humane treatment.
ASSIMILATED-BROWN-GIRL: I know Im supposed to fear immigrants. Im
white, theyre brown, and I dont speak the best Spanish. When they speak they
could be speaking about me. Why cant they just speak English?

(Planting the US flag at Iwo Jima.)

MIDDLE-CLASS-GUY: Im supposed to fear lower class peoples*believe that their
presence in my world makes my world less valuable, less special, less pristine.
RACIST-GIRL: I know Im supposed to fear when I walk down the street. As a
woman I could be raped, kidnapped, and overall gazed at. By men. Especially
men with dark skin who are the real predators of women like me.

(Kent State shooting.)

PARANOID-GUY: Im supposed to fear the daily permeability of our borders, feel a
sense of entitlement to judge on this issue, and believe that there is a correct
answer that is clearly marked off from all the wrong ones.
PARANOID-GIRL: I know Im supposed to fear the sound of my own voice. People
are getting fired for saying some of the things that I say on a daily basis in my
classroom as a student and a teacher. I dont fit the model of the new American
university.

(September 11, 2001, watching the first plane.)

NATIONALIST-GUY: Im supposed to fear my own humanity*believing that only
a conservative agenda will be honest about what needs to be done, will do my
dirty work, will act efficiently, while my weakened liberal consciousness is
paralyzed with hollow empathy.
NATIONALIST-GIRL: I know Im supposed to fear as a citizen. There are all kinds
of dangers known and unknown lurking all around me. I know my government
is there to protect me, to tell me what is good for me, who I am and when its for
my own good.

In the final two scenes we cross the lines that separate us from one another and the
lines between our bodies and discourses. The following text is a voiceover that plays
as we move through the space, cutting and gathering the red ribbons that cordon off
the audience from the performers, then removing the cheerleader and hockey player
gear.

260 K. Perez & D. B. Goltz

Kimberlee: What would happen if your mobility was limited by only your
imagination?
Dusty: What if we spent our entire life traveling without declaring a space as our
home, without buying into illusions that we own land?
US: What would happen if your identity dissolved?
US: What would happen if you had no passport, if you didnt need one?
US: What if we walked around each day with the humility that we were in a foreign
place, a place where we are entitled to nothing, but smile at those who pass us by,
without the arrogant assumption of belonging, nor the entitlement to exclude?

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US: What would happen if you traveled with a stranger?

Dusty: What if the brick and wood fences dividing homes, condos, and apartments
were to fall down and the lines of property were to blur?
US: What happens when empathy stops being a choice and starts being our map?
US: What would happen if we looked at historiography instead of history?
US: What happens when we stop thinking we are entitled to our map?
US: What would happen if your narrative was exposed?
US: What if we adopted a travelers philosophy each day. How might we act or
expect differently?
Kimberlee: What would happen if the spotlight was on you?
US: What happens when we stop trying to violently protect space from being what
it is, temporal, unfixed, and unstable?
US: If the walls are an illusion, what happens if we stand on them, dance around
them, and continually walk back and forth through them? What might happen?
US: What would happen if coalition building wasnt so scary, so disappointing?
US: Why are we so invested in protecting something so flawed, without even
considering how it might change, what it could be, what potentials there are?
US: What would happen if you engaged in that reality?
US: Maybe the only way through this is the lesson in Nightmare on Elm Street. Look Freddy in the face and tell him hes shit. Face these fears head on and
muster faith in humanity even when theres no logical or rational reason to
believe in it.
US: Feeling vulnerable. Naked. Shirt pulled off. Exposed. Fear and reality of
traveling at this moment.

We move through these scenarios in and against the text of our collaborative
personal narrative to eventually strip ourselves down to our matching black t-shirts
and pants, as we stand before the pile of our unmaking.
Standing together in front of the pile of clothes, ribbon, and binoculars with hands
clasped we gaze at the things that have marked us.

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261

Dusty: The minute that line is laid down, we are all cut in half . . .
Kimberlee: . . . were never one thing.
Dusty: And if we arent, if we arent so deeply disturbed and conflicted and forced
to dig though all the selfishness . . .
Kimberlee: . . . were never one thing . . .
Dusty: . . . fear . . .
Kimberlee: . . . were never one thing. . .
Dusty: . . . and privilege we assume . . .
Kimberlee: . . . were never one thing.

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Dusty: If you dont feel that tearing you apart . . .

Kimberlee: . . . were never one thing.
Dusty: Then you, my friend, are one of those stupid fucking assholes.

Scene 12
Lights lowered. Dusty and Kimberlee intimately face one another, exploring one another
slowly through the body, as if meeting for the first time. First with right and left hands,
touching and moving up the arm toward the shoulder, the action is repeated on the other
side. Bodies lift onto toes, leaning in toward one another and collapse into one another,
heads on shoulders in a final embrace, both warm and hesitant. Their voices overlap on
the voiceover.
US: Its no longer possible to bury our heads in the illusions of suburban life, a
righteous government, the goodness of our people, and the uncomplicated threat of
others. As much as that world is the very cause of so much violence, I mourn this
too. The simplicity I felt by drawing lines, building walls, and letting soldiers I dont
know go to faraway places and fight people with no name, face, voice, or humanity.
The world was easier then. Now the hypocrisy of the ways my head is half in the
sand most of the time eats me apart, as the world, which was never easy*but was
allowed to seem easy*will never seem so uncomplicated again. I miss simplicity. I
miss illusions of community and family, and nation, and country, and the freedom
of something not being my problem. I miss not feeling sick to death of my apathy,
my hypocrisy, and yet I am all too comfortable with that hypocrisy at times, as I can
throw my hands in the air and bury my head in the sand in a single movement. I
embody and enact the problem, and its too complicated, too scary, too conflicted
to move from that paradoxical position.

(FADE LIGHTS)
Shifting Contexts: Politics of Relations and Identity
As the lights fade, our heads rest on the others shoulder, our arms wrapped around
one another. There is silence and stillness in that embrace, but we are not alone as our

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262 K. Perez & D. B. Goltz

bodies fall into one another*the audience and the spatial affect determine whether
we come together in tension and retreat, or hope and possibility. Still, whether tense,
frustrated, or celebratory, our bodies come together in trust and love. Metaphorically
and literally, we collapse the border between the audience and ourselves and construct
a narrative of our own. As Butler reminds us, the I has no story of its own that is
not also the story of a relation*or a set of relations (8). These relations, she
explains, are and should be ecstatic in ways that take us beyond and outside our focus
on ourselves. In performance, we understand that these relations are not necessarily
represented as what has been but, rather, what we might become (Mun oz, Stages).
Through collaborative personal narrative we come to no conclusions or prescriptions
about what a different future might look or feel like, but rather maintain our
attention on the ways our histories and experiences cross over, against, and through
the politics of our relations. We find our collaboration has changed us*our
relations*opening spaces for a coalitional subjectivity to emerge, maintaining the
visibility of similarity and difference in productive ways. Embraced, we long to stay
here. We wonder if we could, until applause marks the spatial and temporal
boundary, signaling an end, pulling our bodies apart into the post-performance haze
of cleaning up, breaking down, communicating with others. This is not just/only
about us. In this final section, we turn to the potentiality of coalitional subjectivity in
the politics of relations with our audiences.
Between November 2006 and March 2007 we performed Lines in the Sand four
times in three different places. The affect one experiences in live performance is
difficult to transpose in writing. However, ecstatic moments generated in
performance*currents of energy that transmit belonging, recognition, and hope*
produce beyond the spatio-temporal boundaries of a performance and into our lives
in ways that can and should be theorized for their potentiality (Mun oz, Stages).
While we embrace and experience the potentiality of imagining performance as the
site of community building and resistant worldmaking (Mun oz, Disidentifications),
we are simultaneously cautious. Joseph cautions against the seductions of community, spaces where power differentials among members sometimes override difference
in favor of a unified voice. Rather than collapsing difference (as we are US, Dusty,
Kimberlee, WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY, and BROWN-DYKE-GIRL simultaneously), the
notion of our coalitional subject in performance maintains distinctions in dialogue,
recognizing the heterogeneity of the collective of performer/s and audience members.
The specificity of each performance site is important in the discussion of enacting a
coalitional subject through our collaborative personal narrative. Space is an active
component of producing subjectivity; it is more than the context or background of
an event (Carrillo Rowe, Whos). The spectres of historical and contemporary
discourses move through spaces and inform the relations within them (Massey). Our
performances of Lines in the Sand took place at an annual experimental theatre
festival, an academic conference, and a university theater. The first of these
performances, Teatro Caliante festival, solicits and encourages experimental
performance. The audience ranges from performance artists to academics and local
residents and the festival tends to attract audiences that espouse radical politics.

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When we take the stage, the small, crowded space spills over with the inviting affect of
previous performers and a rowdy emcee. The audience is playful and generous, quick
to participate with WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY in booing BROWN-DYKE-GIRL. Their
collective energy coupled with their interactivity infuses us with a reciprocal
spontaneity with audience, and with one another.
The audiences energized laughter to the critical scholar parody heightens the
ecstatic tension as ANGRY-PRAGMATIC-GUY jumps on top of the table, screams
Fuck deconstruction and rallies the audience into a spirited frenzy. One by one, he
lists oppressive binary structures that work to marginalize people along racial,
economic, sex, gender, sexuality, and ideological logics. He offers, in jest, the rightwing, fundamentalist Christian stupid fucking assholes/ everyone else binary system
as his political solution for the radical left to rally around. The audience and ANGRYSCHOLAR-WOMAN hoot, holler, and scream along with ANGRY-PRAGMATICGUY, seeming to take part in the celebration, mockery, and generative affect. In
performing our queer utopias, audience members disrupt the flow of the monologues
with clapping, yells of support, and identifications through laughter. We interpret this
reaction as a temporal moment where at least some audience members voices and
affect enter into our relational politic. At the end of QUEER-CHICANAS utopia, she
falls into QUEER-JEW-GUYS arms in a choreographed dip. In an ecstatic and
spontaneous moment, spurred on by the energy of one another and the crowd, they
break from the script and share a full kiss on the mouth. It is a moment of queer
intimacy that interrupts the rehearsed performance*one of those unpredictable
performance moments that, in its spontaneity, calls forth an impulse we could not
have expected, blocked, or rehearsed. It felt good.
The entire performance maintains this rousing level of give and take with the
audience, as our collaborative personal narrative seems to spill beyond the politics of
our relations and into the coalitional subjectivity of a fully activated space. We made
connections with audience members during and after the performance. Some
relations we sustain and others dissipate, intact for one night only. The temporary
connection we felt was very real for us. It was a moment in which we might imagine
the force of the performance to enact a performative utopia and temporary
coalitional subjectivity. Of course, there were audience members that we might not
have connected with, that we will never speak to, that we might have read wrong. Our
individual, collective, and relational knowledge will always be partial and limited in
its understandings of that heterogeneous space. Perhaps that is the danger and risk in
any performance and subsequent discussions. Discrete moments are experienced and
imagined and then moved forward in ways that we might never repeat, undo, or even
understand. Yet our discussions between each other, some audience members, in our
writing, and now with you, dear readers, urge us to peer into this and other
coalitional potentialities of performance.
Moving from the theatre festival into an academic conference, we are reminded
how performance presents a site where meanings are negotiated and contested. At
eight oclock in the morning on the final day of the conference, we experience a shift
in the audience dynamic. End of the conference drowsiness coupled with the

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264 K. Perez & D. B. Goltz

academic framing and undertones we often locate in formal conference settings

produce a different kind of performing, audiencing and feeling. In a temporarily
transformed hotel conference room with fluorescent lighting, we emerge from our
performance of critical scholar parody and our final momentary embrace into
academic performances, performances with which our audience members (and we)
are fluent. The politics of our relation in this site appear mired in the politics of
identity, our return perhaps into the site where the force of identity politics
circulate fiercely and differently than in the public sphere (Alcoff). Our postperformance communications gloss over Mexican immigration, our navigation
through identity politics, and the coalitional politic we seek to embody. Rather, the
discussions we engage in continually fixate and return to the tensions and concerns
surrounding the positioning of our bodies. The focus tacks back and forth between
the eroticization of queer bodies in queer intimacy, their incompatibility to complete
heteronormative coupling, and the ways in which our gendered bodies move with
and against one another in the physical power differentials between men and women.
Although Kimberlees height matches Dustys, in discussions there is an emphasis on
her in opposition to him. In this academic setting, the politics of our relation and our
bodies are mapped with the politics of identity, fixating on relational difference, and
leading us to trouble the seamlessness of actualizing coalitional subjectivity.
Recall in our collaborative narrative where you see the phenotype of Kimberlees
body reaping the privileges of whiteness*even as those privileges are harnessed in an
attempt to disrupt them. Our collaborative narrative marks that body as a politically,
historically, and affectively charged brown body even though it looks white. That
brown-white body placed next to Dustys white-male body, we are told by some
audience members, invokes a political tension that fixes these bodies in opposition to
one another, with his in dominance over hers. Rather than a continuance of the ecstatic
feelings in the theatre festival, which again did include academics, here the politics of
our relations emphasize difference and opposition that complicate the intimate
politics of relation that we attempt to enact through our collaborative narrative.
We felt a similar dynamic emerge at the third site of this performance, within a
university theatre for two consecutive evenings, consisting primarily of our colleagues
and students. While some audience members appear to participate in our imaginary
for a queer worldmaking, navigating the gendered and racial obstacles necessary for
doing so, multiple audience members in post-show discussion recuperate the politics
of our relations through the identity politics assigned to each of our bodies. In this
setting, we experience identity politics working to discipline our bodies into their
expected roles, actively working against and erasing the coalitional subjectivity we
attempt to enact. There is no discussion of an us, yet impassioned critique of her
physical relation to him. Words such as man, woman, gay, lesbian, white,
brown, patriarchy, and hegemony work to discipline and shame us back to
opposing corners of the space.
Within academic settings, and particularly within critical academic discussions, it
is not surprising to find steadfast commitments to the labeling and enforcement of
identity politics. In our own process, we repeatedly fall back upon and invoke them,

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even as we seek to work through them. Our conception of coalitional work is nonlinear, wrought with tensions, shifts, and complications. Although we assert, we are
never one thing, rejecting the false ontological foundations of essential identities,
systemic critical scholarship is steeped in these very real fictions. We do not let these
fictions go without suspicion, trust, love, and process. How could we expect less from
our audiences, as unique audience positionalities will always generate unintended
departures (Alexander)? However, strict adherence to a politics of social location and
politics of identity constrain the politics of relation we seek to potentialize through
our coalitional subjectivity. Within this tension, performance emerges as a potential
site to resist and extend the limitations of written scholarship through embodied
practice and engagement. This potential, however, is contingent upon a process of
trust, questioning, uncertainty, and messiness that defines coalitional work, as we ask
audiences to engage our bodies in the ways we work to engage one another. We ask
them to be silent and screaming audiencers of our stories and our bodies, while
moving to uneasy locations between our bodies and our stories, entering liminal
spaces where we are moving together and pulling apart. As we worked together in this
process for over a year, with much contest and with a deep love for one another, we
realize we ask a lot of an audience in 35 minutes. Perhaps, we ask too much. As we
gesture beyond our collaborative personal narrative into our performance of queer
imaginaries, we hesitate to prescribe, to determine the effects of this work beyond our
intentions.
Walking off the stage, audience members are quick to locate his words from
her words, his body from her body, while those same bodies are still damp
from the sweat of the other. Pulled apart, in discrete moments in dialogue with
individuals, lines are quickly erected, as we listen to words that map the politics of
our relations in line with the discourses we hope to collapse and cross. We feel one
another from across the space, aware this physical distance mirrors our physical
separation at the top of the performance. We entered this performance/process on
opposite sides of the stage, peering through binoculars, foreign to one another.
Constructed as BROWN-DYKE-GIRL and WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY, we feel that
distance again. Which words are hers and which are his? Who is writing now, his
body and her body? We never meant to perform, but we have. Now, we cannot help
but wonder, what if we stayed there, at the close, bodies enmeshed with one another?
Regardless of audience, applause, or lights, what if we stayed in our embrace, in that
place of politics, possibility, and pleasure? We wonder if we could.
In the festival setting, our relations feel honored and celebrated, yet in other
contexts they instigate contention. In these contested spaces, as audience members
voice their own suspicions, hesitations, and tensions that emerge through our
coalitional gesture, we too struggle. We feel their pull. At times we fail to speak what
the other desires in that moment, and we break away from one another in
disappointment. Inviting an audience into this process, into us, complicates and
challenges our relations. While we know we will be pulled apart, or choose to step
away from one another, we trust that these lines are temporal, impermanent, and
sometimes necessary. In the enactment of a coalitional subjectivity through

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266 K. Perez & D. B. Goltz

collaborative narrative we remain grounded in and committed to the politics of love

that works to bring us together in relation and in performance. As Carrillo Rowe
argues, we too easily assume that whom we love is not political, is not something
that we choose, is not a function of power (Power 1). What we create with audiences
is no less tangible, yet without the grounding of our process, the relationships of our
bodies on stage remain open to interpretation and meaning making. How our
utopian gesture is more or less engaged or rejected remains dependant on context,
interpretations, and situated audiencing. For some, it seems quite clear; the
enactment of coalitional subjectivity between a BROWN-DYKE-GIRL and a
WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY remains steeped in concern, fear, and hesitation. We
experienced, and continue to experience, these feelings as well, yet remain committed
to the potentials of this project. Like Madison, we are not so nave as to believe one
performance can rain down a revolution yet we still hold onto the belief that one
performance can be revolutionary in enlightening citizens to the possibilities that
grate against injustice (280). Madison suggests that a performance that moves us
towards enlightened and involved citizenship must move to intersubjectivity
relative to the audience (281). In this essay, we articulate how collaborative personal
narrative potentializes a coalitional subjectivity. Was our performance beautiful,
political, or compelling enough to inspire an audience to travel with us, or did they
remain at the margins of [our] meeting? (Madison 282). Perhaps both, and maybe
for some it fell somewhere in between, off to the side, or in non-linear directions we
may never know. Yet the us that we experienced through creating and performing
the work, the us that stands in coalition before (and perhaps with) an audience as
witness to each other did travel with and through one another in ways that both
accentuated and calmed the fears, hesitations, and concerns of placing ourselves into
intimate relation. We look to critical performance for the necessary force to open up
spaces of possibilities, imaginaries, and queer futurity. The potentiality of performance holds both pain and pleasure, as we explore yet-to-be-known relations
between texts, performers, and audiences through critical performative engagement.
Grounded in the politics of these relations and our relations, always propelling us
into unknowns, we take this risk.
Notes
[1]

As a textualizing strategy for this performance, how we label ourselves within the script and
the discussion is continually shifting. Although we are always playing variations of ourselves,
Dusty and Kimberlee, the staged performance forefronts differing elements of our identities,
both in relation to broader discourses of identity and to each other. We begin the
performance as BROWN-DYKE-GIRL and WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY, and at times we retreat
to these identities. In other moments, we share identification through labels such as queer,
critical scholar, or nationalist, or emotions such as angry or paranoid. We have made
the choice of gendering each name, however, to offer clarity to the reader, but also to reflect
the ways several audience members report audiencing the performance (commenting on a
male body next to a female body). While gendered (except for the sections where we speak as
US), our names are always in flux, mirroring the ways our staged narratives and the staging

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267

of our bodies in relation to one another alter and forefront different facets of our negotiated
identities.
Within the text of Lines in the Sand, we continually play with undifferentiated and
problematic identity categories to render hyper-visible the dangers and violences they
reproduce. In the times when we self-label (white, female, gay, etc . . . ) or when we critique
mediated discourse (Mexican, immigrants, etc. . . . ), these categories are intended to call
attention to their shortcomings. However, the use of the category of Christian in the piece
is invoked, in several instances, in a vilified construction. In our earliest performances, the
unqualified label of Christian or even Christian-stupid-fucking-asshole, was meant to
parallel and critique the ways homophobic discourse uses gay, fag, sinner, sodomite,
and dyke in similar demonized ways. In latter performances, after reflecting upon this
choice, we have experimented with qualifying the label (ex: right-wing homophobic
Christians) or changed the label altogether (ex: stupid-fucking-we-use-God,-race,-andgender-to-justify-our-hate-assholes). In the sections of the script where the category of
Christian is not already qualified or complicated within the original text, we have changed
the wording to right-wing, fundamentalist Christians.

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