Bodies That Matter Backstage

Backstage at Deathwatch, I felt a rearticulation beginning in the vocabularies of everyone there.

Image credits: Margot Roberts

In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler tells us about the geography of the city of bodily life – a city with strict borders. Inside the city, live the subjects; glittering, mattering. Outside the city are those who live under the sign of the unlivable. Queer people know what it’s like to live there. Queer people know what it’s like to have their bodies not matter.

A few weeks ago, I got to spend time backstage with the cast of the Dramatic Society’s new show, a drag production of Jean Genet’s Deathwatch. The Cellar Theatre became a place where bodies can be constructed and created, where abjected and delegitimated bodies truly count as bodies. Rolls of binding tape were brought out, eyeshadow and bronzer became beards, contour was blended, gender was blurred. Every corner was bursting with laughter and love and care. A new city was being built — maybe a small one, maybe for just a night, but one that will live on in the memories of those who were there to live in it.

Taylor Barrett Fair, who plays The Guard, talked to me about how she views drag and camp as “the modern brand of absurdism, of taking things to their absolute extremes,” and how a drag adaptation of a play that “so heavily deals with male power dynamics” adds a “very potent layer of subtext”. It’s true, and it made me return again to Butler. They write about how the body, “its contours, its movements” are “fully material, but materiality will be rethought as the effect of power, as power's most productive effect.” In Deathwatch, this cast is able to make material that which has been rendered immaterial; they are able to take back power. They are also, of course, able to mine the richly absurd construct of gender for everything it’s worth.

Deathwatch, as Assistant Director Jasmine Jenkins shared with me, is a satirical and homoerotic look at “masculinity and machismo” inspired by Jean Genet’s personal experience in French jails. Genet himself was gay, and wrote in the text of the play that it “unfolds as in a dream”. This play gestures to the unreality of gender, and how the regulatory practices surrounding gendered ideals are backed by logic that could only hold up in a dream, or some sort of shared, agreed upon, enforced hallucination. 

I often think about the questions raised in Bodies That Matter. Butler asks us: “What challenge does that excluded and abjected realm produce to a symbolic hegemony that might force a radical rearticulation of what qualifies as bodies that matter, ways of living that count as 'life', lives worth protecting, lives worth saving, lives worth grieving?” Backstage at Deathwatch, I felt a rearticulation beginning in the vocabularies of everyone there. Backstage there was unquestioning confidence that our ways of living count as life. Backstage, our bodies mattered. 

Above Judith Butler quotes taken from Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of Sex.