Mousse #91

The abuse of power comes as no surprise. Nor does its performance. In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt describes the public sphere as a space of appearance, where humans join “in the manner of speech and action. . . . Wherever people are gathered together, it is potentially there, not necessarily and not forever.” Power, she argues, arises from performative speeches and actions. “Performativity has something to do with ‘saying’ something that ‘does’ something. Given our currently dire political situation, reconsidering the term right now begs questions such as: What can deploying the term ‘performativity’ do for us today?” This is a question Amelia Jones asks in her essay here on queer feminist literary theorist and critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Jones retraces six decades of the use of this word, and analyzes its progressive public weakening up to the “collapse of meaning into a black hole of artifice.”

This issue delves into the performative and its many open-ended possibilities and embodiments, including those of our hybrid spectatorships. In the Survey, we focus on the 1990s and early 2000s practice of duo Lovett/Codagnone, who radically addressed normativity and relationality (love as a political space) by consistently disrupting power structures through performances intended as “intimate and interpersonal struggles as well as issues of citizenship and state control—as a way to chronicle subcultures and work against their erasure and commodification,” explains longtime friend and collaborator Julie Tolentino.

published by Mousse Publishing
2025, 248 pages, 23,5 x 32 cm