Formulating Affinities and Defiances through Discomfort
This artifact is a video recording of a performance reading given by Kathy Acker at the Montréal bar Foufounes Électriques in 1986. I frame Acker’s rendition as a performance reading to highlight that both the moment of talk before and the period of reading itself are forms of performance—gender and artistic ones respectively. Both are instances of negotiation between Acker’s avant-garde aesthetic of shock and the audience who consented to the reading but maybe not to all its content. Their vulnerability to each other—Acker to the crowd’s disruptions and the audience to Acker’s violent text—are at play in this event. In this recording, Acker is reading excerpts from her then upcoming novel Empire of the Senseless. Her performance is marginal within the frame of literary readings where poetry has received more critical attention and where a lively delivery is understood as interfering with the text (MacArthur 43). A “neutral” style of reading, characterized by sameness of tone and resembling Judeo-Christian services, has thus become the default in academic readings (39, 42), obscuring the fact that reading out loud, and neutrality itself, are already performances.
In Acker’s animated performance reading, where her voice and facial expressions heighten the novel’s plot, threads of gender performance weave together. Acker performs different gender characteristics to negotiate the distance between her gender identity and social expectations regarding femininity. Like in performances of drag, with which Judith Butler develops their concept of gender performativity, Acker plays with the non-correspondence between biological sex, gender identity, and gender performance to refuse patriarchal structures of power dependent on a hierarchized gender binary and mandatory heterosexuality.
As Acker begins her introduction, she is interrupted by a member of the audience who tells her that she has a “nice diction.” At first, Acker doesn’t understand and makes him repeat several times. She uses a higher pitch to perform femininity and gentleness, encouraging her interlocutor. The video shows her adopting a bent posture, bringing her shoulders to the front in a gesture of compliance while also sending her head backward and sideways to signify both her openness to the question and her active attempt to understand it. When other members of the crowd intervene and Acker finally understands the comment, she first responds by being polite: “Oh, thank you sir, yeah.” While answering she curtsies: bending her knees and extending her arms as if holding the sides of a long dress, thus reproducing the traditional gendered gesture of greeting. While performing this movement, Acker also makes a comic sound by pinching her bottom lip with her front teeth and sucking in a bit of air. She then uses a lower pitch, speaks louder and very distinctly, even spelling out the title of the section she will be reading: “This is called Male, M.A.L.E.” While spelling, she seems to be directing her sharp gaze towards the man who just “complimented” her. She then redirects her attention to the pages she is holding as her face goes through a series of light spasms during which she blinks vigorously.
While I would not consider the man making this comment to be a heckler since his interruption happens when Acker is interacting with the audience, his comment disrupts Acker’s gender performance and constitutes her as a feminine subject. Her early reaction is one of compliance with this attribution, yet she re-establishes her rejection of a simple gender binary when she parodies femininity by mimicking a curtsy while producing a funny noise that frustrates standards of politeness and bienséance. She also mocks masculinity by performing authority in speaking loudly and distinctly while looking disapprovingly to the man who made the comment.
Acker’s vulnerability to the audience’s comments mirrors the audience’s vulnerability to the violence of her text. While it is possible for readers to close a book that shocks them (Ioanes 183), listening to a performance in a collective space renders the audience more “captive” (MacArthur 42). When analyzing how readers may negotiate their consent in relation with the violence in Acker’s texts, Anna Ioanes argues that her avant-garde aesthetic is designed to shock audiences to create varied responses such as emotional and critical engagement, identification and distance, joy and rage (176–77). This aesthetic of shock allows Acker, according to Ioanes, to prompt her “feminist readers to reflect on the complex nature of consent and subsequently to think and feel the violation of shock alongside pleasure, absorption, and recognition” (193). However, during her performance reading at the Foufounes Électriques, the author is not exclusively in the presence of feminist listeners engaged in situated and self-reflexive listening. Her performance is not a conversion to feminist thinking but rather an experience of both enjoyment and discomfort which might lead to further reflections (Ioanes 177, MacArthur 42).
Members of the audience are negotiating their shock through non-verbal forms of engagement such as laughter, sometimes accompanying moments of sexual violence in the text, and the noisy manipulation of objects. Sianne Ngai maintains that laughter and boredom—which could be signalled by the manipulation of objects creating noise—bring us “to ask what ways of responding our culture makes available to us, and under what conditions” (262). Producing noise might be a way for auditors to anchor themselves back in their body through tactile and auditory stimulation, to create a distance with the verbal performance, and to produce a counter discourse. Noise can challenge Acker’s authority as a speaker talking to a silent audience. I believe this is an effect that her performance wishes to provoke through shock. Acker’s performance neither invites a silent crowd (such as the passive audience of academic poetry readings) nor a completely supportive one (like the Beats’ friendly and evangelical-like auditory) (MacArthur 56). The dynamic between Acker and her audience is neither framed by formalism nor facilitated by friendship. Yet it is maybe in this situation of discomfort that both audience and speaker are brought to formulate questions and weave affinities.
Works Cited
Acker, Kathy. Empire of the Senseless. 1988. Grove Press, 2018.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble, 1990, 2nd Edition, Routledge, 1999.
Ioanes, Anna. “Shock and Consent in a Feminist Avant-Garde Kathleen Hanna Reads Kathy
—. Acker.” Signs, vol. 42, no. 1, 2016, pp. 175–97.
MacArthur, Marit J. “Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies.” PMLA,
—. vol. 131, no. 1, 2016, pp. 38–63.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings, Harvard University Press, 2009.
| Time | Annotation | Layer |
|---|---|---|
| 0:14 | Acker speaking away from the microphone: "This is Thivai speaking and it's just like of course a female it's not a male woman (inaudible) female (inaudible) female (inaudible)." | Acker speaking |
| 0:22 | In the microphone: "What?" | Acker speaking |
| 0:24 | "A what?" | Acker speaking |
| 0:26 | "Who?" | Acker speaking |
| 0:28 | "A nice fiction?" | Acker speaking |
| 0:31 | "Oh, thank you sir, yeah." | Acker speaking |
| 0:34 | "All right, this's called 'Male': M.A.L.E." | Acker speaking |
| 0:37 | "This is Thivai's talking." | Acker speaking |
| 0:41 | "And just to portrait Thivai so not worry about that now it's all environmental." | Acker speaking |
| 18:36 | "Thank you" | Acker speaking |
| 0:09 | "More!" | Audience |
| 0:10 | "Moi aussi je pensais que c'était de la poésie." | Audience |
| 0:21 | "You have a very nice ... you have a very nice diction." | Audience |
| 0:25 | "well" | Audience |
| 0:26 | "You have a nice diction!" | Audience |
| 0:29 | "You read very well!" | Audience |
| 0:29 | "You read well!" | Audience |
| 0:32 | Laughs and murmurs | Audience |
| 1:16 | "Nah NAH" | Audience |
| 2:00 | Cough | Audience |
| 2:17 | Laugh | Audience |
| 2:23 | Intermittent laugh | Audience |
| 2:39 | Murmur and shuffling | Audience |
| 3:05 | Laugh | Audience |
| 3:10 | Laugh | Audience |
| 3:17 | Laugh | Audience |
| 3:34 | Laugh | Audience |
| 4:27 | Laugh | Audience |
| 4:43 | Laughs | Audience |
| 4:49 | Cough | Audience |
| 4:56 | Laughs | Audience |
| 5:03 | Murmur | Audience |
| 5:08 | Laughs | Audience |
| 5:19 | Laughs, murmur | Audience |
| 6:07 | Laughs | Audience |
| 7:03 | Murmur | Audience |
| 9:46 | Cough | Audience |
| 10:57 | Soft shout | Audience |
| 11:45 | Murmur | Audience |
| 12:34 | Laugh | Audience |
| 12:54 | Laugh | Audience |
| 14:08 | Murmur | Audience |
| 14:52 | Cough | Audience |
| 17:00 | Murmur | Audience |
| 17:11 | Sneeze | Audience |
| 17:26 | Cough | Audience |
| 17:31 | Cough | Audience |
| 18:22 | Laugh | Audience |
| 18:36 | Applause | Audience |
| 0:01 | Noises from the rooms: cracks, soft voices | Environment |
| 0:54 | Throbbing sound | Environment |
| 1:06 | Knocking sound | Environment |
| 1:20 | Sound of a plastic cup or a ball bouncing on a table near the camera | Environment |
| 1:25 | Metallic sound of an object bouncing | Environment |
| 2:06 | Metallic sound | Environment |
| 2:10 | Soft knocking on a wooden table | Environment |
| 2:15 | Short metallic sound | Environment |
| 2:58 | Hollow sound | Environment |
| 12:22 | Throbbing sound | Environment |
| 12:47 | Subtle knocking sound | Environment |
| 13:44 | Metallic sound | Environment |
| 14:11 | Squeaking sound | Environment |
| 17:11 | Click | Environment |
| 0:38 | Reading from Empire of the Senseless, Chapter II. "Raise Us From the Dead," (Thivai speaks), Male. | Acker reading |
| 0:40 | As long as I can remember... | Acker reading |
| 0:45 | As long as I can remember, I've wanted to be a pirate. As long as I can remember, I've wanted to sail the navy seas. As long as I can remember wanting, I've wanted to slaughter other humans and to watch the emerging of their blood. | Acker reading |
| 1:01 | Insofar as I know myself, I don't know either the origin or the cause of my wants. | Acker reading |
| 1:08 | It was a dark night for pirates. | Acker reading |
| 1:12 | Winter had approached all of us on the ship. One night whose beginning was death, three pirates squatting on the deck just like fat cunts or pigs held a consultation which lingered, like death, without becoming anything else. For one human they had taken during their last battle remained bound and gagged near the bowsprit. Their discussion became more confused, then too confused, at least for the victim who could still hear; the pirates had become increasingly drunk. A fat slob waddled over to the victim who was a child and raped her again. | Acker reading |
| 1:59 | She didn't struggle as the other two did the same. | Acker reading |
| 2:01 | ‘Afterwards, I'd like to do it to you,’ the first pirate turned to the second pirate. | Acker reading |
| 2:07 | ‘No. I'm younger than you, so it's possible for me to have a child. I don't want one. Just cause it's safe for you...’ | Acker reading |
| 2:14 | ‘Not if I do it in your asshole. In your asshole, you're safe.’ | Acker reading |
| 2:18 | ‘Just stop what you're doing. Above all I don't wanna be pregnant!’ | Acker reading |
| 2:22 | ‘You don't believe me. You don't trust…’ | Acker reading |
| 2:24 | ‘No.’ The second one explained: ‘Why should I trust you? You just tell me why I should trust you? You tell me why I should trust you who can't get pregnant not to make me pregnant.’ | Acker reading |
| 2:36 | The third pirate came in his pants. A round stain showed. | Acker reading |
| 2:41 | ‘Don't you believe I can fuck you and not make babies?’ | Acker reading |
| 2:57 | Fatty replied ‘I promise’ since he never meant anything by these words. ‘But you're gonna spread yourself for me now. Otherwise I want that thin trigger that thin cock you're showing me so much, I'll cut off your head to get at it.’ Among themselves, also, pirates’re very murderous. ‘But after I come, when you're dead, then you can do whatever you want.’ | Acker reading |
| 3:22 | Fatty dove in, ground and pounded his cock up into the so tight it was almost impenetrable asshole. He pound and ground until the brat started wiggling; then thrust hard. Thrust fast. Living backbone. Jewel at top of hole. The asshole opened involuntarily. The kid screeched like nerves. After a while the kid felt Fatty become still. After a few more minutes he asked Fatty if he had come. | Acker reading |
| 3:57 | ‘Shut up. Shut. Up.’ As it dropped out the final bit of sperm enflamed the top of his cockhole. | Acker reading |
| 4:07 | Barely mumbling ‘Now it's time for me now it's time for what I want’, the pirate who had just been fucked bent over the child tightly bound in ropes, already raped. His hands reached for her breasts. While sperm which resembled mutilated oysters dropped out of his asshole, he touched the breasts. | Acker reading |
| 4:29 | The three pirates turned away from the child. They went back to their work of gnawing and gorging themselves on Nestle’s almonds, Cadbury chocolate flakes, barbecue tortilla chips, green benas, toffeed vanilla, Lucozade, and Mars bars. They guzzled down can after can of swill. | Acker reading |
| 4:49 | The Captain, me, walked out on deck. ‘What a group of pigs! Didn't all of your teachers in all the nice boarding schools you went to, which you never talk about, didn't they teach you about nutrition?’ | Acker reading |
| 5:08 | ‘This ship isn't a public school,’ Fatty blurted out through showers a Coca-Cola mixed with beer. ‘This shit is a pirate ship. And this is a philanthropic association.’ | Acker reading |
| 5:20 | ‘Sure,’ Captain Thivai, me, sneered. ‘I'm a sweet socialist government so I'm paying you to sit on your asses in the sun and get suntanned just that so that you are so happy you will not revolt against my economic fascism.’ | Acker reading |
| 5:39 | Fatty dared to oppose me. ‘No way. This ship is our philanthropic association, our place of safety, our baby crib. Since they have enough dough to be our charity donors, all the people outside it, all the people outside us here, are our enemies. | Acker reading |
| 6:00 | ‘Since we live on this ship, we're orphans. Orphans are dumb and stupid.’ Fatty was epileptic. ‘Since we're stupid, we don't know how to conduct ourselves in decent monied society, and we kill people for no reason.’ | Acker reading |
| 6:13 | ‘Historically, weren't some of the most violent political murderers,’ the punk added, ‘aristocrats?’ | Acker reading |
| 6:20 | ‘Do all of you have parents?’ I asked my crew, for I was astounded. ‘Do you generally come from good backgrounds?’ | Acker reading |
| 6:30 | ‘How can I answer a generality? So how can I answer any question?’ Fatty obviously came from a superior background. | Acker reading |
| 6:39 | ‘Do you,’ pointing my finger at the youngest therefore the weakest of the lot, ‘do you, personally, have parents?’ | Acker reading |
| 6:48 | ‘I don't have parents.’ ‘Me neither.’ ‘Him also?’ ‘No one.’ ‘None.’ ‘No one has nothing anymore.’ | Acker reading |
| 6:59 | ‘Then who did you come out of and where'd you come from?’ I wasn't gonna be fooled by the scum. | Acker reading |
| 7:06 | ‘That's our business. Each one of us.’ | Acker reading |
| 7:08 | The English pirate answered, ‘We're not used to discussing our private affairs. It's not your business on whom we piss.’ | Acker reading |
| 7:15 | I had to agree with the English, for it was necessary for me to trust my crew about whom I knew nothing except that they were not the scum of the earth, they were the scum of the now scum-filled seas. | Acker reading |
| 7:28 | And the next day, when the ship stopped near a shore in which a bordello was stretching out its claws, I jumped ship. A cock cried on the top of a hill. Rooster's red crest jumped through the weighted-down grasses. A guard and his heavy gun descended. I hid from him. | Acker reading |
| 7:51 | Where there were buildings huge trees had showered dew onto the red roofs. My fear dried up my throat. My hands lay over my stomach for protection. The sun… Fear disintegrated my throat… Stunned… | Acker reading |
| 8:14 | I woke. I was no longer free. Words woke me. ‘It's me, Xaintrilles. This morning the General Staff will interrogate you. Good luck’n all that. I'm leaving for Ait Saada.’ | Acker reading |
| 8:30 | I didn't speak. | Acker reading |
| 8:32 | Xaintrilles squatted down on his haunches and looked at the bars. He saw a young man spread flat on the floor, still, his knees apart, a sackcloth jacket only over part of his stomach. | Acker reading |
| 8:49 | ‘Thivai, aren't you listening to me? Maybe you can't hear anymore?’ | Acker reading |
| 8:55 | I recognized despair enough to open my senses only inside me. Lice gnawed my cropped head. Xaintrilles carried this body inside, chafed hands and knees. | Acker reading |
| 9:11 | In the deep river firemen and convoy soldiers washed themselves. Mud scintillated around the decaying bath-house. | Acker reading |
| 9:19 | I lovingly rubbed my skull, the light wounds the hair chopper had made. ‘Shave me. To the flesh,’ I said. | Acker reading |
| 9:29 | The gentle hair-cutter, as soon as his officer had left, positioned the straight razor at the front of the forehead. | Acker reading |
| 9:36 | ‘Thivai, I can't. There's not enough left.’ | Acker reading |
| 9:40 | Upon returning, the officer looked at the prisoner and ordered the barber to shave him totally. | Acker reading |
| 10:12 | As they were cut, they brushed by the ears, the holes of the nostrils, caught in the eyebrows, mommy, I only went the hairdresser to cut off a lock of hair, my matchstick, mommy's sitting in the armchair, mommy's holding my knee, mommy's picking up a magazine, mommy puts it on her knees. Véronique’s behind the mirror. | Acker reading |
| 10:36 | Véronique stands upright. Then the hairdresser pushes her down while Véronique makes signs which the mirror reflects. The cut hairs brush past the beehive I've hidden in my shirt; mommy leaves, forgetting her purse. She walks through the rain along the river. Am I dreaming? The haircutter looks around him, he puts his hand on the hot flannel of my pants, his hand climbs up my thigh, I look at Véronique. | Acker reading |
| 11:00 | It's she who's raping me it's she who's touching me, mommy's screaming out loud and crying in the rain. Dock workers drag barbed wire sheets through the slush. Mommy bites her soaked scarf. The haircutter's hand sinks between my knees; again I push it away; his other hand travels down my stomach; my knees hit the marble washbasin which nevertheless maintains its balance; the haircutter's hand rest openly on my obviously palpitating stomach. The hairdresser looks behind him. | Acker reading |
| 11:45 | Under the door, mommy's drying her shoes. She enters the room. Night fell. Her wet hands hold my small ones, I fall into the armchair; mommy pays the hairdresser; he presses me against the door. | Acker reading |
| 12:04 | Mommy drags me out, down black streets until we reach the river. The dock workers’re trying to warn themselves by standing as close as possible to a fire made out of charcoal dust. Mommy, holding me in her arms, jumps into the thicker mist. She mounts the jetty and runs over the rocks. Snow is covering the rocks. I try to writhe myself away, but she's pressing me into her hips. | Acker reading |
| 12:33 | So I bite her hand, while a tug-boat whose bright port dead-lights are throwing glimmers on a black oily sea, moves down the estuary; mommy throws herself,…, I bite her hand, as her arms let go, I fall down the rocks, rolling down the rocks, mommy falls into the sea my mother's suicide, the foam finds and recovers her, I twist my body round towards the rocks. There a wave carries my mother's head. Her palms slide along a sleek, slightly glittering rock. The tug-boat bears the other way, then stops; a sailor runs on to a bridge; he unfastens a yawl, runs back on board; they row to the jetty. | Acker reading |
| 13:20 | Beneath the clouds the stars are shining. My head's bathing in a small abandoned puddle. The sailor jumps on to the jetty, lifts me in his strong arms, up, and strokes my forehead and left cheek. The other sailors shipped their oars and, lifting up my mother's body, bear it over a huge flat rock. The sailor puts me to bed. From the tip of the tent’s main peg a lantern was barely balancing. My blood flowed into my hands. The sailors telephoned, held my hands in theirs, covered my face. They tore the khaki posters and bills open… | Acker reading |
| 14:08 | After the jeeps and lorries had left, wounded on the forehead now by the rising sun, I placed my sackcloth jacket over my face. The rest was naked. The flies in the toilet and the wine-press the soldiers had for their own convenience were gnawing at the barrier wires’ edges; they darted forward, leapt over the curly locks, so I trembled, opened my thighs. The morning breeze cooled down the thighs and the sexual mass. The flies stole… | Acker reading |
| 14:48 | Again Véronique tosses her hairs behind her; I take hold of this hair and throw my face into it; Véronique turns around and places my head in her hands: | Acker reading |
| 15:03 | Xaintrilles wet-kissed me in the garden.’ | Acker reading |
| 15:07 | I throw my arms around her waist, then I eat at her mouth; revolving her thighs rub and press themselves against my stomach; though she's pushing back my arms, I kiss her eyelids; her hand rubs my back, my waist; her eyelids taste of mud; the sweat wets my opened shirt. | Acker reading |
| 15:28 | As soon as she laughs, I turn her over under me on the armchair. The wind bangs the books on the table shut. My hand burrows like a mole in her clothes. Over a teat. Trembles. Under my hand the teat is hot. I stroke the other teat. With the second hand I unhook the dress. And tongue the teat’s tip. ‘And me,’ she pants. She crushes my mouth by her breast. Wide open the windows look over the park. Xaintrilles walks through the thick grass, his gun erect. | Acker reading |
| 16:04 | ‘Don't be so hard,’ he tells me. ‘You're breaking my legs.’ I crawl over him. Sirens stain the distance. | Acker reading |
| 16:16 | Today there are no more pirates therefore I can't be a pirate. I know I can't be a pirate because there are no more pirate ships. | Acker reading |
| 16:26 | In 1574 there were pirate ships. | Acker reading |
| 16:29 | By that time the total halt of legal, or national, European wars forced the French and German soldiers either to disappear or to become illegal - pirates. Being free of both nationalistic and religious concerns and restrictions, privateering’s only limitation was economic. Piracy was the most anarchic form of private enterprise. | Acker reading |
| 16:55 | Thus, at that time, in one sense, the modern economic world began. In anarchic times, when anyone could become any one and any thing, corsairs, free enterprisers roamed everywhere more and more… | Acker reading |
| 17:12 | Murderers killed murderers… | Acker reading |
| 17:16 | Human beings are good by nature. This is the credo of those who are liberals, even pacifists, during times of national and nationalistic wars. | Acker reading |
| 17:28 | But in 1574, when regular, regulated war, that is, national war, which the nations involved had maintained at huge expense only via authoritarian expansion, ceased: the sailors the soldiers the poor people the disenfranchised the sexually different waged illegal wars on land and sea. | Acker reading |
| 17:57 | War, if not the begetter of all things, certainly the hope of all begetting and pleasures. For the rich and certainly for the poor. War, you mirror of our sexuality. | Acker reading |
| 18:12 | I who would have and would be a pirate: I cannot. I who live in my mind which is my imagination as everything - wanderer adventurer fighter Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces - I am nothing in these times. | Acker reading |