Amelia Jones, In-Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance Amelia Jones and Andy Campbell (eds), Queer Communion: Ron Athey, reviewed by Kimberly Lamm

Abstract

A vulnerable performanceFor Amelia Jones, performance art reveals the fault lines in dominant cultural orders and brings them to light. She has devoted her formidable energies to tracing these acts of excavation and disclosing how feminist, queer, and anti-racist politics animate them. Two recently published books, In-Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance (2021) and Queer Communion: Ron Athey (2020) (co-edited with Andy Campbell) underscore how serious her commitment is. These studies are intimate allies and they illuminate why performance and sexuality have warranted a lifetime of exploration: Jones sees the full liberatory range of erotic life in performance. It allows sexuality to be unpredictably alive and imbued with contingency, not a thing to possess but a process that unfolds by responding deeply to and with others. Creating and modeling the risks of intimate encounters, performance allows the vulnerabilities of marginalized bodies to transform shame and isolation into radically inclusive forms of belonging. Introducing In-Between Subjects, Jones writes that performance allows us to 'enact' rather than 'suppress' or 'contain' the 'messy, durational, relational, and disorienting aspects of being a person in the world' (p. 24). Jones's scholarship shows that performance creates worlds in which such enactments must be fought for but are always possible.Since In-Between Subjects and Queer Communion are full of longing, thick with affect, and dense with erudition, there are many ways a review of these books could go. I want to focus on the theme of vulnerability because, as I was reading them, it struck me as the medium of performance. In both studies, Jones puts herself on the line. At the beginning of In-Between Subjects, she declares: 'Let me set up this book by beginning with a set of highly personal interpretations that make me vulnerable ' (p. xv). Making vulnerability a subject,