The Speed Of Queer: La La La Human Steps and Queer Perceptions of the Body

Abstract

In this article, Stephen Low argues that Edouard Lock’s choreography for La La La Human Steps embodies temporalities that expose how the normative experience of time determines and limits our visual and theoretical perceptions of the gendered body. Focusing on movement executed at hyperfast virtuosic speeds seen in La La La Human Steps’ recent work Untitled, Lock’s choreography demonstrates possibilities of corporeal transformations through the way the body is perceived in time through movement. The analysis of Lock’s choreography expands the theories of queer time elucidated by Judith Halberstam in her book In A Queer Time and Place beyond temporalities defined by nonnormative life schedules to include non-normative temporalities determined by how subjects move in and through time. Furthermore, the examination of the effects of hyper-fast movement exposes how Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity remains contingent on normative temporalities that allow the body to be seen as gendered in a stable and coherent manner. The aesthetic of speed embodied by Lock’s choreography is acknowledged to be both simultaneously destructive, in that it undoes the stability and coherency of gender as ascertainable by the act of seeing the body, and generative, in that it offers modes of challenging gender norms that do not require medical technologies. In other words, through an aesthetic that employs virtuosic speed, Lock offers a concept of queer temporality that allows a subject to embody the trans in “transgender.”

Queer Performance and Radical Possibilities: Bill Butler and the Post-Stonewall Roller Disco

“…offer a potential for physical transformation that challenges normative gender constraints by dissolving the perceived visual material boundaries of the body." 37 Much like the response to the structure of roller disco, the temporalities of roller disco must respond to speed, cadence, rhythm, and obstacles to keep moving in and around the rink. Yet, it must also critique the monotony of skating in circles with the practice of jamming.…”

“…19 The following moment in Butler's guidebook summarizes his own stance on jamming as a style of movement and performance, but also a resistive political gesture. Jamming therefore becomes what Stephen Low calls "a paradoxically destructive yet generative power" 20 implicit in queer dance and other aesthetically radical forms of physical movement. Butler's manual includes a series of more generic how-tos: how to edge, how to balance, how to keep the beat, and so on.…”