• “Performing Our Pain or Performing Through It”: Contextualizing #MeToo

Tarana Burke is the performance theorist of this historical moment. Notwithstanding any individual assessment of its efficacy, her coining of “Me Too” has produced a transnational movement that has left a seismic impact on the protocols of departments like dance and theatre, which center bodies and the knowledge they carry and enact. Like Ntozake Shange, one of her muses with whom she dialogues in the beginning and ending of her published narrative, Burke insists on the power of women’s speech as efficacious in diagnosing and responding to racialized patriarchies. As an illustration, Burke’s memoir Unbound: My Story and the Birth of the Me Too Movement demonstrates the power of performativity, of ritual, of reciprocity between speakers and audiences that foster new relationalities and a continued ethical praxis of healing in the wake of structural racism and intersectional violence. The first part of my title for this editorial cites Burke’s own framing of her project. Examples from her text divulge the ways in which Burke anticipates, elaborates, or otherwise contextualizes the force of Me Too as striving toward recognition and the benefits and drawbacks attendant to such goals.

Echoes of Frantz Fanon’s hailing, “Tiens, un nègre” or “Maman, regarde le nègre” in a critically gendered timbre resound in Burke’s experience of epithet.¹ She perceives a passerby whose “discomfort churns through their body” as that person’s inevitable “stare” marks her as “ugly.”² “The world” that hails Burke is constituted by white supremacy. However, here she exposes its effects not through a white girl à la Fanon’s famous illustration, but from someone whose race is indeterminate: racism saturates all communities in the US.³ As one component of this structural violence, the repeated performance of “unkindness creates a particular kind of vulnerability” resulting in what Burke calls “slow death.”⁴ With these words, Burke revises Fanon’s description of “l’expérience vécue du Noir” (the lived experience of Blackness, which has often been translated into English as the “Fact of Blackness”) orienting her discussion to heterosexual Black women. Fanon’s own attempts to deal with gender and sexuality proved productively inadequate despite his incisive commentary on race. Burke’s writing similarly cannot account fully for the slipperiness of identification and authority, but she nevertheless opens inquiries into overlapping vectors of oppression as well as improvisatory and structured acts to live through them.⁵

In this vein, the prose continually evokes religious practice as a resource for survival. Such a move departs from Fanon but situates her in a tradition of Black intellectuals that extend back to Sojourner Truth and W.E.B. Du Bois. Burke’s avowed calling is to develop frameworks through which certain forms of violence can be processed and [End Page vii] integrated into subjectivity as opposed to dissolving it. The emphasis rests heavily on identifying material and psychic conditions that cause pain, especially for Black straight women, and to find means to perform through it. Put otherwise, survival in a racist and sexist world requires performance from minority subjects. From this perspective, aligning Burke with Fanon proves useful. Stuart Hall provides a constructive reminder of the contingency of Blackness, a position articulated with more ambivalence in Burke’s writing but one that can be gleaned from those pages regardless.

Fanon certainly knew that, in the system of radicalised exclusion and abjection sustained by the look from the place of the Other, the bodily schema is constituted, not given, and culturally and historically shaped . . . any notion that the return to the site of the body represents a recovery of some essential ground or foundation that will restore the essential black subject is not only mistaken but has taken a message from Fanon’s work which he explicitly precludes.⁶

For Burke, what exactly each performance entails cannot be determined in advance; the negotiation of life in a structure that mandates Black death is contingent work. And that, for me, is what Burke’s work ultimately aspires to do: to demonstrate a trajectory of work through and against racism, sexism, and their intersections.

When I first joined the editorial team...

• “表现我们的痛苦或通过它表现”：#MeToo 情境化

塔拉纳·伯克 (Tarana Burke) 是这一历史时刻的表演理论家。尽管对其功效进行了任何个人评估，但她对“我也是”的创造产生了一场跨国运动，对舞蹈和戏剧等部门的规程产生了巨大影响，这些部门以身体及其携带和制定的知识为中心。就像她的缪斯女神之一 Ntozake Shange 在她发表的叙述的开头和结尾与之对话一样，Burke 坚持认为女性言论的力量在诊断和回应种族化的父权制方面是有效的。作为例证，Burke 的回忆录Unbound: My Story and the Birth of the Me Too Movement在结构性种族主义和交叉暴力之后，展示了表演性、仪式性、演讲者和听众之间的互惠性的力量，这些力量促进了新的关系和持续的伦理治疗实践。我这篇社论标题的第一部分引用了伯克自己对她项目的框架。她的文本中的例子揭示了伯克预期、阐述或以其他方式将 Me Too 的力量背景化为努力获得认可以及伴随这些目标的好处和缺点。

弗朗茨·法侬 (Frantz Fanon) 以批判性的性别化音色呼喊“天狮，黑人”或“妈妈，黑人”的呼声回荡在伯克的绰号体验中。¹她认为路人的“不适感贯穿他们的身体”，因为那个人不可避免的“凝视”将她标记为“丑陋”。²为伯克欢呼的“世界”是由白人至上构成的。然而，在这里，她不是通过法农著名插图中的白人女孩，而是通过一个种族不确定的人来揭示其影响：种族主义充斥着美国的所有社区。³作为这种结构性暴力的一个组成部分，反复表现出“不友善会造成一种特殊的脆弱性”，从而导致伯克所说的“缓慢死亡”。^4个用这些话，伯克修改了法农对“l'expérience vécue du Noir”（黑人的生活经历，经常被翻译成英语作为“黑人的事实”）的描述，将她的讨论定位于异性恋黑人女性。法农自己处理性别和性行为的尝试被证明是不充分的，尽管他对种族进行了敏锐的评论。伯克的作品同样无法完全解释身份认同和权威的微妙性，但她仍然对重叠的压迫向量以及通过它们生存的即兴和结构化行为展开了调查。^5个

本着这种精神，散文不断唤起宗教实践作为生存资源。这样的举动背离了 Fanon，但将她置于黑人知识分子的传统中，这种传统可以追溯到 Sojourner Truth 和 WEB Du Bois。Burke 的公开呼吁是制定框架，通过该框架可以处理某些形式的暴力，并且[End Page vii]融入主观性而不是溶解它。重点主要在于识别导致痛苦的物质和精神条件，特别是对于黑人异性恋女性，并找到通过它来执行的方法。换句话说，在种族主义和性别歧视的世界中生存需要少数民族主体的表现。从这个角度来看，将伯克与法农结盟证明是有用的。斯图尔特·霍尔 (Stuart Hall) 对黑人的偶然性提出了建设性的提醒，这一立场在伯克的著作中表达得更加矛盾，但无论如何都可以从这些页面中收集到。

法农当然知道，在由他者的视角所维持的激进排斥和弃绝的系统中，身体图式是建构的，而不是给定的，并且是文化和历史塑造的。. . 任何认为回到身体所在的位置代表恢复基本的基础或基础以恢复基本的黑色主体的想法不仅是错误的，而且从法农的作品中得到了他明确排除的信息。^6个

对伯克来说，每场表演的确切含义无法事先确定；在强制执行黑死病的结构中谈判生活是偶然的工作。对我来说，这就是伯克的工作最终渴望做的事情：展示通过和反对种族主义、性别歧视及其交叉点的工作轨迹。

当我第一次加入编辑团队时...