Reviewed by:

• Performing Queer Modernism by Penny Farfan
• Jonathan Chambers

Contemporary modernist studies is less about tracing the creation and trajectory of aesthetic revolt and more about the numerous ways those contestatory efforts, and authoring subjects, were engendered by modernity and modernization. As such, the oppositional nature of modernism is rendered as complex, varied, and politically and contextually specific. Likewise, modernist texts are no longer regarded as hermetic but deeply implicated in the context of production and, as well, instrumental in the invention of modernity and the modern world.

One site of inquiry that has benefited from this contextualized accounting of modernism is the performance and representation of gender and sexuality. In Performing Queer Modernism, Penny Farfan builds on studies within that broadly defined area, exploring particularly the intersection of modernism and the advent of queerness. The result is a theoretically savvy and yet accessible account [End Page 245] of how five late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century artists engaged with modernism and queerness by way of performance. Though some worked in legitimate arenas and others illegitimate, Farfan asserts that all “bodied forth the dissonances and resistances of both queerness and modernism” (4).

Following her introduction, wherein Farfan offers a useful overview of both traditional and emerging views of modernism and the queer and feminist methodology guiding her work, chapter 1, “‘This Feverish, Jealous Attachment of Paula’s for Ellean’: Homosocial Desire and the Production of Queer Modernism,” addresses Arthur Wing Pinero’s 1893 play, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. Dating back to Shaw but also including contemporary scholars who have excluded it from the history of modernism, critics have faulted the work for its perceived convention and conservatism. Farfan counters these readings, which emphasize the trope of the reintegration of the fallen woman into respectable society, by instead highlighting the “interplay of the homosocial and homoerotic,” as manifest in the relationship between the titular character, Paula, and her new stepdaughter, Ellean (12). Thus, for Farfan, the plight of the conventional “fallen woman” character is disrupted when focus is instead placed on the queer dynamic and desires that exist between the two women. More broadly, Farfan situates Pinero’s play as exemplative of “works that do not obviously comply with traditional definitions of modernism” but “nonetheless participated in its political and aesthetic subversions” (26).

The subversion of content and form is taken up again in chapter 2, “‘Fairy of Light’: Performative Ghosting and the Queer Uncanny.” Here, Farfan argues that Loie Fuller’s Fire Dance, a revision and expansion of a piece originally conceived as part of her staging of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, “may be understood as an intensification of [. . .] queer ghosting” (28). Farfan first neatly explicates the particulars of Fuller’s rendering of Salome, staged in 1895, just as Wilde was being tried and convicted for “gross indecency.” In turn, she argues, Fire Dance “retained a ghostly trace of its earlier life” even as it evolved over the course of the next twenty years (31). Drawing on the complimentary notions of the uncanny, understood as an unsettling indeterminacy, and Marvin Carlson’s concept of the body of the performer as haunted by past roles, Farfan offers an account of Fuller’s composition of Fire Dance. Fuller’s composition drew upon the physical similarities she shared with Wilde. Staged with shadowy lighting and voluminous amounts of fabric, Fuller’s version represented the performer’s body in unorthodox ways. The coalescing of these features, Farfan suggests, evoked the image of a queer, ghostly martyr, Wilde, being burned at the stake, as performatively embodied by a queer, uncanny dancer.

While the two subsequent chapters—“‘Without the Assistance of any Girls’: [End Page 246] Queer Sex and the Shock of the New” and “‘I Think Very Few People Are Completely Normal Really Down Deep in Their Private Lives’: Popular Plato, Queer Heterosexuality, and Comic Form”—address entirely different performance traditions (i.e., ballet and drawing room comedy), Farfan’s analyses of both attend to the subversion of received norms. In the former, Farfan explicates Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1912 Afternoon of a Faun, arguing that ballet...

审核人：

• 潘妮·法凡（Penny Farfan）表演的酷儿现代主义
• 乔纳森·钱伯斯（Jonathan Chambers）

当代现代主义的研究较少涉及追寻美学反抗的创造和轨迹，而更多地涉及现代性和现代化所产生的种种争斗努力和创作主题的多种方式。这样，现代主义的对立本质就变得复杂，多变，并且在政治和背景上是特定的。同样，现代主义文本不再被认为是封闭的，而是与生产环境密切相关，并且在现代性和现代世界的发明中发挥了重要作用。

从这种对现代主义进行情境描述的过程中受益的一个探究场所是性别和性行为的表现和表现。潘妮·法凡（Penny Farfan）在《表演酷儿现代主义》一书的基础上，对该领域进行了广泛的研究，特别探讨了现代主义与酷儿时代的来临。其结果是一个理论上精明但易于理解的记录[第245页]，介绍了五十九世纪末期和二十世纪初的艺术家是如何通过表演参与现代主义和古怪的。尽管有些人在合法的舞台上工作，而另一些则是非法的，但法凡坚称所有这些“都提出了酷儿主义和现代主义的不和谐和反抗”（4）。

在她的介绍之后，法凡（Farfan）对传统主义和新兴的现代主义观点以及指导她的工作的古怪和女权主义方法进行了有益的概述，第一章，“宝拉（Paula's）对艾琳（Eleanan）的这种狂热，嫉妒的依恋”：同性恋的欲望和生产酷儿现代主义”，谈到亚瑟·永·派内罗（Arthur Wing Pinero）1893年的剧作《第二夫人坦奎雷（Tanqueray）》。评论家可以追溯到邵氏公司，但也包括将其排除在现代主义历史之外的当代学者，批评家们指责该作品是因为它的传统和保守主义。法范反驳了这些读物，强调了堕落妇女重返可敬的社会的说法，反而强调了“同性社会和同性爱的相互作用”，这在名义上的人物宝拉与她的新继女之间的关系中得到了体现，埃琳（12）。因此，对于法凡来说，当把焦点转移到两个女人之间存在的奇怪动态和欲望上时，传统的“堕落女人”角色的困境就被打乱了。更广泛地，

内容和形式的颠覆将在第2章“光之仙女：表演重影与酷儿怪诞”中再次讨论。在这里，法凡（Farfan）认为，Loie Fuller的《Fire Dance》是对这首作品的修订和扩展，最初是作为她对Oscar Wilde的Salome演出的一部分而设计的，“可以理解为[[...]的强化。。。]奇怪的重影”（28）。Farfan首先巧妙地阐明了富勒（Fuller）在1895年上演的《莎乐美》的细节，正当王尔德因“严重in亵”而被审判和定罪时。她认为，反过来，火舞即使它在接下来的二十年中不断发展，也“保留了它早期生命的幽灵痕迹”（31）。范凡借鉴过往的不确定性（被认为是不确定的不确定性）的补充概念，以及马文·卡尔森（Marvin Carlson）对表演者身体的理解，如过去的角色所困扰，从而说明了富勒（Fuller）的《火舞》（Fire Dance）的构成。富勒的作品借鉴了她与王尔德共同的身体相似之处。富勒（Fuller）的版本在昏暗的灯光和大量织物的衬托下，以非正统的方式代表了表演者的身体。Farfan建议，这些特征的融合让人联想起一个奇怪的，烈性的烈士，王尔德，在火刑柱上被烧死，表现为一个奇怪的，不可思议的舞者。

随后的两章分别是“'没有任何女孩的帮助'：[结束第246页]同性恋和新人的震惊”和“我认为很少有人能完全正常地度过自己的私生活”：流行的柏拉图，酷儿异性恋和喜剧形式”-解决了完全不同的表演传统（即芭蕾舞和客厅喜剧），法凡对两者的分析都颠覆了所接受的规范。在前者中，法凡（Farfan）阐释了瓦斯拉夫·尼金斯基（Vaslav Nijinsky）在1912年的《农神》（Faun）下午，认为那把芭蕾舞...