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+# Formulating Affinities and Defiances through Discomfort
+
+![ezgif com-gif-maker](https://github.com/lgsump/anthology-testing/assets/122332459/5da6aa81-5043-4e4e-81e4-a0a8b99f411f)
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+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 <i>performance reading</i> 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 <i>Empire of the Senseless</i>. 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 <i>while</i> 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.
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+<hr>
+
+# 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 
+<br> —. Acker.” Signs, vol. 42, no. 1, 2016, pp. 175–97.
+
+MacArthur, Marit J. “Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies.” PMLA, 
+<br> —. vol. 131, no. 1, 2016, pp. 38–63.
+
+Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings, Harvard University Press, 2009.
+
+<hr>