Roll over Judith Butler and tell Germaine Greer the news!
With her dance performance DICKLOVE, Sandrine Juglair, circus-trained choreographer and performer, in a little under an hour, performs all we know and all we need to know about performing gender. She entertains, to boot.
I’ve suspected it for a long time and Juglair’s performance confirmed it. Snips, snails and puppy dog tails are what make a boy. What makes a girl is mostly a boy in makeup through the cheap mirror of what a boy imagines as the perfect object of desire: sugar, spice and everything nice.
Somehow, before I saw it put into dance performance in DICKLOVE, I was still thinking gendering had a bit more to it than that. But, I realize, not. As with so many things that are a part of the ordinary routine of living, getting words around gendering takes so many words and so much time that one comes to think it must be complex: ex multiplicitate, profunditatem, from complexity, profundity.
Well-made dance performance such as Juglair’s gets a body beyond all the narrative bushwa.
Just to state it out loud, the problem of gendering is in its consequences on individuals, not its signs. Its processes are just another story made up from tics and feints and so-called suspension of disbelief that put a gun to people’s heads according to exteriorized genitalia. The real reason critics of feminism claim the feints and tics are natural and observable is that understanding otherwise engages individual and social responsibility, all anathema to a real boy. Surely strutting and fretting a boy’s manly on his stage can be no vice!
As Juglair performs it, the key points of boy-ness or male gendered-ness or masculinity are broad at the shoulder, maybe a penis pouch, a certain crook to a leg that suggests a fighter’s crouch, tongue-tied-ness, a cigarette, brandished, a failure, an excuse, and a hero fantasy. All these cues and clichés are also found in Jimmy Dean’s Big Bad John(1961), the frisson of masculine heroism of which reminded me that to avoid unpleasant consequences, a boy bettermake the man or fake it well enough to pass. Not having been born in northern Ohio, Juglair has never heard Big Bad John. But, of course, like everybody else from everywhere, she has heard of it in some other, equally ubiquitous, and somehow unarguable, culture message. As a girl-kid budding athlete, she says, she instinctively let the boys win the races.
Juglair’s DICKLOVE got Karine and I talking about the ineffable appeal of Donald Trump. As unpleasant as that is, we also realized that “crouch-tongue-tied-ness-cigarette-brandished-failure-excuse-hero-fantasy” is meant to seduce the audience by exposing his, the Donald’s beating heart of boy-ness. To his followers, the threats, auto-exculpation and hero-fantasy that structure his speeches, feel right, are attractive, are catnip, to his followers.
Indeed, the boy has made the man.
Juglair’s DICKLOVE is as fine a piece of performance as you’ll find.
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We saw DICKLOVE by Juglair at Théâtre Silvia Monfort, Paris, on 3 October 2024, played by herself, Sandrine Juglair, assisted by Claire Dosso, Aurélie Ruby, with costumes by Léa Gadbois-Lamer, sound by Lucas Barbier, lighting by Julie Méreau, assisted by Marie Roussel, set by Max Heraud, Etienne Charles and La Manufacture (Switzerland).