For now I am goin to atempt to answer some questions from the knowledge I have from reading Butler as I haven’t been able to do any of the readings yet and I will come back once I have managed to read them

 

How does performance interplay with normative constructions of identity?

As  Butler says  Gender is a performative construction… we become a gender through performing it is a sense….. we perform the norms that we see in the mirror of The Other.   But  in The Cyclical Cupcake, Barri Holstein referencing Ridout talks about how there is a failure in the performance on gender… I don’t understand it totally… but she says that woman ‘cannot represent every possibility of womanhood and therefore becomes just an   act on the stage that fails to represent and imitate because that what it clames to represent is unstable aswel’

What is its affective and/or political potential? • How can art/performance disrupt gender essentialism?

By performing non normative notions of gender ….. the idea of gender as binary can be challenged and opened up to other possibilities and thoughts as  Amelia Jones observes about  Ron Athey’s performances: He is losening  the[ male] body from patriarchal norms and advocates that this body is porous and permeable, that it is plastic , frail and vulnerable. ( in Doyle, Hold it agaisnt me: difficulty and emotion in contemporary art)

What is at stake in ‘performing one’s gender wrong’?

I think the answer to the above is also valid here.