Ageing Queer Embodiment, Audiences, and Empathy: “Intimate Karaoke” and The Material Conditions of Uterine Concert Hall

My research-creation dissertation asks how performance-based practices impact, affect, and intersect with a gendered, middle-ageing, queer body, how that body provokes, enacts, and personifies, and ultimately how the body is at stake in cisheteropatriarchy. I address representational and material concerns about identity and the status of the queer middle-ageing female body; intersubjective and performative concerns with materiality, practice, and collaboration; audience reception and participation; and my embodied method of performance as research. I do this by examining how I use my body in the sound-based, interactive performance installation Uterine Concert Hall (UCH). I track the development of UCH through its multiple iterations, and the knowledge that was generated through hands-on research and performance, knowledge which would not have been possible through non-practice-based methods. I examine how I use my body within this work as a representational concept and as a material object and observe the effects of particular representational strategies on the audience. I also consider age as it factors into modes of representation as well as how age contributes to the work’s aesthetic production. My thesis addresses a lack of critical engagement with what middle-ageing female bodies mean, how they are represented, and how they are valued in performance art studies and mainstream pop culture. I put UCH in conversation with other artists who use performance-based methods and explicit body practices in their artwork. The goal of this research is to study explicit body performance-based practices and artworks against the backdrop of normative mainstream culture, where the value of female bodies to seduce and reproduce is predicated on youthfulness. Research-creation methodologies that were developed in this dissertation include: “intimate karaoke” as a method of achieving empathy between audience members and between audiences and myself as performer; queer sociality as an affective method of engagement and embodiment to circulate intimacies, vulnerabilities, and empathies through consent; and performative strategies to de-centre essentialist renderings of gender and expectations of what people with uteri are to do under cisheteropatriarchy. How I developed a methodology to perform and stage my body in this work relies on my performance-based experience, which I address throughout my dissertation