A case of exclusion: Bodily writing and textual acting – the lesbian letters on stage.

• Our presentation is a transdisciplinary trans art collaboration between performing arts and literary composition. It circles around a visionary research question: through which texts and performances can excluded historical voices and bodies be materialised? I.e. can some of the complexities of their experiences be shaped through a processual and methodological intra-action between performative writing and performing arts? Since the opposite of truth (Greek alethia) is not non truth, but forgetfulness (Greek lethe), our ambition is as well to remember and include forgotten voices and bodies as a means to create an aesthetic truth. Thus, we orient ourselves towards a bodily writing and a textual acting. We will investigate the renegotiating potential in the relation body – literary/dramatic text, and how bodies normally excluded from subjectivity in the public space with the theatrical line as a position can insist on ambiguous states of desire and thus enter into a becoming as existential and ethical subjects. We will use writing and performing as our experimental methods of inquiry, and our methodological aim is to blend, re-shape, interrupt, diffract and extend our different art and research forms. We are working with the theme “excluded voices/bodies” though focusing on letters from Swedish lesbian women sent to the writer and translator Eva Alexanderson (1911-1994) in the 1960s and 1970s as our main source of material. Alexanderson was the first lesbian woman who came out on a national level in Sweden. As a response to her novel Kontradans [Square dance] (1969), which tells the love story of two women, Alexanderson received a lot of letters from women all around Sweden. The letters, that are preserved at KvinnSam - National Resource Library for Gender Studies at University of Gothenburg, tell about lesbian everyday life; fear, hope, love and feelings of exclusion connected to one’s sexual orientation. Alexanderson’s archive also contains materials such as “Novel about a lesbian woman in the 1950s” and extended writing on sex liberalism. These materials will also be taken into account in our bodily and textual trans art work of remembrance.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Konst (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

lesbian

letters

Eva Alexanderson

Kontradans

identity

body

voice

exclusion

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)