Defining Viagra “Performance”
Drama professor Bert States demonstrates the slipperiness of “performance” as an academic keyword. For States, “Even the attempt to investigate the nature of performance turns out to be something of a performance.”3o Performance in its versatility and complexity can be both intentional and unintentional, both artistry and sham. As a method of inquiry, performance theory utilizes the theatrical metaphors of “role,” “act,” “script,” “stage,” “drama,” and, most significantly, “audience,” to account for the conscious and unconscious acts we perform as Donna Haraway’s “material-semiotic actors.” The way I interpret Haraway’s phrase is that we are both material bodies (with biological parts and systems) and products of language, responding to cultural conventions and the myth of objectivity.t! As a result, our actions illustrate various levels of consciousness. Performance theorist Dwight Cdnquergood illustrates these levels of consciousness as he describes performance as “faking,” “making,” and “breaking” and occurring across a range of human activity. In Goffman’s usage, performance is faking-our everyday performances highlight the ways in which we, as social actors, manage impressions) staging our worlds in a semiconscious way.33 Goffman characterizes everyday life as rule bound, a structure of obligations and perf ormative assumptions realized through communicative exchanges. We have motives for conforming to social expectations and our methods for controlling the impression others have of us are based in routine. This idea that we manage impressions suggests that our appearances are “faked” and that there is, instead.la real self that we go to great lengths to conceal. Goffman goes even furthdr by saying that groups ofindividuals-”teams”-foster collective identities. These teams are carefully orchestrated so as to maintain the illusion of cohesion.
It is this aspect of performance that I find especially fruitful in analyzing masculinity, The performances of masculinity are collective ones in which members of a masculinity participate in an ongoing collusion that supports perceptions of an idealized masculine type. Goffman’s definition of performance as the: “activity of a given participant on a given occasion [serving] to influence other participants” highlights the essential component of audience to our individual performances.
But performance in the everyday-life sense is quite different from a performance in a ceremonial or theatrical sense where it also identifies a site for transformation.ss For anthropologist Victor Turner, the conscious transition necessary for transformations to occur requires a ritual passage across a threshold. “eddings, baptisms, initiation rites all have to do with change taking place within a structured ceremony. The movement from one stage of life to the next! results in the “making” of a new reality.36 For boys interested in losing their virginity and, as a result, taking a step closer to manhood, the liminal act that marks that loss/transformation is vaginal penetration. There is no substitute. What Viagra does is maintain the importance of this act well past middle age. Performance, in these examples, is always about transformation through accomplishment (and rarely about competency).
To be continued in a couple of days…
