Endurance Performance As Queer Tactic

Abstract

This thesis examines endurance performance in the context of three contemporary artists whose durational works serve to embody, question, and reconstitute the constraints of their marginalized social position. The artists on whom I focus are Tehching Hsieh, Marina Abramović, and Cassils. I use their works to contextualize how endurance performance functions as a queer tactic in its form, as the works themselves subvert traditional structures of artistic expression, in such ways that call forth the labor of the marginalized subject in a world that would otherwise render such labor illegible or unrecognized. I consider these enactments of endurance as powerful theoretical and artistic tools by which the state of marginalized subjects – the immigrant, the woman, the trans person – might reconstitute oppressive social structures to assert their own singularity and realize their own ambitions. Through their self-disciplined, durational, and exacting embodiments of constraints, I argue, these artists compel audiences to ponder the possibilities of freedom while living in an inhospitable world.