Defiant Embodiments: Mark Hamilton
Channel: Dynamic Tensions
Date: 2017-05-08

Defiant Embodiments in Theatre, Sport, and Performance: An Interdisciplinary Symposium. Brunel University London, 29 April 2017. www.dynamictensions.com

Mark Hamilton (Regent’s University London) 
“Play-Fights: A Kind of Straight-Acting”

When boxers ‘get it on’ in the ring Wacquant says “the erotic connotation of the folk expression is not innocent” (Wacquant 2004:70). Oates quotes Bundini Brown: “You got to get the hard-on, and then you got to keep it […] be careful not […] to come” (Oates 1987:30). Woodward identifies a “troubled alliance […] where sex and combat become interchangeable”(Woodward 2007:134). As a dancer-cum-martial artist I mine the ambivalent intimacy of the hostile embrace. Armed combat like  kalaripayattu uses high complicity to choreograph battle as dance. But the rules of full-contact forms like judo comparably convert fighting into play. In Bateson’s terms, “The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite” (Bateson 1972:180). Sparring partners flirt with and through violence, communicating provocations like those of Simmel’s coquette: “Perhaps you can conquer me, perhaps not – try it!” (Simmel 1984:135). My collaborator and I make queer live-art interrogating the “the gender fluidity of those who have a penis and identify as male” (Avlance, 2016). We use interactions borrowed from martial arts to train intentionally at the edge of intimacy, where visceral drives (including violence and sexual desire) are ever-imminent. We enjoy measured exchanges which challenge our systemic integrity and foster athletic skills. More paramount, we ‘fight’ to evoke passions, memories and our unconscious. Sometimes our practice bleeds into domestic arenas — kitchens, bathrooms: our training is an intimate interaction and our intimacy informs our training. We make our subversive repetition (Butler 1990:226) of martial practices in search of agency. We inscribe our bodies with new entanglements of queer desire and masculine embodiment. In our play-fights can we see a kind of ‘straight-acting’ — a revision of heteronormative homosociality? What then is their relationship to more explicitly defiant expressions of homosexuality?