Texts that capitalize on queer theory in the analysis of dance have been relatively thin on the ground, compared with, say, performance studies, although this is gradually changing. For those hungry to see how dancing bodies manifest and propel queer notions, Penny Farfan's Performing Queer Modernism offers crucial insight, situating Loie Fuller's Fire Dance and Vaslav Nijinsky's Afternoon of Faun as key in the emergence of new European sexual and gender mores. Importantly, however, in pursuit of modernism's queerness, Farfan overrides academic and professional disciplinary boundaries, putting various performance forms in conversation. She does this by articulating mechanisms of social change that define the category of “queer modernist performance” (1). These mechanisms manifest as Farfan reads the reception of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century plays and dances through contemporary queer theory. Littering her text with lengthy quotes from reviews and other commentary on the performances, she teases out key ideas held by a range of critics. By borrowing concepts from scholars of queer theory, theater, and dance studies, Farfan argues that these ideas reflect broader cultural belief systems. Rather than historicize queer notions in the cultural moment of the works she is analyzing, Farfan proposes that contemporary queer critique is applicable to works from more than a century ago and analyzing them within this frame reveals the integral nature of queerness to an emerging modernism.
Notwithstanding the valuable and rigorous archival research that the book boasts, the bodies themselves, which Farfan argues are key to queerness’ role in modernism, are disappointingly absent from much of the text. In three out of the five chapters, queer modernism's mechanisms materialize almost solely between historical commentary and contemporary theory, all but effacing the materiality of queerly performing bodies. In the case of Fuller, for example, it is in renderings of the dancer by Toulouse-Lautrec and others as well as in the changes in the narrative/thematic content between two of Fuller's related dances that Farfan finds an association with Oscar Wilde. By doing so, the author establishes a compelling connection of Fuller to an early twentieth-century emergence of queerness through the idea that Wilde and his notoriety up to and beyond his trial ghost Fuller's Fire Dance. Yet, because Farfan focuses on commentary about the dance, historical facts about Wilde and Fuller, and portraits of both these artists, the association between Wilde and Fuller works textually and even visually. But the reader is never asked to think about how this ghosting might have manifested in the movement that Fuller performed, the dance thus remains all but offstage in Farfan's argument.
The chapter on Arthur Wing Pinero's late nineteenth-century play, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, exhibits the same absence of performing bodies even though it sets out by identifying slippage between actor and character as central to the agency of queer modernist performance. Farfan focuses primarily upon critics’ responses to the text's narrative, and thus the reader never learns how any particular actor, in his or her rendering of a role in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, embodies the slippage that the author figures so prominently. The actress who plays the central character in a popular London West End production gets a mention, and Farfan establishes that this show provided an important site of identification for swathes of young women in its audience. Quoting male commentators’ concerns about the impact the play might be having on women of the day and insisting that the narrative is being queerly read against its explicit intentions, Farfan cleverly establishes queer theory's purchase on considering the modernist play. In particular, she shows how the blurring of lines in homosocial and homoerotic relations between women contributes to the transgression of conventional femininity in a historical moment of dramatic change in gender roles. But the female body that gets constructed in the performance, with which the women audiences might be identifying, has little presence. Instead, Farfan focuses on plot twists and the questions about the nature of the characters that reviewers raise.
Despite these drawbacks, which will feel particularly glaring for students of Dance Studies and performance studies, Farfan usefully models a queer modernist frame that resists the prevailing separation of theater and dance in balkanized academic contexts. She looks at The Second Mrs. Tanqueray as part of cultural shifts in which Fuller's Fire Dance also participated, demonstrating the value of moving beyond the narrower scope that histories of dance are often guilty of reproducing. For example, to support her claim about Wilde's ghosting effect in Fire Dance, Farfan details Salome as an earlier more character-based dance of Fuller's that could be connected to Wilde's play, Salomé. Alongside The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Farfan characterizes Fuller's and Wilde's works as related to the late nineteenth-century Decadent movement, which rejected logic, nature, and morality in favor of excess, artificiality, and perversion. The Decadent movement's skepticism about society is typified by Wilde's notorious humor. Connecting examples of dance, theater, and visual art through the Decadent movement, Farfan demonstrates that study across genres and disciplines can reveal how the performance of queerness, through character and narrative, contributes to changing mores about how bodies are being defined and categorized. Moreover, by analyzing Pinero's play alongside Fuller's dance, Farfan demonstrates how different disciplines or genres of performance were linked through cultural movements; in doing so, she centralizes the question of historical change, avoiding analysis dictated by contemporary disciplinary boundaries.
In her work on Nijinsky, Farfan makes up for the earlier absence of palpable performing bodies. Her focused discussion of the choreographic structure and vocabulary of Afternoon of Faun convincingly accounts for changes in concert dance that Nijinsky's choreography ushered in. Even while a good part of her argument for the dance's queerness turns on the plot, Farfan identifies the prioritization of seamlessness in composition over narrative and a flatness of gesture that evacuates from the dancing body's dramatic character. She deploys these bodily elements to secure her assertion that Nijinsky choreographed ambiguous gender, which she reads in historical reviews of the dance and commentary on the artist himself. Furthermore, by locating Afternoon of Faun’s queerness in a play with gender, Farfan also goes some way toward repairing a problem with the conception of “queer” that opens her book. Defining queer by sexual object choice, Farfan conflicts historically both with the early and late twentieth-century use of the term. In fact, her prioritization of sexual object choice seems to construct a sexuality that conforms more closely with the mid-twentieth-century “homophile,” who emerged in that era's extremely conservative post-war “containment culture” as an unequivocally single axis (rather than intersectional) identity. Conceived of to fight some of the worst homophobic oppression the twentieth-century English-speaking West has ever seen, the homophile disavowed gender transgression, claiming to be like every other American except for sexual preference. Farfan does acknowledge the role of gender transgression in conceptions and performances of queer, but by foregrounding homosexuality, she recapitulates a key shortfall in later twentieth-century queer theory of eclipsing transgender subjectivity, while using nonnormative gender expression as an enabling notion.
The problem with Farfan's conception of queer arises to a certain extent from her analytical method of reading historical commentary and other primary source material through contemporary theory. Late twentieth-century conceptions of queerness inherit the midcentury separation of gender and sexuality that late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century nonnormative identities predate. The pitfall of centralizing “sexual preference” to the exclusion of other axes in the conception of queer extends to Farfan's treatment of racial and cultural difference, something she also begins to repair in her discussion of Nijinsky. Talking about the reliance of Afternoon of a Faun upon Orientalism, Farfan tempts the reader into thinking she will address how these ideas underpinned late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century notions of queerness. Furthermore, discussing how Russia, where Nijinsky's ballet came from, was represented as quasi-Oriental and how Nijinsky's features and sexuality caused commentators to view him as an example of Oriental debauchery, Farfan connects the emergence of alternate sexual identities to colonial ideology and complicates prevailing understandings of Orientalism. Yet, she neglects to make the same connections in her discussion of the Decadent movement, and thus, cultural or ethnic differences seem only to arise with Nijinsky's dance. This was simply not the case, which Farfan could have easily established by contextualizing Wilde's play and Fuller's dance in relation to “Salomania,” a late nineteenth-century European and American fascination with Salomé that was rife with Orientalism.
Had the book addressed the centrality of colonial ideology to the whole notion of debauchery, queerness, and cultural change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Farfan could be forgiven for choosing all white (and all but one Anglophone) examples for her argument. With substantial critical discussion of Orientalism's role, for example, Farfan could have deconstructed the whiteness of the queer modernist performance that she holds up, but as it is, she appears to believe that the interface of cultures and races precipitated by colonialism had scant influence upon, or role within, queer and modernism performance. In this sense Farfan reconstructs a canon that she might otherwise be attempting to critique.
Notwithstanding the problems in the limits of Farfan's subjects of analysis as well as in her methodology, by drawing connections between a handful of queer modernist performances and contemporary queer theory, the author imagines an important historical space. Artists from the late nineteenth century onward are envisaged as critiquing or “queering” dominant cultural values and practices. Furthermore, Farfan chronicles social circles and cultural movements dedicated to such critique, establishing that while the works often occupied contentious positions in dominant culture, the ideas staged were integral to a broader development of modernist conceptions of gender and sexuality, both marginal and central.
