Strategies of Resistance in Post-Fordism: A Feminist Performance Perspective, Over-identification with Benign Evil

The central concern of this practice-based research project is how to create resistance from a feminist perspective by exploring and developing strategies in performance art. This resistance is aimed at the current economic and political conditions of post-Fordist production, in which an increased precarity of the workforce is accompanied by a shrinking autonomous political sphere and regressive gender politics, led by ‘sexual decoys’ (Eisenstein, 2007). In my practice, I perform and record political speeches which I circulate online; I also hold live talks and presentations where I introduce utopian performance improving technologies that replace the physical female body with a digital one. In both performance formats, live or online, the role of the performing female body is central to my investigation. According to J.K. GibsonGraham post-Fordism is characterised by an unquestioned narrative of accumulation which ‘takes priority over other social processes, becoming an imperative of the social totality rather than simply an activity of firms’ (2006, p.158). My research investigates how to disrupt this narrative through performance, resulting in a resistance towards it. Gibson-Graham also claim that theories of post-Fordism ‘tend to highlight ways in which the economy and polity reflect and re-enforce each other rather than the ways they contradict and undermine each other’ (p.159). Hence my practice as a performer investigates how to make these contradictions visible as a form of feminist critique and resistance. Central to my investigation is the exploration of over-identification which is based on the inherent contradiction that in order to create critique one becomes the subject of critique. In over-identification the performer overtly affirms the position of the subject of critique instead of articulating an open direct critique. Through my practice I explore how to deploy and transform this strategy effectively from a feminist perspective, to create an agonistic space as the location for resistance and disrupt rather than harmonise contradictions within post-Fordism. I combine this strategy with opacity where instead of an overt affirmation of positions, it transforms into an oscillation between contradicting positions.