B-Visible: Martin Hargreaves

Sarma asked the British performance theoretician and queer theory specialist Martin Hargreaves to visit B-Visible and write some observations. This process of perception and reflection is put on line during the event, and is introduced by a lecture and will be concluded afterwards by an essay. On this page Hargreaves states some theoretical ideas he will explore through the documentation of queer B's. Observations are printed underneath.

Queering B - B-ing Queer

In The Parameters of Postmodernism (London 1993), Nicholas Zurbrugg proposes that there is a 'B-effect' within postmodern cultural study and practice (deriving from responses to writings by Benjamin, Barthes, Bürger, Bonito-Oliva, Baudrillard, Bourdieu et al.) which establishes a pessimistic sense of 'no future' and a melancholic yearning for an annihilated past. This B-effect attempts to analyse postmodernity as a crisis of creativity and describes an apocalyptic vision of imploding artistic practice. Zurbrugg suggests that there is a counter 'theoretical virus' - the 'C-effect' - developing out of the work of John Cage which finds new modes of creativity and an optimism in anti-art and ante-art. Zurbrugg traces how this C-effect has infected the practice of many performance makers and artists in both Europe and America. The C-effect is distrustful of the authorial voice in its celebration of silence, interruption and collage and its manifestation is largely to be found in works which disrupt hegemonic norms of identity and art.

An important B missing from Zurbrugg's algebraic analysis is Judith Butler, "the reigning Queen of Gender" (the Queen B), whose Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter became key texts in the emerging field of Queer Theory in the 1990's. Butler's particular strain of Queer Theory seems to exist between the B and C effect in that it celebrates disruption and critiques the author but it also examines the melancholic structures of identity and suggests that gender is a set of compulsory repetitions. Although many have approached Butler's work it generally suffers from a set of B-effect and C-effect responses - either a pessimistic response which argues that Butler forgets 'real' bodies and 'real' differences (a demanding B-real-effect) or a utopian adoption of her notion of performative gender as a form of drag which can be put on and altered at will (an exuberant C-me-effect). Butler's work is more complex than these readings allow and it cannot be easily equated within a postmodern algebra (indeed she refuses to recognise her writing as postmodernist). Her work focuses on compulsory, regulatory discourses of gender which cannot be refused nor subverted from a 'pure' point of resistance but yet stresses that these discourses are iterations that necessarily fail and are therefore open to reworkings. Her work investigates how the present is both a sedimentation of the past and an opening to the future.

Being visible, in these terms, requires an acknowledgement of how we are always already reflected within a specular economy of representations which renders the abject queer as the spectacular frame of the invisible heterosexual subject. Simply affirming visibility therefore risks the reification of this logic and fixes the coherence of a queer 'position' which remains degraded and subject to punishment. As Peggy Phelan has suggested (Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London 1993), visibility politics need to consider the power of the invisible, what is offered up for consumption and what remains unseen in its control of the visual field. By queering visibility we refuse to be seduced by the promise of representation and instead seduce representation itself, haunting the scene of subjectivity in a play across presence and absence, never fully manifesting but critiquing the process of materialisation and what it might mean to be material.

Biography

Lecture: Queer Expression, Context And Performativity: Not Talking And Saying Too Much

Observation no.1 - 03.40am 5/11/02

The 72 hours began queerly enough as I was edged out of a room by the inflation of a giant elephant. My first observation is to document the impossibility of documenting B-visible. As soon as it launched I became aware that there were events that, try as hard as I may, would remain invisible to me either through their refusal to become an event, my difficulty in finding them, or from my decision to see one thing over another. Stefanie Wenner’s lecture on horizons proposed the overlapping of the visible and the invisible in a zone of potential transformation, by way of David Lynch, Renaissance Frescos and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It posited some interesting and important questions which provoked a discussion of the problematics of perception and projection. If invisibility, or the blind spot, is the very possibility of sight then the eye functions only through its impossibility to ever receive or capture an entire visual field, or as Thomas Plischke put it; we don’t see that we don’t see what we can’t see. Furthermore what we do see is flagged up by mental ‘post-it’ notes that ensure the quickest and most efficient neural shortcuts to perception. The question becomes how to reflect upon these ‘post-it’s in order to queer vision, to see the unseeable – if being is visual (pace Lacan) then how do we b-visible without dissolving the self into psychosis? What strategies are there for renegotiating the machinery of perception which can exploit the ruptures in visibility?

Observation no.2 – 02.15 am 06/11/02

After two hours sleep on the ghostlit stage I attended the first in a trio of workshops directed by Alice Chauchat which explore the transposition of movement from the soft-porn video posing of a female model onto a male performer. In this case Ugo Dehaes was given very careful and attentive direction by Chauchat to variously drop his shoulders, arch his back, put his finger in his mouth and invite a consuming gaze without direct provocation or confrontation. Dehaes followed the instructions methodically without lapsing into drag or parody and therefore the formal elements of the movement were emphasised instead of a symbolic display of a feminine construct. His subdued response gave this transposition an interesting edge as it became clear that he was not attempting to inhabit an alien image but to understand the movement on his own body. Nevertheless the detail and effort that went into Chauchat’s recontextualisation of the eroticised feminine spectacle clearly made visible the masquerade of gender which seduces the gaze through repetition of a narrow repertoire of poses and looks. Denaturalising notions of bodily pleasure and display, the workshop thoroughly queered the exchange of desire within pornographic tropes of visible gender as neither Chauchat nor the audience fully adopted the role of voyeur but instead found pleasure in reflexively participating in a deconstruction of spectacular erotics.

Later I delivered my lecture which dealt in part with the notion of a performative break in context but I reflected afterwards that in part my own context and relation to the word ‘queer’ had not really been addressed. ‘Queer’ is an English word which has been reappropriated and recontextualised in B-visible to mobilise the metaphoric promises it offers. Queer is, I think, a more ambivalent term for native English speakers because it carries with it the resonances of its use as a term of abuse – for example I first encountered the word ‘queer’ as an insult directed towards me, as a form of injurious address which sort to cast me out of heterosexual normalcy. This is not to tie it to that usage, nor to restrict the reworkings of the term, nor to posit an exclusive understanding of the word (after all what is most exciting about this event is the very mobility of ‘queerness’) but to suggest that it is precisely the ambivalence of a word and its history that engages me and in part was the reason for my consideration of the figure of sedimentation in Butler – Queer is a muddy word.

Observation no. 3 – 05.45 pm 6/11/02

Last night in a clash of the Post-It curve-ball champions, Killer Jerry beat Peace Potato while Andy went from A to B and back again via some Gender Trouble. Shedding yellow paper scales as they went, the two combatants left the pitch marked with their presence and hence absence as the match documented itself. On my way to bed at 4 am I encountered some of the interventionists from Claude Wampler’s workshop – by morning many had received gifts from these nocturnal visitors – were they good fairies leaving nice surprises or bogeymen delivering bad dreams and nightmare violations? I suppose it depends on your response to waking up with a painted face and arcane body markings, or mysterious letters or tapes documenting someone else’s night. Their careful tiptoeing around seemed to complement the eerie twilight that has descended on the Vooruit stage and they were at once both mischevious and mysterious like the ambivalent characters of fairytales.

Observation no. 4 – 06.45 pm 6/11/02

In Visibility Itself Sinisa Ilic and Bojan Djordjev created an impressive photomontage on powerpoint and videotape of images drawn from both public and private visual archives. Canonical images from the twentieth century, from ‘art history’ and ‘popular culture’, were collected alongside photos of family members or images which had a particular context within the recent shifts in Serbian history. Although I was unsure of the structure or curatorial discourse behind their presentation, and slightly overwhelmed by the volume of images, there were moments of what Roland Barthes would call ‘punctum’ where the resonance of the image held me – particularly those of Ilic’s relatives, who themselves were surrounded and absorbed in images. The complex interrelation of the personal and the wider cultural visual fields, or the “desert of pictures” as Djordjev put it, seems to me to be an interesting dynamic. In b-ing queer do we draw on a repertoire of images which have already in some way proscribed the boundaries of visibility and can we deploy these images in order to resignify a queer praxis whilst simultaneously acknowledging that we are always already caught in a gaze?

Observation no. 5 – 09.30 pm 6/11/02

In Performing "performance” Alice Chauchat and Vera Knolle invited us in to the pleasures of the performative through a queering of the wedding ritual that Austin offers as paradigmatic of all performatives. Unfaithful citations, impure speech acts and inappropriate utterances all played subversively with the language of performative theory but we were also drawn to reflect upon the promise of a performance and then humorously shown the scandal of performances ever to fully and finally deliver on their promise as Chauchat and Knolle took a show of hands to poll the success of their piece. Context and ritual were highlighted and, in one of the least likely but strangely convincing transformations I’ve ever seen, a ceremonial initiation rite evoking trance states segued into a routine to Britney Spears Live in Concert and it finished with a lip-synching sequence which played with the concepts of presence/absence and quotation central to performativity. Since it overlapped so much with my current research I enjoyed its intellectual rigour but also its irreverence and subversive humour, and it negotiated the challenges of speech-act theory and queer enactment with a great deal of insight but in the end it didn’t take itself too seriously.

Observation no. 6 – 00:10 am 07/11/02

In the attic I have just witnessed a slaughter. All manner of grisly deaths were met; drowning, hanging, poisoning, car crash, premature burial, flaying, burning, crushing, falling, quartering, shooting, voodoo cursing, suffocation, evisceration, acid burns, staking, shipwreck, battery, electrocution. One victim was even eaten. They were all cherry tomatoes but somehow Eva Meyer-Keller managed to elicit sympathy for them and her methodical massacre perhaps raised questions about capital punishment or our desire for the performance of gruesome deaths – either way we all have some tomato juice on our hands.

Observation no.7 - 14:30 pm 07/11/02

The subject and object of Queer or queerness have continued to escape the boundaries of definition within this event and have led to some flashpoint situations over the past hours. The 'Strategies for Stagefright' video document last night led into several confrontations which I was not part of and cannot write about but I do think that the conflict and ambivalence over this word 'queer' proves at the very least that it has potential. If we all had one common perception or definition of 'queer' then the very force that it wields to confuse and contest would necessarily be weakened. This is not to belittle the perception of betrayal by those who would resist queerness being appropriated for artistic work that has little to do with alternate sexualities but to suggest that the very qualities of ambivalence and recontextualisation are part of 'queering'. To try and close down or fix a singular 'queer' meaning, context or usage I think would be antithetical to 'queer' itself but at the same time I do think these discussions and arguments are a necessary, if sometimes painful, part of queer practice. I think the only thing I would resist is any normalisation of the word – both the conflicts and the convergences of B-visible have I think demonstrated that the subversive promise of queer is not exhausted yet.

Observation no.8 - 21:00 pm 07/11/02

True or false, dream or reality, authentic or constructed, fact or fiction – these are some of the binaries which art criticism despite itself often deploys to judge the quality of a work but Claude Wampler thoroughly subverted them with the ‘documentary’ film of her workshop. For me this was certainly the most provocative investigations of the event as the delicate notions of privacy and intimacy were queered in order to cause trouble of various kinds. I was totally seduced into believing the images she showed us yesterday of underwear exchanges, victims being sewn to their sheets and other nocturnal violations because I had witnessed that night the painting of nails and marking of hands – even though I recognised one of the participants of the workshop in the role of victim I was so drawn in by the paranoid fear created by the initial images and reactions of the audience that I overrode my doubts to invest in the fictional document. Wampler’s strategy of using staged scenes intercut with the ‘real’ footage not only undermined this division but also, in my case, really made visible my desire to believe in the truthfulness of images. It also took what was already a strange place – the transformed stage – and made it even more ambivalent and unheimlich. Strategies for Stagefright became an appropriate title as the complex crossings and transgressions performed by the workshop panicked the binaries of participant or victim and insider or onlooker, the real thing or imitation.

Visible definitions

B-visible was a 72 hour laboratory for art-theory and practice installed at the Vooruit arts centre in Gent from the 5th to the 7th November 2002. Multifarious projects occupied the space - workshops, installations, performances, lectures, discussions and indeed the participants also slept in the theatre, with a dormitory installed on the main stage and food provided in the café. Curated by Kattrin Deufert, Jeroen Peeters and Thomas Plischke, and co-ordinated by Barbara Raes from Vooruit, the space was opened up to explore 'queerness' which, in the press release, was described as "a series of strategies that oppose the conventional hetero-normative pattern that defines and marks sex, sexuality and gender, rather than as a delineated theory or attitude." This lack of a single delineation or definition for what constitutes 'queer' theory or practice meant that a diverse range of actions and interventions occurred under the title of a 72 hour 'queerathon'. Consequently during B-visible, and continuing after, (and no doubt preceding it too), differences, discussions and arguments focused on the types of 'queerness', if any, that manifested at the Vooruit. Although I don't want to put words in the mouths of those who were most vocally upset, one of the controversies was whether or not the participants were 'queer' (which for some meant gay or lesbian) and how or if this 'queerness' was represented and projected into the wider visual field of the city. Was the Vooruit itself queered and therefore did it show this queerness in a way that could be read by the inhabitants of the theatre and of Gent as a whole? What did 'queer' mean in this context and could it be used to mean anything else, in other contexts?

At the heart of this dispute is 'visibility'; showing, presenting, and marking and a correlative emphasis on definition both in terms of visually clear images and a limitation on meanings and readability. To define is to describe or delineate but also to present or discern a clear visual outline, and what was desired by some from this event was a clearly defined 'queerness' which could be seen and understood as evidence of alternate sexual identities and practices. I don't want to offer my final definition of 'queerness' here, or indeed anywhere else, since I think that 'queer' is about, at the least, a confusion and troubling of definitions (its 'original' English usage means strange or odd and therefore difficult to define, except as somehow a limit to definition) but I do want to explore the question of what became visually defined by the event, what showed up or out, what wasn't clear and what escaped the eye/I completely. After all, my participation in the event was by way of an invite from Sarma to both present a lecture but also to write 'observations' in order to document the event from the position of a writer/critic. There were however components of this event that could not be observed either because they purposefully didn't manifest themselves as a spectacle or because I did not and could not occupy a position outside of the event from which to adopt the scrutinising or scientific gaze that the word 'observe' suggests. The Vooruit did not operate as a panopticon, organising events for a singular viewing position, but confused, immersed and overwhelmed the process of 'observation' and this is my attempt to address but not define the optics of b-visible.

In the final few hours of the event I did go and occupy a traditional spectatorial role - I sat in a seat in the auditorium of the main theatre. As I looked onto the stage covered with beds, I saw the sleeping zone as a set for the first time whereas previously I had experienced it only as an occupant. As an installation it was quite beautiful with the low ultraviolet light making the white sheets shimmer but it was not simply an aesthetic experience since the stage was where I, and eighty other people, were living in that moment. The stage did not therefore mark the limits of where a performance was taking place or for whom but confused these divisions (after all I became aware that I was 'on show' whilst asleep, I was conscious of my performance of being unconscious) which resulted in a very ambivalent and liminal space. This ambiguity was explored by Claude Wampler's workshop, Strategies for Stagefright, which deliberately infected the intimacy of sleep with the theatricality of the space. On the second evening they silently moved around the beds and left markings on hands and feet sticking out of the covers, or left messages and tape recordings of sleep sounds: visible traces of a performance which was played for a sleeping audience - or perhaps it was an audience that had intervened in the performance of sleep. A documentary film shown the following day combined footage of this intervention, with what turned out to be fictionalised violations (such as stripping sleepers or sewing them to their sheets), further blurring the opposition between participant and audience, between the visible and unseen and also further displacing the certainty of being able to see what 'really' happens. On the final evening the workshop asked the theatre technicians to drop sheets from high up on the gantry and they photographed them as they fell - printouts of an image were then laid on the beds with the title 'Proof of Ghosts'. For me this had resonance with the entire event which was itself ghostly - it was never fully manifested but haunted the edges of visibility - what actually were we seeing? and what was it proof of? Queerness?

Part of what we did see were the 'invisible' workers of a theatre, and the 'ghost' performance by the technicians for Wampler's workshop was part of a wider shift to place the 'backstage' workers centre stage; Frankfurter Kueche technician Bernard Sissan constructed a performance machine in the bar area and Heine Avdal and Petra Roggel's Camouflage performance was to work in the bar during the event. The photographer Tomaz scattered multiple photographs of the many different people employed in the Vooruit throughout the building and every hour a bucket of badges with a B and the hour (from 1 to 72) was hidden somewhere in the building with the rumour of a prize for the most badges collected - the hunt integrated the staff of Vooruit into the event so that the artist/worker definition was blurred. One of my most pleasurable 'performances' was when technical director Peter Misschaert took Natasha Hassiotis and myself on an impromptu tour of the building and told us about it's history, communicating both an in-depth knowledge and an infectious love for the building. Whereas the usually unseen elements of theatre therefore became more visible, there were few traditional 'performances' to see, if at all. Alice Chauchat and Vera Knolle's Performing 'Performance' was perhaps the closest to a performance and yet it took the very contexts and definitions of 'performance' as its object and moved between rituals, games, conversations, dances and lip-synching. Presented as a work in progress it deconstructed its own appearance through an investigation of performative theory, deploying a witty and intelligent mixture of citations from theorists such as J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler with Dan Graham's performance work and Britney Spears 'live' in concert!. Chauchat's own work, simply titled 'Study', examined the transposition of pornstar poses onto three different bodies, and showed a 'rehearsal' process which didn't become a piece but was itself the work. This was repeated over the three days which allowed the observation of gender masquerade but also the subtle differences between individual bodies - indeed although Ugo Dehaes, Tom Plischke and Yasuo Akai were all men adopting 'feminine' poses their 'maleness' was not necessarily always the most important factor in their performance and the various permutations of the director/dancer relationship performed by the workshops was as interesting as the deconstruction of gender performance. The repetition of the work across different bodies and days created a context where elements of performance were made visible that are perhaps disavowed by a 'one-off' performance product. Up in the rafters of the attic, a slide installation by Kattrin Deufert and Thomas Plischke entitled Gender Studies, clicked slowly over the three days to illuminate the space with images of themselves wearing woollen tights lying alone in forests, glades and riverbeds. Their androgynous appearance and the ambiguity of both the location and the poses they adopted, suggested an unheimlich performance which unsettled both gender difference and the places of reality and fantasy in the representation of queered identities. Its durational aspect also meant that the spectator actively participated in the projection of fantasies of gendered morphology played out across the screen.

The general avoidance of 'product' and the exploration of 'event' and 'process' meant that debates over the visibility and recording of performance were raised by B-visible. Peggy Phelan's writing on performance in her collection 'Unmarked' has become something of a key text within performance studies and she champions the 'ontology of performance' as based in the live moment, outside of reproduction and representation. She states "live performance plunges into visibility - in a maniacally charged present - and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control."(1) Phelan argues that writing on performance is mistaken when it seeks to record what has happened since performance's existence in the present moment is strictly antithetical to repetition or recording. Heidi Gilpin has made similar claims suggesting that watching and writing about dancing is based in a series of displacements - the bodies of the dancers disappear to be displaced by their representation of 'movement' which is further displaced by the act of writing. She suggests that "we must begin not only to let the body go, but also to revel in its absence, and in the traces engendered by its passage from presence to absence."(2) Whilst I am indebted to these arguments they however require that a performance has in some sense 'taken place' whereas B-visible did not make anything fully 'plunge into visibility' and the performances did not necessarily obey the linearity of 'beginning, middle, end'. Writing about b-visible therefore I am unsure where or when the displacement starts or finishes.

Mark Franko focuses on Derrida's notion of 'the trace'(3) to suggest that "the disappearing presence of the trace- unrepeatable but not for that reason culturally irrecuperable - is the "being" of performance, its "once" as memorable."(4) For Franko the trace enables an understanding of dancing as an impermanent enactment or re-marking of space which is not brought to full presence but is meaningful in its absence. As Franko suggests, "Dance performs still non-existent social spaces constructed from the memory of what is not, and never was, under a false appearance of a present."(5) André Lepecki advances a similar argument when he suggests that dance performance invokes "the space of apparitions, of ghosts, of illusion in representation,"(6) and therefore this "choreographic play of invisibilities challenges the critical fetishism of thinking, writing and seeing dance as that which pertains only to the visual."(7) Lepecki suggests that memory is the key element both in dancing and in writing and both disappear, they move from visible to invisible but what can be seen is already defined by what is unseen; the specters of performance.

All of which leads us back to ghosts - according to Derrida the ghost appears in order to disappear, indeed the appearance is conditioned by both its past disappearance and its future disappearance - it is constituted through a deconstruction of, "the border between the present, and everything that can be opposed to it: absence, non-presence, non-effectivity, inactuality, virtuality, or even the simulacrum in general, and so forth."(8) If, as I am arguing here, B-visible was ghostly then the haunting of the Vooruit itself constituted a deconstructive queering - not only of the order of the unseen and seen but in terms of representation and presence. If 'queer' is defined as a demand to present oneself as a visible sign of homosexuality (and this is how it operates as an insult - it interpellates the queered subject as the visible limits of unmarked 'normality') then b-visible both repeated this ironically ('be visible, show yourself') and refused it (it did not show itself fully). Although some articulated a desire for 'proof' of queerness, (proof that it exists, that queers were present at the event), the proof is after all only the proof of ghosts, the seduction of the visible and its attempt to communicate full presence which is always already undermined by disappearances, traces and dematerializations. Of course invisibility is nothing new to queers but I am not sure that this event constituted a 'closeting' of homosexuality - it did not deny space for the representation of homosexuality but instead deconstructed the premise that full visibility can ever be achieved. Indeed B-visible suggests that a politics of ghosts might be more useful in queering the definition of sex, gender and identity.

In the last hours of the 7th, following my short performance as an audience member, I climbed the stairs of the auditorium to the Mokkabon at the top where "Viewing Films Publicly" was installed by Sabine Nessel, Birgit Kohler and Winifried Pauleit. They took archive film reels from Gent and played them continuously over the 72 hours, with only a 90 minute break each day for discussion - their intention was to reverse the usual timescale of a film experience but also to make visible these hidden records. I sat and watched extracts from the archive of the openings of art galleries, motorcycle stunt-team competitions, weddings and other ceremonies. Of what I saw, and understood (they had Dutch dialogue), it was all footage of important local and national rituals - indeed they seemed to be public performances. These people from the early 1970's seemed to adopt an awkward still pose whenever the camera framed them. Clearly they were not as used to film as we are today and they seemed to hold themselves so that they could be caught on film. The reanimation of these ghostly bodies was a flickering performance that was not really there, and indeed it drew attention to the notion of capturing, archiving and revisiting the past in the present - the performativity of documentation and the repetition of the performative moment.

I worked my way down the back stairs and went into the space that Nadia Schnock's workshop had used for 'The Performative Object' explorations - here I found again an archive of performances - there were polaroids laid out of the participants trying on clothes and merging into polymorphous assemblages of limbs and torsos like the perverse doll-like figures of the Chapman brothers, Pierre Molinier or Hans Belmer. I didn't see these 'live' objects but instead caught the trace through the documentation that had been left behind. Stephanie Wenner's workshop on 'Horizons' also left some documentation of their activities in the form of an installation of video and text in the café, part of which plotted a chart from a questionnaire regarding horizons with the chart itself forming a horizon. The other workshops though remained invisible to me - perhaps I wasn't looking hard enough, or in the right places, or perhaps they simply did not become visible to an external viewpoint. Documentation seemed to be a large part of the event although it was never simply about recording - there were archivists from Sarma at the lectures and discussions who were recording and transcribing throughout the 72 hours but also many of the other events either performed or provided their own documentation. Some, like the discursive tents set up for discussions of 'queer theory' or for conversations, broadcast a live archive of speech via the radios scattered throughout the Vooruit, while other projects such as Yasuo Akai's photo/e-mail exhibit 'Re:turn letters (2)/(trans)late', Pierre Rubio's video viewing workshop 'D.H.L.' and Sinisa Ilic & Bojan Djordjev's slideshow 'B-ing in the desert of PICTURE' explored queer identifications through textual and visual archives.

Boris Groys has argued recently that the emphasis on the documentation of art work, as opposed to the presentation of a final product, has shifted the location and perception of art - "it makes it clear that art in this case is no longer present and immediately visible but rather absent and hidden…art documentation is neither the making present of a past art event nor the promise of a coming artwork but the only form of reference to an artistic activity that cannot be represented in other ways."(9) Again, the artwork becomes spectral - it is neither fully visible nor fully invisible (even if is only its 'absence' that becomes visible) and its time and place are not ordered according to past, present and future but through repetitions and returns. Documentation as ghost-writing therefore does not set out to force a manifestation of 'art' nor to exorcise its troubling ghostliness but engages with the spectrality of performance. Derrida suggests that a 'hauntological' enquiry is one which attempts to speak with ghosts and remain welcome to their repetition and return. The materialisation of hegemonic norms requires and instances a simultaneous dematerialisation of exclusions that nevertheless constitute those norms - "Hegemony still organises the repression and thus the confirmation of a haunting. Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony."(10) Although Derrida does not deal directly with either gender or performance (although he does engage the ghosts of Hamlet), it could be argued that a 'hauntology' should be 'queer' because it has to welcome the excluded abject figures that haunt gender hegemony. It does not welcome them in order to define them, either visually or symbolically, but precisely to allow a disruption of the ordering of appearances and the privileging of the heterosexual matrix which ,although unseen, attempts to control the visual field and the position of the eye/I. I would suggest that, in spite of the differences and difficulties, indeed because of them, B-visible was both a space for the return of 'queerness' and the rethinking of the space of performance; a queer hauntology which evoked the performativity of definition but playfully resisted being defined.