contact information
To contact us for joint presentations, performances, installations, program reviews, and workshops:
Jackie Rhodes
skype: profjrhodes
Jonathan Alexander
skype: profjalexander
“Once queer subjects begin to speak…” With what do they speak? We conclude not with conclusion, but with suggestion, with gesture, with a return to the body in the metaphor of the tongue, moving from Adrienne Rich’s generality of a “dream of a common language” to the specificity of Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied, for in the tongue we find a robust metonym of our struggle, our critique, our possibility. The queer tongue, long denied its utterances, long disciplined by legislation and normalization, long in the making of critique and the construction of queer identities, of queer particularities, of queer taste. The tongue contains our histories, and our possibilities. We have variously been tongue tied and twisted. We have bitten our tongues, but also gestured tongue-in-cheek through camp, spoken in the tongues of innuendo and insinuation, longed for a mother tongue, a tongue untied, and found just as often the tongue bath, the deep-throated kissing that articulates the desires of the body in its annunciation of alternatives to your lives, your limited languages. We are these tongues, so many tongues, speaking, depressed, suppressed, repressed, but still expressed in the plays of power that twist and bite, but also lick and delight. We reserve our right to be mouthy, to spit, to eat fire, to do things that we are not supposed to do with our mouths and tongues. Our tongues know the death of silences, the dead in the silences, but also the living loving taste of pleasures in the dark and the light. We crash your party, take our seats at your table, never hesitating to critique your setting, your taste, and daring you to expand your palate/palette, if you’d only let us. We’ll do so anyway, licking our lips with delight, for the tongue is speech in the body and the body in speech, the smack of desire in the licking of those lips, inviting, teasing, denying, connecting, kissing—but not always the Judas’ kiss you offer, but sometimes—sometimes—the kiss of recognition in difference, of delight in what you don’t know. O taste and see how good, how very very good this difference is, this tongue can be.
