(performative?) audio experimentation

Denise: Some of you may remember this series of audio tracks beneath my video footage from last quarter. In some sense, I think it was more successful as an audio piece. I've tried to think about this in terms of Bruzzi, Brecht, etc. and my ramblings are below.



For this audio experimentation piece, I have decided to focus on a series of reflexive interviews that I conducted one year ago. From these, I have created an audio collage in order to represent some of the patterns I have noticed across interviews. I have organized these patterns meticulously within this piece to tell a story about how men begin to reconceptualize masculinity in ways that attempt to subvert gender binaries and hegemonic norms. The story is one that is complex. I consider these complexities through a media form intended to be slightly incoherent, blurry, and full of contradictions.


My research involves listening to, documenting, and analyzing a lot of stories. Inevitably, I reproduce these stories through some medium—be it text, film, photograph, audio, or some combination—in order to communicate my research, ideas, and findings to a broader audience. This means that ultimately, I am in a precarious position of representation. Currently, I am grappling with how re-presentation of stories involves creating new realities of my informants. In an article by, Tania Hammidi (2000), she suggests that we need to complicate how we “listen to” our texts. For me, this means finding new ways of listening to the stories of my research participants. In my audio piece, I have taken this idea and applied it to how we represent our texts, and in this case, how I represent interview texts. In experimenting with new forms of representing stories, my aim is to create a kind of sensory experience that helps the audience to listen in new ways. However, in this created audio piece, my own ear is very present. I have carefully adjusted audio levels, background noise, and selected very specific interview fragments to communicate the ideas that I would like the audience to hear. However, I am working towards something multi-dimensional. I hope that in the multi-layered audio form, different people listening to this piece will have different experiences—that is, different people will hear different things.


Through this piece, I reflect upon how a feminist perspective on Brecht’s ([1957] 1964) Verfremdungseffekt, as a representation “which allows us to recognize the subject, but at the same time makes it unfamiliar” (p. 192), might inform our understanding of performative documentary media. Here, I consider Stella Bruzzi’s (2006) explanation of the performative documentary mode as one intended “to draw attention to the impossibilities of authentic documentary representation… [as] an alienating, distancing device, not one which actively promotes identification and a straightforward response to a film’s content” (p. 185). For this particular project, I am exploring how performative documentary might include documentary media forms beyond film, such as audio. Furthermore, I am interested in how the alienation effect works through the content of my piece to bring attention to commonly understood subject matter (wearing clothes), while simultaneously distancing the listener (wearing clothes in marked ways—that is, non-hegemonic articulations of style). This is grounded in Brecht’s notion of “alienating the familiar” (p. 192). Additionally, I am interested in how the form of the audio collage pits moments of recognition (statements that one can actually hear) against alienating incomprehensibility (statements that trail off into indecipherable audio noise). Brecht explains that the alienation effect “is just a widely practised way of drawing one’s own or someone else’s attention to a thing… [and] consists in turning the object of which one is made aware, to which one’s attention has is to be drawn, from something ordinary, familiar, immediately accessible, into something peculiar, striking, and unexpected” (p. 143). Through both content and form of the audio collage, I am working to transform familiarity into something strange.

The Furkini

Denise: This is a short clip I've been working on, which is about a very special garment known as the furkini. It is a garment that is gifted during the Burning Man festival. Here are some of my musings (and perhaps a little background) about gifted adornments in general, and the furkini, in particular:

Gifting Clothing at Burning Man

The gift is an important component of the Burning Man experience, and symbolizes a redressing of an economically driven society. However, it is easy to criticize such attempts, as fashion theorist Elizabeth Wilson (2000) reminds us, that like other oppositional groups throughout history, “their attempt to subvert the dominant ideologies… [use] the very mass consumption means that constitute or contribute to these ideologies” (p. 204). Similarly, Burning Man participants embrace consumerism in order to make gifts that allow them to subvert consumerism in the ephemeral moment of the festival. Nonetheless, the spontaneous and temporal act of gifting affirms the community’s counter-capitalist narrative.

On a more intimate scale, the gift allows strangers to interact and collaboratively construct daily appearances at the festival. Many gifts given are adornments: necklaces, garments, scarves, goggles, or forms of body painting. This two-person collaboration is unique in that the story of the gift (how it was made, what it is made of, what it might mean, where it is from, and the story of the maker) combines with the story of the recipient. The Burning Man experience is thus materialized and memorialized through gifts given and received, and these eventually become mnemonic devices to the wearer once they are re-introduced into what Burners call the "default world" and everyday appearances.

In some cases, the gift is intended to be transformative. When discussed in interviews, “transformative adornments” were almost always are spoken of in reference to men. Large-scale theme camps, such as the Black Rock Boutique and Kostume Kult, provide primarily women’s clothing to Burners. In interviews with members of both camps, they discussed the importance of "getting men out of their khakis and t-shirts and into more exciting clothing." Furthermore, there was an indication that men tended to be more reserved, especially if it was their first year or first day to the festival. While the clothing is the material gift, there was a feeling that the real gift was the freedom accompanying that initial transgression of gender norms.

Another theme camp called Camp Furkini--on a much smaller scale--frames its mission as one of transforming men’s experience of dress at the festival. Each year, Camp Furkini makes 50 garments (“furkinis”) to give out to men.



The furkini is certainly a fascinating garment for a number of reasons. Perhaps because it is a contemporary codpiece? Or maybe because it hearkens to a primitive, caveman-like aesthetic? Or is it because its shape is incredibly masculine, yet it is so revealing of the male body (which is more often concealed by clothing)? The colors, often in bright pinks, blues, and reds tend to be those classified as feminine in western culture. Furthermore, it is interesting how sexuality is complicated by the furkini. Made, designed, and manufactured by gay men, it tends to be most popular with straight men. As James’s partner and co-furkini-maker, Mertz, explained to me, “It’s the straight guys that really love the furkini” (hypothesizing that this was because of their fashion repression in the everyday world). The furkini problematizes, like many other Burning Man outfits, the complex relationships among masculinity, sexuality, and appearance. The story the furkini tells is that it’s ok for men to feel sexy in their clothes, no matter what their sexual orientation, outward appearance, or relative manliness. Furthermore, it carries with it a narrative of democratization, that all men may appear manly, well endowed, and look fabulous at the same time. These narratives are both intimately constituted through the giving and receiving of the garment. James and his partner, Mertz, develop close relationships with the men (and often their girlfriends, too), who receive the furkini. Recipients keep in touch and send photographs of themselves in the furkini, both in public and private spaces. As one recipient wrote to them later in the year, “I can’t take it off; I wear it all the time. Please send washing instructions.”

Vandana: ...this is a clip from an upcoming piece i am thinking about called 'Butter Dosa'. 'Butter Dosa' is an ethnographic film that explores issues of migration and nostalgia through recollections and preperations of the South Indian cuisine, dosa. Following South Asian migrants of the 1965 Immigration Act era in New York City- as they speak about and make dosa-this film argues that everday practices centered around this food become a vehicle for challenging long-held conceptions about national territory, belonging and identity. Visualizing theory 'Butter Dosa' is an ethnography that also explores the ways in which trends in global migration are being appropirated on the ground through the reconfiguration of the homeland via food, thus adding to the theoretical writing on migration, nation-making, and nostalgia