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Post by tannis on Oct 23, 2009 11:27:51 GMT
Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory by Deborah M. Withers
This is the first press release for Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory, which will be published by HammerOn Press in March 2010. Let me know what you think!
A new book, Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory by Deborah M. Withers, that provides the first in-depth engagement with the philosophy of Kate Bush’s music, is being published in March 2010.
Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory will present Kate Bush as you have never seen her before. Here is the polymorphous perverse Kate, the witchy Kate, the queer Kate; the Kate who moves beyond the mime.
Since Bush burst into the public eye in 1978, her fans and admirers have been fascinated by the endless mysteries of her music. She is a pop star whose brain and imagination have inspired, delighted and comforted millions. Former Sex Pistol John Lydon recently said that Bush ‘supplies me with all the clues and it’s up to me put the answers together’ [BBC Queens of Pop (2009)]. Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory is one personal response to these clues. Written by a queer woman in her late 20s, its answers are delivered in a unique way.
Through in-depth readings of the often critically neglected works of Bush’s career (The Kick Inside, Lionheart, The Dreaming, The Red Shoes and her film The Line, the Cross and the Curve), Withers guides the reader through the complexity of Bush’s art and how it transformed popular culture.
Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory makes theory accessible to new audiences. Drawing on cutting edge feminist philosophy, critical theory and queer studies, the author uses Bush’s music to demonstrate how these often abstract ideas can be applied to everyday life. Through rigorous analysis of the music, film, video and dance of Kate Bush, it breaks down boundaries between the academic and popular, showing that theory can be sordid, funny and relevant – despite what most people think.
Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory is being published by HammerOn Press, a publishing company set up by Withers herself. She is capitalising on the latest developments in print-on-demand (POD) technology and the economic recession, two important factors which are seeing more and more aspiring authors turn to self-publishing as a way to get their work published and widely read.
Self-publishing using POD technology is also attractive since it carries a low carbon footprint – books are literally only printed when somebody orders one. Simply put, with POD technology, publishing books has never been cheaper, easier or more ethical.
Lesbo ASBOlesboasbo.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/adventures-in-kate-bush-and-theory-press-release-draft-1/see more:
THE KICK INSIDE: An Erotic Attachment...katebush.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=kickinside&action=display&thread=1679&page=2
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Post by Barry SR Gowing on Oct 25, 2009 10:33:52 GMT
Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory will present Kate Bush as you have never seen her before. Here is the polymorphous perverse Kate, the witchy Kate, the queer Kate; the Kate who moves beyond the mime. This could be very interesting. It could also be a "car crash" if the author is just superimposing her own viewpoint onto what she thinks Kate is. The "polymorphous perverse Kate". That should be polymorphously perverse, by the way. I personally love the idea of a polymorphously perverse Kate  but I wouldn't impose my Kate-inspired notions onto a serious book about her. The "witchy Kate". It's hard to argue with that one! The "queer Kate". I suppose it depends on one's definition of "queer", doesn't it? Kate's not a lesbian, although she obviously appeals to the gay subculture, but then "queer" goes beyond just being gay these days. I do wonder where the author is going to get this from. The "Kate who moves beyond the mime". This could do with a bit more explanation. I know a bit about mime and the theatre (well, my degree says that I do), but beyond suggesting that Kate uses movement as an expressive form I'm a bit stumped. Ethical? I'd never thought of publishing as being unethical. You can take that sort of thing too far, you know. Everything that humans do is natural ... it's just us occupying our evolutionary niche. An elephant destroys nearly half a ton of vegetation every day just walking around- not including what they eat - that's many times more resources than we humans go through - does that make elephants unethical? No, of course not. They are just being elephants, just as we are just being humans. --Paul-- |
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Post by tannis on Oct 25, 2009 20:27:48 GMT
Yes, Paul, Withers' Kate Pod could be an interesting read, or, as you say, it could be a "car crash" with the author merely 'body-snatching' KaTe for her own queer agenda!  Still, it will be interesting to see Kate Bush as you have never seen her before, through the eyes of Debbie Withers' personal response... Withering Heights... 
"[T]he first in-depth engagement with the philosophy of Kate Bush’s music" sounds pretty impressive, but I have no idea what she means! Is she referring to Kate's supposed paganism, or feminism, or Wagnerism? etc... 
Regarding the ethical question, I guess Withers is referring to the material means of production used by publishers, whether the sourced wood is ethically managed, etc. But the content of what is being published also defines its ethical standing. Self-publishing using POD technology needn't be ethical at all, but I suppose it is more ecologically sensitive than those darn elephants!
Withers has already written on the 'queer' identity diffusion of Lionheart, how it moves beyond the mime to challenge boundaries of gendered ‘correctness’. And it will be fun to see how the author now uses Bush to show that theory can be "sordid, funny and relevant" ... ;D Creation, loss and subversion.
Whether or not a woman performing a number of gendered positions is a subversive act, is the question I turn to in order to finish these explorations. It is clear that using performance enabled Bush to explore a number of different gendered positions and these complemented her textual strategies that arguably open up and blur gendered space (‘In Search of Peter Pan’ here being an exemplary example). In many ways this structural re-ordering of time, space, body and positions are what enable new gendered embodiments to become a legitimate part of the cultural imaginary.
However, I think it is best to be cautious when considering the question of how subversive gender performance is. Is it really the most effective means of resistance to binary gender regimes? The critique I have in mind here is of Judith Butler’s notion of subversive repetition, which emerged as a critical category in her 1990 text, Gender Trouble. Butler argued that heteronormativity and binary gender are maintained and affirmed in culture largely through the fact that they are constantly being repeated and thus they have, over time, become thoroughly normalised within the structures that we live in. Subversive repetition, on the other hand, is a means by which the canny subject can contort and disrupt the dominant forms of gendered behaviour. She asked in this text, ‘What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?’27 Convincing as this idea sounds, our only power as subjects lies in our ability to subvert, not create. It is important now to question how subversive repetition limits the possibility of agency for the subject and ask what alternatives are there for resistance that we can theorise which enable and affirm the creation of new gendered positions?
As Edward Davies observes, subversively repeating gender through performance or representation, does ‘predict[..] the possibility of creating new sexual identities although it remains to formulate how this might be done.' He goes on to emphasise that the use of such a tactic ‘may indeed take a very long time to establish,’ what Bernice Hausman has called the ‘slow accrual’30 of the effects of Butler’s subversive repetition. Given how lengthy a process of continually repeating one’s gender in a subversive way would be within this framework, it seems to me highly problematic to accept this as the revolutionary end of radical gender theory. The subject’s potential to have an effect upon the world around them is often what is glaringly omitted from this theorization, as Annabelle Willox summarises: ‘for Butler, we cannot escape the gender system; we can only subvert it through visible transgression.’
That is why it is dangerous to automatically read the ability to play with one’s gender as radical or subversive, especially if parody and subversion signpost the total extent of a subject’s agency and opportunity to resist normative gender roles and identity categories - within Butler’s theatre we are still very much contained within the prison of gender. The structure of exclusion and segregation that subversive acts are graining against, still maintains a lot of power and this structure has far more capacity to ‘renew’ itself through autonomously operating repetitions such as: institutions, laws, narratives, ‘hetero-visibility’ and ‘normality’. Subversion can be a necessary and fun part of day to day life, but it can also be painful too, with the threats of violence and social exclusion being the penalty for those who wish to tread a different path to that of the norm. Therefore, it is really important to keep the possibility of creating new genders and sexualities open, not merely subverting old models. Subversion here can be compared to a process of making structures shudder by knocking against them in the hope that one day they will break.
Annabelle Willox has further critiqued Butler’s idea by arguing that it implicitly relies on a binary structure for their intelligibility and workability. Referring to Butler’s use of a butch identity to exemplify the visible crossing that subverts binary gender, she argues that ‘Butler's theory relies on this crossing to exemplify the construction and performative nature of gender, yet her reliance upon crossing implicitly relies upon a binary structure that denies the autonomy of [other possible] identity[ies]’ There is no room within Butler’s framework for the creation of different gendered embodiments – the possibility of a butch identity being an autonomous identity in itself is actually an impossibility. Its existence functions merely to display the crossing and deviation from dominant gendered models of appropriate femininity.
This critique pointedly reveals how Butler’s theory is limited because it is simply not generative and in fact denies creativity and difference. We could argue that it re-enforces rather than subverts the ‘regulatory practice of identity itself.’ Butler’s admission that ‘gender norms are finally phantasmatic, impossible to embody’ further underlines this point – the route to revolution for Butler, is through the lack and loss of gender not through the multiplicity of possibilities that can be accessed by creating different gendered embodiments. Why is the loss of gender not an acceptable thing to desire? It seems that the only genders that we lose under the Butlerian frame are the models of patriarchal, heteronormative binary masculinity/ femininity – we do not lose all the possible other genders and sexualities by positing this state of gender loss, because their potential to be created in the first instance has been radically circumscribed. It seems far better to have the opportunity to have many choices than sink back into just the one, genderless body for, is that not the model of the liberal humanist subject anyway?
The important point that I wish to underline here is that no matter how much fun and tactically necessary ‘performativity’ can be; it does not place enough emphasis on the individual’s power to be an agent and facilitate change. It places too much emphasis on a pre-determined structure that we can just about peel back the edges of, by subverting it. In its defence however, ‘performativity’ does allow for movement between categories and this vehicle for thinking and acting is something that should not be abandoned completely.
However, embodying and creating new and different gendered embodiments enables distinct fleshed and subjective experiences to be included into the structure of cultural reality. This will also benefit people because it simply creates more space: psychical, bodily, desire and many more that are yet to be discovered. There is an emphasis on our capacity to imagine new positions to speak from; positions, which are not dragged back and mapped onto the original and hierarchical binary. This binary still exists even if Butler insists in her theory that gender is an imitation for which there is no original. The important thing is, if we choose to explore a path of difference, beyond or outside the prison of gender, then we don’t have to choose between models of resistant thinking in the final instant of conclusion: ‘performativity’ can be just another form of difference, whose tools we can call upon when we need them most.
It should be clear from my exploration through some of the queerest aspects of Bush’s musical career that she deploys both strategies in order to stretch the possibilities of expression accorded to a female singer, songwriter, and performer within a popular music market in the late 1970s. Certainly, her work can be understood as a form of subversive repetition because the transgressive gender performances on the album can be played repeatedly if we choose to do this. However, I would argue that the inhabitation and exploration of differently gendered speaking positions is not merely performative, as this model privileges only the visible crossing of gender as the ‘successful’ moment of resistance. As I have been at pains to elaborate, there is little, if any, attempt to do this – the crossing and destabilisation of gender occurs within the musical text. This crossing is engineered by creating spaces of doubt and speculation within the narrative arrangement that can be detected on ‘In Search of Peter Pan’ and through the musical and vocal transvestism of ‘Wow,’ ‘Hammer Horror’ and ‘Coffee Homeground.’ The rearrangement of gendered space on these songs offers the listener the possibility to imagine and create yet-to-be defined subjectivities that move far beyond the limitations of binary gender. Therefore Bush’s ‘crossing’ on Lionheart is always embodied and structural and cannot be reduced to surface change.
from: Debi Withers (2006), 'Kate Bush: Performing and Creating Queer Subjectivities on Lionheart.'www.iiav.nl/ezines//web/Nebula/2009/No1/nobleworld/Withers.pdf
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but I wouldn't impose my Kate-inspired notions onto a serious book about her. 
Still, it will be interesting to see Kate Bush as you have never seen her before, through the eyes of Debbie Withers' personal response... Withering Heights... 
