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The figure of Salome and the image of her dance have had a particular appeal. They have been taken up by a long list of cultural producers such as Oscar Wilde, Alla Nazimova, Loie Fuller, Aida Walker, or - in a modified version - by the choreographer Yvonne Rainer. Even amid violent social circumstances such as colonial history, homophobia, and Taylorism, the figure of Salome appears to have made it possible to live and fantasize about sexuality and gender outside gender binarism and heteronormativity. This text traces the denormalizing use of the Salome story as a 'desubjectivating mode of subjectivation.' First, appropriations of Salome are approached as 'drag,' or more specifically as 'trans-temporal drag,' which engages with queer chronopolitics seeking to intervene in the self-constitution of western modernity as heterosexual, civilized, and advanced. This does not so much produce any identity or fixed meaning, but ramer dissolves or 'destroys' the connections to fixed identity, to normalization and evidence. Second, I introduce the film installation 'Salomania,' my own artistic reenactment of the Salome story, by which a reflexive gaze is cast on the method of 'queer archeology' mat would make it possible to 'dig up' mese simultaneously destructive and altered practices today for future use.
Scene 1 (1:35 min.):
A person, adult, but still young, with long black hair pulled into a ponytail, enters the room through a door. The camera follows him to where he is standing in front of a microphone, directly facing the camera. He is wearing a white t-shirt with a large face printed on it in black. He begins speaking:
My name is Oscar Wilde,
the whole country knows me.
I choose my friends for their beauty
and my enemies for their intelligence.
On my grave in Paris it is written,
famous for his play Salome and other literary work.
I don 't hide my male lovers. When the situation in town is getting tense,
I go to the colonies, spend the winter in Morocco, where
l ean do as I please.
l am Alia Nazimova.
l am shooting the film Salome.
I am forty-five, and, as you notice by my accent,
lam a Russian immigrant.
I am the richest actress in Hollywood.
Hove women, I don 't hide it....