“Stay cool, stay calm, you have the right to remain silent. / Don’t run, don’t resist, and get that badge number.”
So goes the catchy and campy tune performed by Circus Amok! that teaches people what to do when they are stopped and frisked by police. A “New York-based, one ring, no animal, queerly-situated, political circus spectacular,” Circus Amok! has been touring since 1989 to bring free shows to NYC parks. Exploring topics that include citizenship and healthcare access, the circus educates audiences on social justice issues through vivacious performances that involve acrobats, puppeteers, and stilt dancers. Circus Amok! founder and Pratt Associate Professor Jennifer Miller delivered an afternoon keynote address at the Scholar & Feminist Conference on Utopia, in which she talked about queer pedagogies in public spaces. Viewing Circus Amok! as a locus of solidarity and education, Miller looked to performance as an enactment of utopia.
At Circus Amok! the bearded woman is the ringmaster, not the sideshow. In queering the circus, Miller has revealed the potentiality of queer pedagogy. She advocates employing the body in queering performance work. Queer stylings of the body through song and dance disrupt the normalized (i.e., racialized, classed, gendered, etc.) terms of engagement in public spaces. The Pratt professor of performance extends this thinking to the classroom, where she destabilizes heteronormativity to create a welcoming, inclusive space, where students are “all out [of the closet].” In this genderqueer classroom, Miller advises her students to learn with their bodies—to “[try] on different gendered behaviors” and “stretch” in new directions.
In her keynote address Miller exposed the utopic possibilities of enacting queer pedagogies. Circus Amok! participants stand up not with a traditional, masculine strength, but a queer one that employs the body to produce what Miller calls “a campy f— you.” In the same vein, Miller’s students challenge their racism, homophobia, etc., in the classroom when they unfasten prevailing and limiting notions of gender and sexuality through deliberate challenges to the corporeal. These pedagogies, in effect, embody Miller’s feminist utopia. They inhabit a queer world and share tools of survival and resistance. They liberate space and people by queering approach. They are kinetic and accessible. For Miller, queer pedagogies constitute “a horizon imbued with potentiality,” a performance of utopia.
Michelle Chen is a sophomore majoring in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies with a concentration on Race and Ethnicity at Barnard College. She is a Research Assistant at BCRW.
Related:
- The Multiple Futures of Gender and Sexuality Studies [VIDEO]
- Art with intention: visions of newness and reform
- New Feminist Solutions Volume 7: Desiring Change