JONATHAN BOLLEN
The Somatic Rupture: Jonathan Bollen's Queer Kinesthesia Performance Studies • Cultural Analysis In his seminal essay "Queer Kinesthesia: Performativity on the Dance Floor" (2001), published within Jane C. Desmond’s landmark anthology Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage , Australian theater and performance scholar Jonathan Bollen provides a rigorous material defense of the dance floor. Grounded in the subcultural landscape of late-1990s Sydney—specifically the monumental scale of the Mardi Gras Party and the Sleaze Ball—Bollen shifts the analytical lens from cultural text to somatic practice, examining what gay men and lesbians are actually doing when they move together. Bollen’s primary intervention is a critique of early queer theory's over-reliance on linguistic models of performativity. While post-structuralist frameworks frequently treated bodily identity as a text to be read or a discursive sign to be decoded, Bollen asserts that th...