Özev, Cemre

This paper aims to investigate performance art (PA, hereafter) as a way of political activism by using phenomenological approach from a feminist vantage point. The focus of the study is performance pieces of queer/feminist performance artists (including myself) which are collaborative and ritualistic in their structure. Collaborative performance pieces put the agent in a unique ontological position in which the artwork is determined and altered through the intersubjective relations carried out between the performer and the participant while it paves way for emergence of creativity and transgressive intimacy. The questions I address in this paper are (i) whether the relation within a safe space where participants experience autonomy can be constructive and consequential for their experience; and (ii) what its political signification is. Politics of PA suggests an active resistance to normative performativity in everyday life together with creating a third-space which subverts social boundaries where participant and performer can transgress binaries of oppositionality and, where their experience is shaped with and by each other. Meaning of the safe space and possibility of schism from societal constructions (gender, sex, race, political affiliations etc.) for the agents in question will be investigated along with subversive potential of PA as political action. PA creates fluctuations on the system of repression. It alters audience’s position to an active participant; invites them to explore their own experiences; and suggests a subversive openness, where a shift in perspective can emerge with an intervention of feminist political discourse. PA and its positionality as a political act is understudied in philosophy.

Here, I aim to study feminist PA and its intersections with politics from a phenomenological point of view, while also suggesting something for praxis which existing literatures lacks.

Cemre Özev is a feminist queer graduate student, activist and performance artist from Turkey and currently undertaking her graduate studies at Central European University, at the Philosophy department along with Advanced Certificate in Political Thought Program. Her research concerns include socio-political philosophy, feminist philosophy, phenomenology, aesthetics, and performance studies. She completed her BA in Philosophy with a minor in Film Studies at Boğaziçi University in 2019. Throughout her studies, activism and human rights advocacy became major part of her life; and combines her scholarly interests with the experiences aiming to suggest a positive outcome for creative political action. She had been part of research groups, contributed to writing of humanitarian reports about human rights violations of Turkish State with collaboration of other civic agents &NGOs; She presented in several conferences and has published in one of the most respected philosophy magazines in Turkey, Cogito. Now, she is writing her thesis on interrelations of performance art and feminist political activism.

• Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: the Politics of Performance. Routledge, 2017.
• Soja, Edward. “Afterword.” Stanford Law Review, vol. 48, no. 5, 1996, pp. 1421–1429. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1229393. Accessed 25 Oct. 2020.
• Forte, Jeanie K. “Women's Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism.” Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, by Sue-Ellen Case, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997.

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