Save the date: Palari #3

A critical discussion on queer curatorship with Asterios Touvlatzis and Julius Thissen.

Join us on November 3rd to discuss queer curatorship and queering the museum space. Our guests Julius Thissen and Asterios Touvlatzis will tell you about their respective practices as queer museum professionals and researchers, after which you will be challenged to speculate on queer museum spaces and queer curation together. Whether you are a museum professional yourself, an avid museum visitor or have no interest in visiting a museum whatsoever, you are welcome to join our discussion and visualize the queer museum.

We are very pleased to announce that Palari is now supported by Cultuurfonds! Thanks to their support we are able to keep organizing our bimonthly salons for the rest of the season. We’ll keep you up to date about next editions, check back soon!

Agenda

• October 5th: Activism Intro Fair, Noorderplantsoen, Groningen

• November 3rd: Palari #3, Grand Theatre, Groningen

• November 14th and 15th: Our Exquisite Corpse at What You See Festival, Theater Kikker, Utrecht.

Discount code: Coerced & Freely Given, Merel Severs

Grand Theatre is offering another discount for followers of The Pink Cube!

After her much-acclaimed performance Try not to know what you know, Merel delves deeper into the relationship between care, violence, exhaustion and resilience in Coerced & Freely Given. Joined by performers Milou van Duijnhoven and Princess Isatu Hassan Bangura, she brings another blistering performance with her signature energy. The trio questions the existing capitalist, patriarchal system and explores a world of intense physical effort versus gentle connection. How can nurture and interconnectedness form an active rebellion against the dominant norms in our society? As raunchy hits turn into tender embraces, the performers transform the stage into an evocative landscape of potentiality.

In Coerced & Freely Given, Merel puts the body under pressure with both discipline and pleasure. With the actors, she fights for radical softness and together they celebrate being human in all its complexity, full of emotions and impulsiveness.

Lesbians with swords!

Chappell Roan and Julie D’Aubigny

_{Arlo van Lierop}

I know Iris wrote about lesbian hands last time but I am very chronically online and tapped into pop culture and because of that I want to talk about Chappell Roan. She cancelled a couple of her European shows, including the Amsterdam one, to rehearse for the VMA’s which took place on September 12th. A lot of angry fans, a lot of social media backlash. Until the actual performance happened and all seemed to be forgotten.

Chappell appears in front of what looks like a mansion, wearing chain mail armor and holding a crossbow with a burning arrow. The guards open the gate for her, she slowly walks out, turns around and shoots the arrow at the mansion, setting it on fire. She then performs Good Luck, Babe!, waving around swords while the building burns down behind her. The setting is too specific to not be rife with historical references, and many fans have logically drawn the comparison to Joan of Arc. I see the resemblance but I’m afraid the homage is much more likely to point to the opera singing, sword fighting, bisexual, hot-tempered, cross-dressing 17^th century noblewoman Julie D’Aubigny, an infinitely more chaotic and unhinged historical figure.

Good Luck, Babe! is about what queer people call compulsory heterosexuality, or comp-het. The woman Chappell sings about is a former lover who ended up pushing her homosexuality away deep enough to marry a man and live a sheltered, privileged life as a heterosexual woman, (“you’re nothing more than his wife”), forever lying to herself about her true identity. In more extreme cases of comp-het people never even figure out they’re attracted to the same gender because they are too conditioned to see a heterosexual life as the only possible future.

Julie D’Aubigny’s father was the secretary of the comte d’Armagnac, or the Master of the Horse to King Louis XIV. She was technically married to a man, monsieur Maupin. She didn’t seem all too interested in him, though, as she ran off with her fencing instructor as soon as monsieur Maupin was sent off to a job abroad. The duo made a small living by giving fencing demonstrations and, eventually, Julie joined the opera in Marseilles. She had learned some typically ‘masculine’ skills while growing up in the court of Versailles, like sword fighting and horseback riding, which made her pick up the habit of wearing men’s clothing. So while on the run with her fencing instructor, her fashion sense and undeniable skill warranted accusations of lying about being a woman (some things never change). On top of this she caught the eye of a young woman in the audience at the opera, whom she began a relationship with. The girl’s parents were horrified and sent the girl away to a convent to stop the two from being together. But Julie wasn’t about to let that happen. Buckle up: she managed to weasel her way into the convent, steal the body of a dead nun, place it on the bed in her lover’s room, set the room on fire and run away with her ‘dead’ girlfriend amidst the chaos, the convent burning to the ground behind them. After being on the run together for several months Julie and her girlfriend were caught, and Julie was sentenced in absentia to death by fire. Very fitting. She still managed to escape her fate for years and is believed to have passed away in 1707 at age 33, but not before kissing several women and beating several men in duels.

Almost all stories about Julie D’Aubigny, and there are so many more, need to be taken with a grain of salt. 18^th century France isn’t known for its tolerance of lesbian women and many writings on Julie’s life can be assumed to be influenced by this attitude. (Kaz Rowe made a great video on Julie D’Aubigny’s life that addresses this.) While it is undeniable that Julie D’Aubigny was a woman who loved women, was really good at sword fighting and had a bit of a temper, the savage madwoman she is sometimes portrayed as in these historical records might have been in an effort to demonize her more. It is up to us to believe if the story of lesbian arson is true, but at least it makes for an incredible setting at the VMA’s.