Rethinking illness through performance: The gaze and the aesthetics of health in Charles Burns' Black Hole

Abstract

Abstract Focusing on the relation Charles Burns' Black Hole weaves between identity, illness, performance and desire, this article reads in Black Hole a celebration of perversion as its own epistemic structure as it simultaneously exposes the possibilities opened up by performance for a re-articulation of abnormality as a positive identity whose own idiosyncratic value can, in turn, become a site of investment for new individual and cultural forms of desire. Narrating the story of a group of American teenagers whose community is prey to a sexually transmitted disease, which visibly transforms the body of its host through the addition of extraordinary appendages, Black Hole opens up the experience of sickness to the notion of performance. Multiplying the set of responses available to the subject, it promotes an idiosyncratic understanding of illness as an identity while cultivating an understanding of the latter as the solidification of a specific mode of performance. Exploring the ways in which the two contrary practices of dissimulation and voluntary spectacularization embodied by Burns' protagonists signal new possible spaces of resistance to the visual dominance of the medical apparatus and its identificatory discourse, this article exposes how the willful appropriation of the sick identity and its correlative self-objectification force the re-articulation of the unidirectional relation set up by the gaze as a bidirectional mode of address in which both actors participate in the constitution of desire. Reading in Burns' portrayal of Eliza a positive and active embrace of monstrosity as its own form of identity and a disruption of the traditional relationship posited by the dominant discourse between active observer and passive patient, this article explores the potential implicit in performance to challenge the traditional hegemonic discourse of medicine and public health and to articulate a new approach to desire and sexuality for and around the contagious monster.