Peter Dickinson: Tim Miller’s Body Politics: Solo Performance Practice and Sexual Citizenship in America, 1984-2004

In September 2004, American performance artist Tim Miller launched his most recent solo creation, Us, in New York. A queer romp through American musical comedy, the work is an indictment of American immigration polices, which discriminate against bi-national same-sex couples. Using Miller's corpus as my anchor, this paper contextualizes the development of queer solo performance in the United States over the past twenty years, paying attention to how this work has examined sexual citizenship through a focus on the queer body (Miller, after all, always gets naked on stage). Referencing the theatre and performance work of Holly Hughes, Margo Gomez, and Justin Chin, the stand-up comedy of Sandra Bernhard and Margaret Cho, and the video art of David Wojnarowicz and Sadie Benning, my paper will be structured around two axes: what I am calling the "monodrama/metagender" dialectic, in which the queer performance and storytelling, used to comment on the trying on and taking off of selves, mirrors a shift from identity politics to performative; and how this queer "body politics" critiques the American body politic as it has come to circumscribe American sexual citizenship between the Reagan and Bush Jr. administrations