by Matthew Zundel
This essay offers a reading of Mario Mieli’s militant political project through the theoretical lens of performativity. Performativity, suspended between, and fully incorporating both the linguistic and the theatrical, courses through Mieli’s cultural production. I begin with a discussion of the role of the travestito within the context of Mieli’s involvement in the emergence of gay theater in Italy in the late 1970s and its necessarily political valences. I then move on to discuss a performativity that is particular to Mieli’s cultural production: to dare, elaborating on the performative structure of Mieli’s insistence that to dare is also to give of oneself. I conclude by reflecting on Mieli’s figuring of the actor as masochist. For Mieli, masochism makes it possible to dissolve the individual self in favor of a liberated communal self, a subjective process that is enabled through daring acts.