Les Mirabelles, Marseille, 1979. Photo: Pierre Ciot
(Libération, April 3, 1975, republished in Révolution Moléculaire [1977])
Les Mirabelles are experimenting with a new kind of political theatre, one that distances itself from didactic language and well-intentioned polemics—about homosexuality, for example! They use drag, song, mime, dance, etc. not as ways to illustrate a theme, to ‘change the mind’ of the audience member, but to trouble him, to stir up those troubled zones of desire within him that he has always refused, more or less, to explore. It’s no longer about playing the masculine against the feminine or vice versa, it’s about what to do so that bodies, all bodies, can extract themselves from the representations and constraints of the ‘social body’, from stereotyped postures, attitudes, and behaviours, from what Wilhelm Reich called ‘character armour’. Sexual alienation, which is one of the foundations of capitalism, implies the social body’s polarisation around masculinity, and the concomitant transformation of the feminine body into an object of lust, a commodity to which one gains access only at the price of guilt, and by getting enmeshed in the gears of the system (marriage, family, work, etc.…). As for desire, it just has to get by however it can! What actually happens is that it deserts the man’s body and emigrates onto the side of a woman-becoming. What is essential here is not the object being aimed at, but the movement of transformation. It is this movement, this passage, that les Mirabelles help us to explore: a man who loves his own body, a man who loves a woman’s body or that of another man, is himself always secretly involved in a ‘feminine becoming’. Which is nothing at all to do with an identification with ‘Woman’, still less with ‘the Mother’, as psychoanalysts would have us believe. No, it is a matter of a becoming-other, a step toward becoming something other than what the authority of the repressive social body has assigned us to be. Just as workers, despite the exploitation of their labour power, succeed in establishing a certain type of true relation to the reality of the world, so women, despite the sexual exploitation they suffer, succeed in conserving a certain true relation to desire. And they experience this relation essentially at the level of their bodies. And just as on the economic plane the bourgeoisie is nothing without the proletariat, so men amount to nothing much on the bodily plane if they don’t accede to this kind of “feminine becoming”. Hence their dependence on women’s bodies, or on the image of the woman that haunts their dreams and their own bodies, or which they project onto the body of their homosexual partner. Hence the counter-dependency to which they try to reduce women, and their sexually predatory behaviours toward them. Economic exploitation cannot be separated from sexual exploitation. The bourgeoisie and bureaucracies only maintain their power by relying on the segregation of sexes, classes, ages, the codification of attitudes, the stratification of castes. The reproduction by militants of these same segregations and stratifications (for example, refusal to confront the concrete alienation of women and children, possessive and dominating attitudes, maintenance of the bourgeois separation between private life and public activity, etc.) constitutes one of the essential bases of the current bureaucratisation of the revolutionary workers’ movement. Beginning to listen to the true desires of the people implies beginning to listen to your own desire and the desire of those close to you. That doesn’t mean that class struggle has to take a back seat to the struggles of desire. On the contrary, every junction point between the two will impart an unsuspected energy to the former.
It is on this ‘front’ that les Mirabelles are working, with great modesty and tenacity. But above all they aren’t asking to be taken seriously; they are fighting for something far more important than seriousness! (Their slogan: ‘monetary crisis and drag, green beans and drag’). What they are interested in is helping to extract homosexuality from the ghetto, even the militant ghetto; what they want is for shows like theirs to touch not just homosexuals but anyone who feels uncomfortable in their own skin.