Queer Kinesis: Performance, Invocation, Transformation

This chapter introduces the concept of queer kinesis. Drawn from Aristotle’s kinēsis, which the ancient philosopher used to suggest the potential for change that is brought on through movement and its process, I’m queering the term to include the initiation and successive development of (a) transformation (Kostman 1987: 3). By examining and analysing performance artist and photographer Alexander Guerra’s ungendered character ‘Rabbit’, I demonstrate how a transformation may occur through Rabbit’s performance, set in motion by an act of anthropomorphosis. Guerra notes that his work is first and foremost ‘always about movement and motion’ (2013). I critically read this example of queer kinesis as both transformational and transformative as it extends across time and place. Herein I employ a variant and specific notion of trans (as opposed to trans*) as an enactment of the transnational, the trans-temporal and the transspecies.