Jennifer Jasmine White


Care, Spit, and Queer Confessional: 52 Monologues

52 Monologues for Young Transsexuals, Soho Theatre, 4 – 16 March.
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As audience members file into the Soho Theatre upstairs, Charli Cowgill stands at the door. She asks us to spit, one by one, into a cup. We each compliantly do so. I tightly purse my mouth, gather up the moisture, recoil ever so slightly, and then, expel. All of this occurs in a split second, and I give it little further thought. I am keen to perform acceptably, and, if anything, wary of what feels like a slightly naff gimmick. Leaving the theatre an hour later, I am reminded of this reaction, and reminded too of Sianne Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick (2020). For Ngai, the gimmick is that which works both too little and too hard, and feels both flat and overly engineered. It is that which reminds us of our ambivalent feelings towards capitalism, and the hidden labours that fuel our everyday lives. What kind of labours are hidden behind Cowgill’s request, and our compliance to it? What does it mean to spit something out?

52 Monologues for Young Transsexuals may begin with a gimmick, but it seems keenly aware of its own use of the form. This is a work intimately concerned with labour and ambivalence, as an ‘unapologetic speed-drive through transfeminine experience’, leaves its audience brimming with mixed feelings of their own. It is of course insightful, though to suggest empathy as a primary affective residue would be to do the show a major disservice. It does not, as some might presume, take much interest in factional identity politics, instead interrogating identity as relational, and emphasising work, and specifically care, throughout. It masterfully weaves between the riotous and the traumatic, and is contented with neither pride nor shame. There is lots and lots of spit.

Spit has a history with radical and queer art practices, from Janine Antoni’s Lick and Lather (1993) to Frances Goodman’s Spit/Swallow (2013), with Gabriel Pericàs The History of Lubrication (2023) providing a particularly energetic account of its varied cultural past. Its practical history is important, and its potential use-value, for instance as a lubricant, or a tool of aggression, is played on throughout the show. Yet to spit is also to encounter a central tenet of feminist theory: the abject. ‘I expel myself’, wrote Juliet Kristeva, ‘I spit myself out.’ Spit prompts abjection, what Kristeva described in Powers of Horror (1980) as an elemental revulsion at our own bodily form. For Cowgill and Laurie Ward, the trans women that make up the piss / CARNATION company, this kind of theoretical inheritance comes with an obvious burden of added difficulty. In their own words, ‘calling your body wrong is such an aggressive thing to do.’ This is an aggression of a different calibre to that which Kristeva described. Watching, then, we’re reminded that canonical feminist thought, so much of it born of cis-gendered women in discourse with one another, cannot be straightforwardly transposed onto narratives such as these. These women must go beyond notions like the abject, but Kristeva’s loss is our gain. Cowgill and Ward know this, and they own it, offering up the makings of a new blend of theory to be carved out before our eyes. This is not to deny forebearers. As Ward describes feeling ‘really in my body’ whilst dancing to techno or house, for instance, I am put in mind of McKenzie Wark’s recent Raving. But these inheritances are gestured to, rather than relied on outright. The only citations that matter here are the names of the trans women interviewed in the making of this verbatim work, flashing up on the screen throughout. Their words are held tenderly in Cowgill and Ward’s mouths.

To spit, to expunge, to confront the abject; all of this might be understood in relation to the act of confession. When we confess, we spit something out, something previously secret and slippery, something summoned up from deep inside. Art as an act of confession is nothing new, but the mode has emerged as something of a trend in recent years. The confessional in this context is not that which necessitates any wrong doing or guilt (though it is never entirely separable from a history of shame), but which refers to revelations of an intimately personal nature, the sharing of the inner-most self. It is tightly bound up with what Jennifer Cooke describes as a ‘new feminist audacity’ in her writings on Maggie Nelson and Paul B Preciado among others. The voices we hear in 52 Monologues are often audacious, Cowgill and Ward certainly are, and their subject matters are as boldly intimate as it gets, from anal sex to maternal desires. There is no sense in which the lives of any of these women are defined by shame, and that is crucial. But their identities, their choices, and their pleasures have undeniably been cast as shameful by others. To describe the framing of this work as confessional is not to legitimise that shaming, but to suggest that in the act of intimate revelation, reparative possibilities might be found. Religiosity is never far from the surface, and confession takes on an added significance as the play turns ultimately to questions of bodily sacrifice, but it is also permitted to extend far beyond this immediate context. 52 Monologues is a piece of confessional art in which confession itself comes to be queered.

To queer something is, in the words of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, to find ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps…and excesses of meaning’, that which ‘can’t be made to signify monolithically.’ Contrasting readings of Sedgwick in relation to trans politics should be noted here, yet her words remain useful. To queer the confessional is not to deny its baggage, but to remake it strange, directing its impulses towards plurality and potentiality. Confession is made queer in 52 Monologues not on account of the subject matter, but the forms it takes, forms that accommodate communality and acknowledge precarious labour.

Introducing the show, Ward and Cowgill gesture towards the glitzy pink curtain behind them, and proudly proclaim that fifty-two transgender women sit behind it. With characteristic swiftness, the tone then shifts. ‘But today’s not about them. It’s about us.’ Audaciousness, again, and one that builds to a self-deprecating crescendo: ‘It’s about trans women speaking up and saving the world through… fringe theatre.’ The line only works because Ward and Cowgill do believe in the political efficacy of what they’re doing, that much is obvious. But there remains a glimmer of truth in the introductory joke. A whole ensemble of women make up this show of only two performers, and it is the artful re-composition of their words in relation to one another – often contradicting or completing one another’s sentences, that allows for an idiosyncratic rhythm to emerge. Even when that rhythm is quick and cutting, a fundamental feeling of care remains. There are moments during which the show seems to teeter teasingly on the edge of in-yer-face, but it always pulls back, opening up space for reflection. Shock would be too easy. The show is sustained by the relationship between Ward and Cowgill themselves, we hear of their meet-cute, and they are throughout shaped in relation to one another, dance partners, lovers, and carers in turn. In this, confession becomes a communal process, shared consciously between the women and their spectators, and grounded in careful attentiveness. To share is, among other things, an act of compassion, and confession is performed not in intimidating isolation, but alongside and through the trusted mouths and bodies of others. To confess might also be comic, and it bears stressing that this is a truly funny work, as when, throughout, particular brands of pop-feminism face a deserved degree of ire. We open with a wry dedication to Greta Gerwig, and condescending cries of SLAY, QUEEN are repeatedly cracked open and shown to be largely hollow inside.

This is a play about new forms, and the new forms that might be made of expulsion and confession. What can be made of spitting it out? A queered confessional form might be a communal one, made of the ‘open mesh of possibilities’ that Sedgwick sought, and therefore both discordant and hopeful. Such a form is fitting in relation to the newly adopted emblem of the company, the piss carnation, the ‘incredibly interesting otherworldly flowers growing out of human pee on the sideways of a highway’ as they describe it. Something optimistic might be made of that which already exists, something beautiful from that which we are told is abject. Very briefly, the intermingled liquid in the spit cup seems to represent this too. Have we, the audience, made something new and sparkling from our previously distinct fluids? Yet the communal is not always the reparative, and the audience learn this when the use for this particular liquid becomes clear. Novelty quickly morphs into a flash of violence, as the contents of the cup are thrown into Cowgill’s face. To suggest that love and care are of the utmost importance in this piece is by no means to smooth it of its sharper edges. We are complicit in this act of harm, and the play fractures in response to the hit. The tone shifts, and the audience is for the first time genuinely uneasy.

At points, 52 Monologues is dizzyingly and viscerally painful, and trauma and abuse are boldly admitted as brutally integral to most of these stories. It is a difficult watch, and hard work. Confession too is re-articulated as a laboured act, underlining the sheer energy that is excised in finding the words to express trauma, regardless of the apparent safety of the environment in which they are spoken. On her experience of vocal coaching, Cowgill recalls how ‘speaking became such an act of labour that it was easier to just swallow.’ This takes on a double significance in the context of a verbatim show with heavy doses of the auto-theoretical. 52 Monologues is itself an act of labour. To queer the act of confession exposes this fact, and it also exposes the presence of risk. In Living a Feminist Life (2017) Sara Ahmed paints a simple picture of precarity: ‘when we say something is precarious, we usually mean it is in a precarious position: if the vase on the mantelpiece were pushed, just a little bit, a little bit, it would topple over.’ To confess in a public setting, to confess as art, is to take a risk. It is to adopt a precarious position. Revelatory confession may well be the much-praised domain of the good feminist, but too few critics have emphasised the personal harms and potential new traumas born of such a process, particularly for those other than white cis women. At its point of climax, and in a bold moment of self-reflexivity, 52 Monologues does so. To describe it in detail here would be to claim words and experiences that are not those of the reviewer to share, but to watch these women intervene in their own dramatic construction, breaking with an expected script in order to speak truth to power and warn of the potential pain of self-exposure is both a privilege and an affirmation of future theatrical possibilities. Confession is queered not only in being rendered reparative, but in the exposure of its dangerous unknowability too.

If confession is a queer process in 52 Monologues, then it is inevitably one that cannot be contained within the parameters of an hour-long piece, nor a brief review. Spitting it out is a wonderful thing, but rarely is it neat. Cowgill and Ward pay tribute to the frothing excesses that neither verbatim theatre nor confessional art can capture, of sticky relationality and of risk. This is a company with beautifully revelatory potential.
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Photo by Arabella Kennedy.
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Jennifer Jasmine White is a writer and researcher based in London. She has degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, and is currently completing a PhD at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on the relationship between working-class women and experimental forms, and she is always keen to write about art, gender, and class. You can find more about her work at www.jenniferjasminewhite.com. Instagram: @jenniferjasminewhite. X: @jennifer_j_w.


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