| dc.description.abstract | This thesis explores the performative costuming and Live Art of Leigh Bowery in
relation to the ways they have influenced the broader spectrum of visual culture and the
expanded field of performance studies. Bowery’s cult status as an outrageously selfstyled nightclub personality has obscured, I argue, his significant contribution to
performance studies and visual culture in favour of a justifiable discursive emphasis on
his importance to fashion. The diversity of Bowery’s work and his marginality as an
artist who emerged from a subcultural milieu complicated and thwarted his cultural
value, hindering, as a consequence, his incorporation into art institutions and
performance narratives.
Chapters are organized around a variety of disciplines and challenging research contexts
in an attempt to historicize his multifaceted oeuvre and critically situate his work within
the broader field of visual studies. Through close analysis of Bowery’s key looks and
non-theatrical performances, I examine the implications of his work in dominant
histories of performance art and urgent discourses surrounding normativity,
representations of illness, and body politics. Initially focusing on the performative
dimension of Bowery’s costuming as an effective strategy for blurring the boundaries
between art and life, I then shift over the course of the thesis towards reflecting on his
aesthetics of freakishness and narcissistic desire, his engagement in BDSM practices
and the performance of extremity, and the posttranssexual ethos behind his hybrid
embodiments and trans-queer visual language.
Bowery’s enduring influence on club cultures, queer drag practice, and gender
nonconformity attests to an urgent – yet obscure – body of work that resonates into the
present. Attempting to undertake the first monographic study of Bowery’s peculiar
practice, this thesis approaches his Live Art and performative costuming as significantly
disruptive political gestures that allow him, I argue, to penetrate multiple contemporary
theoretical discourses and contexts of visual culture | en_US |
