Speaker: Marcus Pyle

How do people, portrayed as femmes fatales, assert agency within structures (narrative, musical, social, and otherwise) that are hellbent on their erasure and normalization? In my previous work I have developed a theoretical framework that shows how the materiality of the femme fatale seeks and asserts agency. I have also discussed the rhetorical deployment or manifestation of a vocalic strategic essentialism—one that deconstructs presence/absence, inside/outside. If the preceding scholarship outlines strategies of survival employed by the characters within operas, this talk will demonstrate the ways that those characters become avatars for the lived experiences of “real” persons. I will address the effects and affects of adopting the avatar of the femme fatale as a mode of social and political critique. My present argument, and indeed the arguments in this project broadly, stem from a foundation of corporeal queer theory—the notion that bodily materiality and the way one uses one’s body can be a bridge toward freedom.