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PERFORMING “AKIMBO” 39
political in which identifications were embodied and performed. By preserving
the complexity of the political references of gestures like setting the arms
akimbo, mollies, fribbles, and fops may have foregrounded, contested, and coped
with the processes by which the bourgeois ideology invaded and inscribed their
bodies.
One twentieth-century meaning of “akimbo” demonstrates the final outcome of
the historical struggles surrounding this gesture. In 1943, Ivor Brown noted that
“akimbo” could mean either “high horse” or overly theatrical (24). As the
former, akimbo connotes a performance exceeding taste. As the latter, it also
signals excess; but as an excess of theatricality, it registers the very nothingness
underlying performance. This is the curious circle, the knack, I have traced in
this essay—in the one direction, excess; in the other, nothingness. And yet in the
epistemological prejudices underlying bourgeois psychology, excess and
nothingness can appear as each other: excess and nothingness pivot around
“realness” as two kinds of specters/spectacles. On the one hand, conspicuous
display of a gesture like arms akimbo registered the excess that displaced
bourgeois identifications; on the other, pride and sodomy coalesced as markers
of the status of aristocracy as no-thing in itself, an identity misplaced and
misspoken. What was once a gesture registering sprezzatura, the inherent
legitimacy of the aristocracy, connoted the very (homosexual) instability of self
for which they were criticized by the bourgeoisie. Later on, as I have shown,
excess and nothingness became opposite ends of a ray curving in and meeting to
form the concept of homosexuality as at once offstage and antecedent to
normative sociality. Shaftesbury’s primary discourse of the self—the occupation
of the “I” as the basis of all other knowledges and all epistemological certainty—
contributed to a concept of homosexuality as both the excessive (or narcissistic)
speaking of the self and the dispossession of self, the speaking of an identity that
had no place. The homosexual’s flamboyance and narcissism became understood
as a compensation for (and, later, a specifically pathological compensation for)
the lack of self-knowledge.
To recuperate “akimbo”—to reclaim excessive nothingness through Camp—
would be to reassert the primacy of performance beyond the epistemological
privileging of the real or the ontological prejudice of identity. To perform
akimbo would be to set gestural practices against their final critical rereading as
merely/too theatrical. To historicize akimbo would be to refute the naturalness of
psychoanalytic discourses which have inscribed excess and nothingness as the
content of homosexual psyches. Finally, to reclaim akimbo would be to reopen
the space of refusal and (un)identification of the self closed by Locke,
Shaftesbury, and other prophets of bourgeois morality at the end of the
seventeenth century.