Taking It Lying Down: On the Labour of Gender Non-Compliance in Doran George’s Live Art

Abstract

On 9 June 2001, Doran George spent a workday in a large emptied store within a shopping centre located at the heart of London’s Elephant and Castle district in the UK. This area south of London city proper usually has the connotation of being an undesirable area; it has been largely a run-down working-class and immigrant neighbourhood, although also an historical site of theatres. On a global scale, this moment is shortly pre-9/11, less than a decade before the world recession, and, more locally, 50 years post-renewal following the district’s destruction during the Second World War. In the intervening years the locale had changed its notoriety from a consumerist space of prostitution to a massive shopping centre, the first of its kind in the UK. The commercial space George took over for the day was converted into a performance space, shifting the register from buying and selling to enacting. My approach to this performance is to ask in what ways do its various components make concrete, or localise, the time and place of its actions, affects and political gestures within the ever-expanding space of neoliberal economic orders? Against the backdrop of globalising tendencies that leverage the masses into the precariat, what can this performance teach us about shifting registers and political allegiances?