The Rocky Horror Show Analysis

Performance of gender in everyday life

If we consider Judith Butler’s theory of performativity it can be seen how gender performance in everyday life contributes to a gender hexis. To understand how cultural roles are embedded into physicality we need to consider Freud’s understanding of socialization as discussed in Civilisation and its discontents. The id/ego become micro versions of macro ideals and expectations. The internalisation of external codes for contact can only happen through interaction with others.

Consider how the act of sport can shape the body, through repetition that body is then ‘suited’ to sport. Add to this the cultural gendered expectation that males are good at sport, but understand it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

At The Rocky Horror Show, two different types of performance occur simultaneously and interlock to create a very unique almost doubly liminal cultural phenomena. In this scenario, the audience perform without fully becoming the established performer. Going to see the performance of the stage musical or film, has become a performance it itself. Also the threshold between performer and audience is challenged, fragility threatens to break at any given moment, due to the unusual nature of the event, where the two different types of performance are in close proximity. The experience of The Rocky Horror Show can also be considered an ‘interperformance’ (Haring 1988), which relates back to meta-communicative methods of denotation. In this instance the framing rules of performativity of performance inform the behaviour of the theatre audience. Spectators consciously occupy a third space within a liminal space, whilst referencing the performance of the liminal space whilst simultaneously becoming part of the performance, yet still maintaining an overlapping separatism. Therefore the intertextuality of the complex performance between audience and performer extends beyond the situated performance and the repetition of the event, creates a ritual which reaffirms relationship with

For some, discovering the film is the change in their life and this is a step towards an independent marginalised identity. Furthermore, the reflexivity inherently facilitated by liminal spaces, would give time and space for self-transformation. I argue further that this unique experience, through a combination of liminality and cultural text, holds the potential to enable change and resistance beyond the liminal zone, through individual action. It would be interesting to see how disruption to gender policing would be performed without the security of liminal