Melia Efstratis Chendo
“Foucault” Seminar, NYU Performance Studies
“With hands on Foucault — reaching towards his writing hand, reading towards him — I present a reading that is formally experimental, that unravels with the seminar in real-time.”
“I speak of “unraveling” as a performative and theoretical gesture, a motion made upon the body of the autoerotic subject and Foucault’s subjectless history of sex. I speak of unraveling as a performative reading. I speak of an unraveling that never quite achieves completion. I never reach orgasm. I never reach Foucault’s body. I want his body – I want his desire – I perform masturbation at the seminar table with you, the Foucauldian scholar, with the desire to meet his, to meet yours, to meet desire. As an interpreter and performer, scholar and artist, I meet desire at the confluence of theory and bodily experience. Influenced by the voices of Amelia Jones, Carolee Schneemann, and Michel Foucault, I trace an eroticized reading of The History of Sexuality with the aim of locating, in this subjectless history, a genealogy of the clit.”
-Chendo, 2025, “Desire Into Discourse: Why Not Masturbate to The History of Sexuality?”
Hands on Foucault emerged from a routine presentation assignment in a graduate seminar: Chendo took the occasion of a close reading of Foucault's opening chapters of The History of Sexuality and transformed it into a live durational performance involving bodily gesture and video.
For twelve minutes, Chendo masturbated silently at the seminar table while reading The History of Sexuality in front of a video narrating their own eroticized encounter with the text. The performance asks: what does it mean to bring a body — with its desires, its sensations, its "hand-touch sensibility" — into contact with theory? To read with the body rather than despite it?
Drawing on the tradition of feminist body performance (artists of the 1960s and 70s who marked their bodies as visual territories and integral materials, e.g. Carolee Schneemann), Hands on Foucault investigates the libidinally charged dynamics of reading, writing, and occupying a subject position in the academy. Foucault's historical analysis of masturbation in children — as a site where relations of power and knowledge converge within familial, pedagogical, and state structures — becomes the conceptual hinge of the work. The seminar room, already a space of disciplined knowledge production, is reactivated as a site where the body learning to speak and think academically is confronted with the implantation of perversion, and with the possibilities of its own pleasure.
The performance does not resolve. The performer never reaches orgasm. The unraveling — at once performative gesture, theoretical method, and erotic act — remains incomplete by design, grappling with the tension between an erotic, embodied subject and a history written without one.
Read Chendo’s accompanying research paper here.
Hands on Foucault was later developed into a multimedia installation in collaboration with Jackson King.
Video stills
Performance documentation filmed by Denisse Griselda Reyes
Video stills, “Master” accompanying material