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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Tari Ito is so far the only ‘out’ lesbian performance artist in Japan. After performing as a pantomime artist in Tokyo and Holland for ten years, she began her series of solo performances in 1989. In 1996, she ‘came out’ as a lesbian, in a performance entitled Self-Portrait. In her performances Ito makes various uses of a latex ‘skin’ which she uses to create an interface between discursive practices and desire, revealing the constructedness of our desire and sexuality. Along with this skin, Ito's verbal assertion of her lesbian identity at the end of the otherwise non-verbal Self-Portrait unsettles a heterosexual reading of her performances that would assume the construction of desire and sexuality in terms of heterosexuality.
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