Criticism

Iteration in Marcela Michelle’s MILFFEEDSBABYDEER100%REAL

Repetition is the central performance method in Marcela Michelle’s MILFFEEDSBABYDEER100%REAL (MFBD). Choreography loops, monologues recur, chants are learned, and modular set pieces are rearranged in varying formations. The result is an experimental theater performance that spirals toward a single point, an ending wherein the MILF feeds the Baby Deer a few scraps off a paper plate on the floor. Because it is foregrounded in the title, the ending is neither shocking nor entirely predictable, since the audience recalls that just a few scenes earlier the MILF was gagging the Baby Deer with a black nitrile glove. This is iterative performance: repetition that accumulates difference. Like a compass with a moving pivot point, small shifts in repeated sequences lead to drastic transformations in the overall design, the meaning of gestures, and the audience's understanding of what is real, what is possible. Iterative performance is not just about repetition for its own sake, but cultivating an affective and relational experience that is deeply political. In a moment when early-stage American fascism thrives on categorical implosion and airtight rhetorical loops, iterative performance is an insurgent counter-training that generates the lived experience of a politic rooted in love, interdependence, and mutual need. Iterative performance in MFBD therefore transitions audience members into empathetic political subjects by accumulating disturbances to the logics upon which authoritarianism depends. 

Unlike tautology, iteration builds toward a shift. Tautological rhetoric uses the repetition of identical elements in order to ground meaning. It’s a favored form of authoritarian speech. Stalin was often quoted as saying something along the lines of the Party is always right because it is the Party, a kind of closed loop reminiscent of a Trump tweet: WE WILL HAVE A WIN AND THAT WIN WILL BE A WIN. The opening of MFBD stages this kind of tautological slogan in parody. The MILF enters as a domme-dictator figure in a fresh white button down and an office siren blunt bob. She chides the audience for wasting their “one precious life” vaping, vibing, jazzing, jizzing. She commands us to repeat “the time is now to take a stand and rise to the best you’ll ever be and that’s what matters when we say what we mean and, baby, we mean business!” The slogan is essentially meaningless, yet we are made to chant it until we get it right. “Everybody!” she commands, and we do, and in so doing, the feeling of meaningfulness arises. Although the MILF’s call and response parodizes authoritarianism, it also serves a different purpose. A chant can be politically motivated, but it can also be an incantation, implicating (or perhaps, binding) the audience into the fate of the work. In MFBD, the latter is more likely. Our presence is integral to the function of the work, even needed.

Fascist aesthetics rarely draw attention to the fact that the production of beauty requires viewership as a precondition. It may be odd to think of fascism as having an aesthetic mode at all, but the construction of the “beautiful” is central to upholding certain politics. For Susan Sontag, the aesthetic mode of fascism was an attempt, often failed, at the perfection of a fantasy. Take Mussolini’s Via dei Fori Imperiali, for example. Like the gold cherubs in the Oval Office that turned out to be cheap props from Home Depot, Mussolini’s grand avenue was criticized for being tacky, more like a movie set than an actual architectural feat. The construction process for the Via also involved the demolition of medieval and Renaissance buildings, revealing the regime’s disregard for the actual historical layers of the city. As it were, contradiction always shows up in the work. 

Spectacle lays bare the cracks in the veneer of the ideology it purports to espouse. Identifying slippage is resistance because the recognition of something's constructedness deflates its psychic power. Queer experimental performance like MFBD often works with these slippages instead of against them, exaggerating ideological seams. One could argue that drag as a genre relies on amplifying aspects of gender roles beyond what is legible as normative in order to reveal the performative essence of gender itself. While Michelle draws upon drag in MFBD, the work can hardly be categorized as such alone. It is a multi-genre work, more akin to the experimental drag of legendary performance artist Vaginal Davis. Over the span of her career, Davis, known for her genderfuck aesthetics, produced deeply subversive performances that exaggerated social and cultural norms by stitching together multiple genres and different personas. Her “Saint Salisha Tate” persona, for example, takes stereotypical religious, racial and gender tropes and pushes them to extremes, through drag, song, installation, poetry. One of her best known works/personas was actually a zine called Fertile LaToya Jackson, which was a 1980s punk publication blending outrageous humor and radical queer politics. Both Michelle and Davis use a cross-genre approach and amplified societal tropes to craft performances that are ultimately invested in exposing mechanisms of systemic control. 

Where Davis relies on a multimodal approach to achieve this, MFBD primarily uses iterative performance practices. The clearest example of this happens during a piece of choreography I’d like to call the MILF Runway, a repeated procession from upstage left to downstage right, each time with new objects in hand. In the first iteration of the MILF Runway she carries lush ostrich feather fans, striking a balletic pose under a spotlight while Debussy swells—an image of polished femininity. In the next iteration she carries dumbbells, the movement clunkier, but ultimately walking the same path. Then she carries knife sharpeners without knives. Then fistfuls of cash. Then light sticks sweeping over the other performers in sexual gyrations. In the final iteration of the MILF Runway she carries two bitless power drills, slinking the same path to Tina Turner’s “Whole Lotta Love.” On the MILF Runway the path is repeated, but small changes in the props and choreography shift the semantic load of the dance. By the end of the sequence, the drills are no more or less feminine than the feather fans, revealing the absurdity of assigning gendered essence to objects at all. 

Where the iterative performance of the MILF Runway deconstructs “woman” as a fixed category, showing it to be a mutable arrangement of signs, the Baby Deer, by contrast, is constituted through iteration into a fixed identity. The Baby Deer is at first unrecognizable as such. She is not a literal animal, nor a straightforward representation of one, but a figure in pink mesh, a high pony, pleather pleasers, and a butt-plug tail. It is not until we observe her dote at the feet of the MILF that we even begin to consider that the figure in front of us could be the Baby Deer. Some may not even pick up on her identity until the very end of the show, when the MILF feeds her. The subjecthood of the Baby Deer is slowly constructed through iterated choreography and repeated monologues until her identity seems natural, as if it had been that way the entire time. Judith Butler postulated that gender itself was similarly constituted. Gender, she argued, is performed through a “repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame” that, over time, produces “the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.” 

If gender is constituted through the iterative performance of it, the process is not an inherently savory one. Some of Michelle’s earlier work speaks to this. In her Good Evening My Name Is (GEMNI), for example, a series of performers, all of whom are named Marcela, go through a procession of monologues in which they introduce themselves over and over. Although playful at times, the work examines the tedium and unease of having to justify one’s selfhood. This captures a quieter form of trans trauma, the slow dissolution of the self that comes with repeated subjugation to scrutiny. The radical potential of GEMNI, as in MFBD, lies in positioning gender performance as ontological fact rather than discursive play. This departs from a common misreading of Butler that assumes any performance of gender is liberatory, flattening her critique that some performances consolidate the norm while others trouble it. Nothing can be performed outside a matrix of power. It is, for both Michelle and Butler, a precondition of reality. 

Part of MFBD’s resistance potential lies in the way the work handles the construction of the real. Butler concluded that there was no social self that could precede the performance of it, that what we think of as the self or our gender identity is not something that exists first and then gets expressed, but is real in the sense that it has consequences in the body. Heidegger, by contrast, might suggest that our being-in-the-world presupposes a relational context, a kind of fundamental thrownness into a shared world of meaning. Thus, where Butler sees the self as purely process with material consequence, Heidegger might emphasize that we are always already situated in a web of relations that give rise to any notion of self. In considering Michelle’s ontology in MFBD we arrive at what might be a secret third thing: a construction of the real that is neither pure performativity, nor fixed objecthood in a sea of signs. Instead, Michelle stages an ontology of relation, where the real is provisional, always in flux, and sustained by the bonds of recognition and need. This is closer to ballroom’s “realness,” which emphasizes potentiality as present tense ontology. To be “real,” in this sense, is not to aspire, but to already be. Similarly, the real, in MFBD, emerges in performance and relation. By hinging the real on both iteration and interdependence, Michelle offers not a category but a practice, one that refuses closure while insisting on care. 

In MFBD, the invitation to relation occurs most clearly at the end of the performance. There the MILF stands naked before us, stripped of the satire, the domination, the hyper-gendered runways. “I want to see you sweat,” she says softly into the microphone, sitting at the foot of the runway. “I need to see you cry. I need to see you. I need you. I need you.” The words ring out. Moments later we find the Baby Deer feeding at her feet. The closing stanza uses anaphora to condense to a single point, that of interdependence. This is not an open ended finale, nor a definitive moment of catharsis, but a resolution nonetheless. In mathematics, an iteration is understood as a series of equations that works toward a solution. In MFBD, that solution is the admission of needing an other, but one that allows the possibility of refusal. The political work is not only to destabilize authoritarian forms, it seems, but also to propose an alternative: a subjectivity formed outside subordination. Iteration has carried us to a place where compliance has no meaning, because the relationship is no longer one of order and obedience, but of mutual survival and flourishing. The affective life of anti-fascism is, as it were, love. 

The chant that began as parody of authoritarian tautology is transformed into a call to relation. MFBD departs from the fascist fantasy of wholeness and instead it asks us to inhabit the messiness of shared existence, to see iteration as a space of becoming. As Michelle writes in Axiom, Idiom, Maxim, “contradiction is not an obstacle to queer critique, but its condition of possibility." In MFBD, iterative performance reveals the cracks, cultivates empathy, and trains us in a mode of being-together that is fragile and necessary. The final act of feeding the Baby Deer makes this explicit: survival requires relation. To accept that is not romantic, but a recognition that mutual dependency is the precondition of being. In a moment where the American imagination is under siege by fantasies of purity and control, MFBD offers us an alternative: to stay with the trouble, to feed each other and recognize the seams in every spectacle. It may not be the beginning of a clearer sense of self, but it might just be the beginning of a freer one. 

Yoni Tamang, August, 2025.