I realized I penned two pieces persuading us to think beyond virtuosity, without dedicating time to unpack what virtuosity means within the context of a performance practice. I will attempt to clarify while engaging with some critical theory that I have been working through for my dissertation.

What comes to mind when you hear the word “virtuosity”? Notions of competence, skill, and ability? Or, to quote RuPaul - perhaps characteristics of charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent? Calling a performance “virtuosic” often suggests that it is exceptional, even transcendent. The Italian virtuoso translates to “virtue”, “excellence”, and “skill.” If we dig a little deeper, we find vir - Latin for “man” - at the heart of virtuosity. Virtus connotes manliness, masculinity, a gendered kind of power.

Niccolò Machiavelli writes about virtu as the “material spirit,” the innate ability to act. He describes this as the force of a “natural” leader, one who is likely male, within the confines of a 16th-century imagination. In this sense, virtuosity is not just an implication of skill; it is linguistically entangled in histories of birthright, mastery, and domination (not necessarily the kind of domination that delivers sexual pleasure), along with the masculine ability to act with ruthless force and consequence.

Yet Hannah Arendt offers a different understanding of virtuosity, deviating from mastery and skewed toward contingency. She writes:

“Freedom as inherent in action is perhaps best illustrated by Machiavelli’s concept of virtu, the excellence with which man answers the opportunities the world opens up before him in the guise of fortuna. Its meaning is best rendered by “virtuosity,” that is, an excellence we attribute to the performing arts (as distinguished from the creative arts of making), where the accomplishment lies in the performance itself and not in an end product which outlasts the activity that brought it into existence.” (Between Past and Future, “What is Freedom?”, 153)

In her redefinition of Machiavelli, there is a shift: virtuosity is no longer just tied to masculine dominance or durability but to the unpredictability of presence itself. This connects with Arendt’s broader theorization of freedom as an enactment of “speech and action”, a relational gesture that distinguishes the human as a political being rather than a fabricator (homo faber) or laborer (animal laborans).

Political theorist Wendy Brown expands on this, describing Arendtian virtuosity as “the contingency of action” (8), where “the I-will and the I-can coincide.” In this view, virtuosity does not emerge merely from technical perfection but from the openness of action and the risk of failure, where freedom is practiced not with an aim to control but also as an encounter with the contingent.

To translate this into the context of rope bondage performed before an audience, the drawing of rope across skin is both an enactment of skill and an expression of freedom, realized through the unpredictability of liveness, interaction, and response. Brown’s emphasis on contingency highlights how virtuosity unfolds through the aleatory conditions of its enactment. Unlike mastery, which seeks control, this queer form of virtuosity resists fixity, emerging instead through improvisation, responsiveness, and the unfolding relational dynamic between the rigger, their subject, and the spectator.

Foucault’s reflections on BDSM sharpen this argument. He describes it as “the creation of new possibilities of pleasure” (165) and “the eroticization of power, the eroticization of strategic relations” (169). If virtuosity, in the Arendtian sense, is about the act rather than the outcome, then BDSM - particularly rope bondage - exemplifies a mode of queer virtuosity, one that subversively repurposes the infrastructure of power, playing with expectations around masculine domination. To take an apparatus of domination / submission and render it a site of mutual exchange, risk, and eroticized improvisation is itself a practice of freedom.

Queer virtuosity is not transcendence, not technical mastery, not the achievement of an ideal form. It is the risk and art of failure, the rope slipping, the unexpected negotiation of movement and constraint in response, an improvisation in the moment. It is a form of freedom that resides not in control but in the willingness to engage the unknown - to embrace contingency as the very condition of Arendtian “action”, and of Foucauldian “pleasure”. To listen, to call, and to respond.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. “What is Freedom?” Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Viking Press, 1961.

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton University Press, 1995.

Foucault, Michel. Foucault's Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Edited by Paul Rabinow, The New Press, 1997.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield, University of Chicago Press, 1998.