ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of the phallus in contemporary performance, focusing on concert events by Miley Cyrus and art works by Dani Ploeger to understand the role of the phallus as a prop in contemporary installation art and popular culture. The authors show how both artists attempt to destabilise and decentre the heteronormative phallus. Cyrus, tongue stretching as far as it can reach, strides across stadium stages wearing colossal strap-ons. Ploeger presents his entire naked and tumescent body as tiny-the size of a human thumb. Close textual analyses draw upon Susan Stewart’s work on the miniature and the gigantic (1992) to interrogate phallic power and phallic performance. As well as notions of size, the chapter traverses aspects of materiality, touch, play, temporality, and spatiality.
