Performing Fighting Cocks elicits Coble’s live performance Fighting Cocks that took place in 2011 as part of Commitment Issues, a night of performances curated by artist Jess Dobkins for the FADO Performance Art Network in Toronto, Canada. The site -specific 3 hour performance took place in Oasis Aqualounge (an upscale sex club). Fighting Cocks is the investigation and reenactment of the dynamics of violence, play and masculinity in a site that typically offers no space for other than a normative expression of gender and an over accentuation of behaviors that are a result of that. Two bodies, both performing queer masculinities, meet in a locker room and play out the ritual of snapping towels. When a towel is snapped there is pain inflicted and a mark left on another’s flesh whom, on their behalf, has to prove that they can take it. It is a double play of dominance and endurance. Continuing this beyond a realistic degree this conventional confirmation of masculinity and means of bullying is gradually deconstructed and new meanings are constructed based on the queering of the locker room as a symbolic site. The performance is a humanizing mimicry of a cockfight where the birds are conditioned for strength, stamina and trauma.