f Anatomy’s a drag: Queer fashion and camp performance in Leigh Bowery’s Birth Scenes

Leigh Bowery is often remembered for his outlandish fashion design, controversial performance art and alternative rock band, Minty. Bowery’s performances in his self-fashioned ‘looks’ were genre- and gender-bending. His costumes were often transformative prosthetics and imagined anatomies that acted as fantastical yet temporary body modification. While Bowery’s incessantly shifting body is addressed, this article focuses on Bowery’s notorious Birth Scenes (1992−94). Manifesting in a variety of iterations, Bowery literally wore another person, who happened to be his wife, as drag for simulated birth onstage. And importantly, the performances occurred at queer venues and events during the ongoing AIDS crisis of the early 1990s. Through visual cultural analysis, this article argues that Bowery manipulated camp tactics of artifice, incongruity, appropriation and humour, to challenge normativity and capitalism, and furthermore; to test cultural assumptions about drag performance, which was then having a distinct cultural moment in the early 1990s. This article explores Bowery’s Birth Scenes to understand how queer fashion and performance combine to explode notions of the body and embedded sociocultural norms of sexuality, gender and consumerism.