Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture - Posthuman Drag, Apr 2023

This article is the culmination of a collaborative process with drag artist Charity Kase. Providing both transcriptions of our conversation and sections of theoretical commentary, I come to test and transform what constitutes the (post)human. Aspects of Charity’s drag – its mediality and virtuality, its hybrid monstrosity and beauty and its anthropomorphic abjections of bodies and environments – embrace the disordered and damaged dimensions of human life on earth. This article introduces an inhuman turn, emphasizing how bodily borders are broken down when the inside is re-turned through staged fantasy and shared imaginaries, as a strategy for challenging phallo- and anthropocentric stereotypes, and the opening of a potential within for becoming without. Tracing some differences in my and Charity’s senses of what drag can do, this article offers up a figure for post/in/human possibilities.

This article looks at Berlin-based drag performer Hungry, who employs ‘distorted’ drag, primarily through digital documentation and recordings of performances. The displacement of the body within her drag performances and the understanding of this body as a ‘body’ by an audience becomes the focus of analysis: whilst Hungry remains human in some aspects of appearance, the aesthetic of the performance is ostensibly non-human. Viewers of the performance are aware of Hungry’s human nature and the attempt to reconcile the human and non-human facets of Hungry’s body itself becomes part of the performance. That is, the performance relies on the multiplicities between the recognizable and unrecognizable human body. This, in turn, acts as a lens for the reconsideration of what one recognizes as human in the first place, and allows us to ask questions regarding the conceptual limits of the human body, particularly in relation to what are perceived as its defining characteristics.

This article considers three digital, time-based projects – by micha cárdenas, Meriem Bennani and Rashaad Newsome – in which digital avatars function as posthuman drag, reaching beyond their particular contexts to drag normative understandings of space, time and kinning. In proffering queer and trans of colour perspectives as an ethical imperative of, and precondition for, humanity’s persistence into the future, these works challenge the ontological formations that undergird the neo-liberal project, and in being designed to circulate beyond queer and trans communities, they mobilize queer and trans strategies for survival and redress beyond the confines of queer and trans spaces and lives. The dis/junctures at the core of these three works bring into focus a set of new ways of thinking the body beyond whiteness, where the post- of the human is a way of staging time so as to lose white-dominant culture.

Drag performers in Australia perform anthro-decentric laments for and beside endemic nonhuman species. They catalyse a public exteriorization of multi-species grief and rage in response to compounding losses in a situated, contested Anthropocene. Approaching queer performance beside intersections in new materialism and the environmental humanities, this article proposes drag as a device of speculative fabulation – of story-telling or fable-making in-the-present for generative, undefined outcomes in un-promised futures. Imbricating qualitative visual and textual analyses with autoethnography and a methodology informed by avian ecology, the article shares stories of ecological laments in the context of contemporary Australian performance, art and culture. It presents a brief review/revue of performances by artists based in Warrang (Sydney): Vallarie Van Gogh dances as a burning human-galah hybrid; Latai Taumoepeau goes to war as a monstrous coral reef; Phasmahammer (Justin Shoulder) bends mythology and matter imagining post-apocalyptic memories of birds.

This article seeks to explore how non/human drag has been utilized to perform queer of colour feelings, which result in a mess-making of identity-based relationalities. Rooted in a phenomenological exploration of the fursona, this queer narrative case study focuses on furry acts, or the act of creating and embodying a personalized fursona, as non/human drag that becomes a site for self-exploration and queer of colour becoming. In exploring furry acts, this study centres its focus on the material impacts of non/human drag performances and suggests that furry acts are improvised responses to queer of colour domestication. The non/human drag performances, as explored through furry Poppy’s narratives, are also considered feral practices that intentionally bewilder and disorder subject identification. With a focus on furry acts as messy, this study proposes that non/human drag performances are essential for Poppy in accessing queer of colour joy, pleasure and liveability.

Review of: Drag in a Changing Scene, Volumes 1 & 2

Volume 1: Contemporary Drag Practices and Performers, Mark Edward and Stephen Farrier (Eds) (2020)

London: Methuen Drama, 248 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35008-294-6, h/bk, $110.00

ISBN 978-1-35031-919-6, p/bk, $39.95

ISBN 978-1-35008-295-3, e-book, $35.95

Volume 2: Drag Histories, Herstories and Hairstories, Mark Edward and Stephen Farrier (Eds) (2022)

London: Methuen Drama, 256 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35010-436-5, h/bk, $115.00

ISBN 978-1-35019-851-7, p/bk, $39.95

ISBN 978-1-35010-437-2, e-book, $35.95