Queer Performance, Affective Engagement, and the case of Panti Bliss

Fintan Walsh

‘…on some level, our pleasure is our resistance.’⁷²⁴

This chapter approaches queer performance as a distinct subcultural tradition in Ireland. While a wide range of plays, theatre productions, and festivals have carried issues concerning gender and sexual diversity from the periphery to the mainstream, including work of significance to feminist, gay, and lesbian politics; this essay seeks to uncover, in part, the development of a specific queer performance tradition that does not engage directly with the dominant social order by way of normative modes of communication or cultural critique. In particular, the study considers how a range of performance practices, sites, and modes of relationality have been harnessed by queers to create liveable spaces for undesirable lives: the coming together of bodies in gay bars, fetish clubs, hill walks, political protests, choirs, alternative pageants, and drag shows.⁷²⁵

It might be useful at this point to clarify my use of the term ‘queer’. From a certain perspective all live performance might be aligned with this adjective, as so often the contingency of the event, not to mention the indeterminacy of desire and identification among those present, speaks to the slipperiness of all identity. But further to this, the term queer – as distinct from gay, lesbian or what might be considered as mainstream theatre and performance – signifies a much wider range of difference that the former categories do not. Jill Dolan stresses the value of using the words gay and lesbian alongside queer in relation to theatre ‘to remind us of history, to remind us of differential power, to remind us that however fluidly we might practice and perform our identities, regulatory systems tend to fix them and to legislate against them, through juridical, medical and educational discourses in which the theatre we make and write about must intervene’.⁷²⁶ While this is a valuable reminder of the importance of historicizing both theatre and theory, like most discursive classifications, it is also somewhat exclusive, for not all those who identify as queer do so with gay and lesbian movements, the identity categories themselves, or even, for that matter, something called ‘theatre’. In fact, the term ‘gay theatre’ is usually conferred retrospectively, as in Alan Sinfield’s’ work. And, as Tim Miller and David Román remind us, ‘queer theater audiences, like all theater audiences, defy simplistic categorizations and resist overly determined preconceptions concerning why we are even at the theater’.⁷²⁷ Queer, then, seems to be the most useful term to index the multiplicity of open, contradictory, and contentious forms, practices, and identities such as those I am interested in addressing here. Noreen Giffney suggests that we might speak of ‘quare’ ‘to articulate the specificities, nuances, and methodological tensions between expressions of queer theory in an Irish context and theoretical formulations of queer theory originating in an Anglo-North American context’, and in order to signal the relationship between queer studies and discourses of feminism, lesbianism, and postcolonialism that already inflect Irish studies.⁷²⁸ Without borrowing the term, this paper echoes the value of doing queer in context.

Those who live through or alongside the queer culture about which I write (Irish, Dublin-centred) will know of the many braided performative gestures that constitute it and us. Similarly, they will know of the centrality of cross-dressing, guerilla drag, and gender-fuck to many forms of queer sociality. Although this is not specific to Irish culture, it is true to say that these specific modes of expression and interaction are especially prevalent and well-developed languages. We might understand this pattern in light of Ireland’s rich history of popular theatre, its rigid construction of gender types, or its skill in subversive mimicry, finely honed within the folds of a wider system of postcolonial resistance. Regardless of its original impulse, when taken up by Dublin based artists such as Shirley Temple Bar, Heidi Konnt, the Shamcocks, and Panti Bliss, cross-dressing enters the realm of queer performance art, and as such, demands recognition within Irish theatre and performance scholarship.

Outside of Irish studies, much has already been written about the practice of cross-dressing. Peggy Phelan, speaking within the tradition of outspoken critics Marilyn Frye and Janice Raymond, has noted how gay male drag in particular runs the risk of misogyny by fetishizing the category ‘woman’. In Unmarked: the Politics of Performance (1993) Phelan contends: ‘Gay male cross-dressers resist the body of woman even while they make its constructedness visible.’⁷²⁹ Countering this, other critics have asserted the strategy’s value in disrupting the illusion of gender and sexual coherence. On this, Judith Butler’s discussion of the documentary Paris is Burning (1990) has been particularly influential: ‘In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency. Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary.’⁷³⁰ In the case of Irish drag performance, we can hold both theories in useful regard. While cross-dressing might well be understood to upset gender categories, there are many examples from the Irish queer performance repertoire where the personae invoked are the derisive legacies of colonialism and cultural nationalism such as the comely maiden, the dancing schoolgirl, the virgin, the whore, the mother, the religious authoritarian, the patriarch, and the stage Irishman. While some performers might build their persona around one such category, other acts might embody them occasionally or for an isolated outing. Collectively, these acts trouble restrictive and oppressive identity formations by disidentifying with the divisive logic of heteronormativity, while simultaneously creating queer space within the Irish cultural imaginary.

The following pages focus on this generative dimension to queer culture. What interests me is not only what queer performance might undo rhetorically or epistemologically, but what kind of world it opens up affectively. Following this line of thinking, the essay will focus on self-styled ‘gender illusionist’ Miss Pandora ‘Panti’ Bliss as an embodied archive of queer feeling. In drawing queers together through her warm, familial persona – ‘Aunty Panti,’ as she often refers to herself – the chapter argues that Panti resignifies the principle of contagion that is so central to homophobic discourse by letting queer feeling freely flow, while simultaneously effecting an uncanny imaginary dwelling space that is no place like home.⁷³¹

Crossing Clothes, Crossing Culture

Following a number of years in Tokyo, where she performed as part of the drag duo CandiPanti, Panti launched her career in Dublin in 1996 as host of the Alternative Miss Ireland (AMI) queer beauty pageant. Conceived in the mind of art graduate Rory O’Neill as a mid-Atlantic aunt returned home, Panti entered the scene as an oddly recognizable figure that – like anyone’s favourite single, zany, and possibly lesbian aunt come to visit – inspired intrigue and attraction in equal measure; while retaining for herself the outsider’s facility to comment upon the culture in which she found herself. However, while Panti may have been an imaginary construction, the social and political dynamics she referenced were real. For instance, Panti was not the only person returning home at this time. Following mass emigration during the 1980s many aunts, uncles, sons, and daughters were similarly returning to enjoy the benefits occasioned by the country’s financial boom. Three years after the decriminalization of male homosexuality, Ireland was not only on the brink of economic regeneration but cultural diversification and cross-fertilization. Finding herself in a country on the cusp of change, Panti was in a unique position to participate in this reimagining process.

The AMI is perhaps the most significant event through which Panti has perfected her persona and negotiated a specific performance style. Modelled on Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World, since its first production in 1987 (it did not resume until 1996) the pageant has staged an irreverent take on the sanitized depictions of gender and sexuality typical of normative beauty pageants world-wide, while also engaging with a specifically Irish tradition of gender appropriation, and contests such as The Rose of Tralee and Miss Ireland. In this, the performance exists as an important community-driven political forum dedicated to both cultural interrogation and transformation.⁷³² Drawing on Pantomime’s tradition of playing highly current politics in humourous but no less committed terms, the event also known as Gay Christmas quickly became an important arena through which Panti began to deploy drag as a vehicle for activism while encouraging similar modes of intervention among others.

This particular approach to queer politics found further progression in collaborative partnerships to emerge from AMI. Working with producers, promoters, and artists that included individuals such as Trish Brennan, Niall Sweeney, and Tonie Walsh, Panti proceeded to appear at a number of performance-based pub and club nights throughout the 1990s such as Gag, Powderbubble, HAM, Gristle, while also running the long-standing Casting Couch Karaoke night. In addition, Panti regularly appeared at Pride parades throughout the country, frequently speaking passionately about issues affecting LGBTQ people. The leading lady at these events, Panti typically performed a range of tasks such as hosting, singing, lip-synching, dancing, lecturing or, notoriously, pulling all manner of objects, including rosary beads, from her ‘rosy rump’.⁷³³ Operating within these highly varied contexts, Panti’s cross-dressing performances did much more than play with gender and sexual norms. Rather, drag became the mechanism through which an extensive concatenation of transgressive practices and ideas could be re-signified and mobilized. Throughout her career, Panti has turned the celebration of a range of appearances, characteristics, behaviours, and modes of contact, normally understood as either oppositional or unthinkable, into an art form. Unique, given drag’s hyperbolic tendency, Panti has offered herself as an uncanny aunt-like figure who does not police desire by way of prohibition and guilt, but through a kind of conductible affectivity, licenses the development of a variety of queer behaviours and positions among her audiences.

‘A Triumph of Greasepaint and Gaffer Tape’

In furthering this discussion, I want to focus on Panti’s most recent work. I do so not only because the performances represent her most developed endeavours, nor even because they appear more significant for taking place in conventional theatre spaces during festival periods, but because they involve Panti reflecting on her own personal life and artistic practice. In May 2007, Panti staged In These Shoes? at the New Theatre as part of the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival. Produced by THISISPOPBABY and directed by Phillip McMahon, in being formally structured the piece marked a departure in Panti’s normal mode of address. Playing on her persona as educator to the uninitiated, Panti assumed the role of lecturer in drag school. More specifically, she talked the audience through the blondes who inspired her – the ‘triumph of greasepaint and gaffer tape’ who stood before us – and from whom we might also draw wisdom.

The performance was organized around separate modules, during which Panti schooled her students on a range of famous blondes, mainly from Ireland. The lesson on Catherine Nevin (the woman convicted for conspiring to kill her husband in 1996) does not focus on whether or not the former landlady at Jack White’s Inn was actually guilty of the crime, but on how much the media focused on her image during the trial. Nevin’s appearance was subjected to more forensic examination that the case itself, we are led to believe. Panti reasons that, quite literally, Nevin’s blondeness both made and unmade her. While the constructedness of Adele King (Twink’) is also foregrounded by comparing her to ‘something Macnas made for St Patrick’s Day,’ the comic actress’s facility to play that particular role, with and against public preconception, is equally celebrated. Brunette-turned-blonde news presenter Anne Doyle also figures in the lecture, used to prove the point that gender-play is by no means the preserve of drag queens, actresses, or latter day femmes fatales.

Of course, the show’s premise is that all gender is a form of drag: a performative mode of expression that bears no direct relationship to biological sex. Then there is the emphasis on blonde women in particular, treated in a comic manner that nonetheless purposefully considers the contradictory associations of the much maligned look: ditsy, sexual, and powerful. Accrediting Darwin with the observation that ‘all drag queens eventually go blonde,’ Panti connects herself, other queer performers, and the audience to a very specific history that maligns certain forms of gendered presentation, while also analysing some of the fears that produces such stereotypes in the first place. While she humorously critiques a number of these figures, she does so not to slander the individuals, but to grate against the system that produces and perpetuates the categories and their associations. As she says herself, ‘it’s not a parody, it’s an homage’. In so doing, Panti encourages a similar kind of playful cross-identification among her students.

Writing about performances by ‘queers of colour,’ José Esteban Muñoz has discussed the dynamics of disidentification. This intersubjective process involves the recycling and resignification of culturally encoded messages: ‘The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications.’⁷³⁴ While Muñoz suggests that these practices indicate a move towards ‘cracking open the code of the majority,’⁷³⁵ their greatest contribution is towards the production of alternative worlds.

Similarly, while the performance in question very much involves a critique of the blonde stereotype, the focus of the piece extends beyond discursive interrogation to affective accretion. While Panti indicates that future (imaginary) course topics will focus on Irish politician Liz O’Donnell, singer Doris Day, and the dog Lassie, the final subject of this event is the performer’s own idol, Dolly Parton. Panti has never made any secret of her fascination with the singer, and at the AMI in 2007, a personalized message from Parton was screened at the show. What rendered Panti’s discussion especially interesting here, however, was the way in which this interest was divulged at the intersection of O’Neill’s and Panti’s identities.

Suspending fiction for the most part, the vet’s daughter from County Mayo revealed how she first heard Dolly on the radio in 1978 shortly after Dusty Springfield, her pet sheep, died. Thus began the life-long love affair, revealed here through fragmented tales of ardent fan worship. Other personal anecdotes are added too, that offer both a critical and emotional glimpse of life in Ireland in intervening years. These stories culminate with an account, complete with recorded footage, of Panti’s invited appearance on the New York based Maury show in the 1990s. Masquerading as an Irish transvestite, under pressure from Catholic parents and a sister (performer Katherine Lynch) to dress more like a man, Panti is treated to a female to male make-over by the chat show’s production team. After an hour of innumerable crossings, In These Shoes?, like the Maury episode in question, ends with Rory O’Neill standing on stage.

While disidentification implies a psychic rejection of symbolic logic, in the case of Panti’s work in particular, I would underscore the importance of the affective encounter to this process. Ann Cvetkovich has suggested that the most profound queer archive would be radically affective, arguing that ‘an archive of sexuality, and gay and lesbian life […] must preserve and produce not just knowledge but feeling.’⁷³⁶ As the interrogative tone of the play’s title implies, In These Shoes? involves a certain questioning and disarticulation of identity, but its more urgent call is for empathic engagement with lived experience, and for the sharing and reproduction of those affective repertories. Given that the Irish Queer Archives were handed over to the National Library in June 2008, this seems like a timely tacit proposal.

‘Full-Blown Woman’

In September 2007, only four months after In These Shoes? was first performed, Panti made a return visit to Temple Bar to stage All Dolled Up at the Project Arts Centre. Although a discrete piece in its own right, the performance developed and elaborated upon many of the strands suggested by the earlier venture. While the previous show was certainly reflective, All Dolled Up might be more readily understood as a memory play. The retrospective tone of the production was established with Panti’s soulful rendition of Édith Piaf’s ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’ at the outset. For Panti, lip-synching of this kind is a full-bodied act of channelling, ‘a collaboration between the queen and the original artiste.’ In this cross-identificatory vein, she proceeds to frame her show not as theatre in the traditional sense, but as a ‘conversation’ between her, the audience, and implicitly, the people she mentions along the way, who may or may not be present. Writing on the work of Luis Alfaro, Muñoz suggests that memory performances ‘deploy affective narratives of self, ways of being from the past, in the service of questioning the future, a future without annihilating epidemics, both viral and ideological.’⁷³⁷ By the same token, Panti calibrates this performance as an interactive, embodied journey through a lived Irish queer history in which identity, propriety, and relationality are all drawn into question.

While Panti begins with a meditation on her own particular medium – ‘Drag still retains its power to offend the easily offended, and that’s part of the fun’ – she moves on to account for some of her many involvements in queer culture throughout the 1990s. While the performer reckons that many audience members will know Sir John Rogerson’s Quay in Dublin 2 as a nice middle-class neighbourhood with lots of new apartments, she knows it as the place where her fetish club Gag began. Referring to photographs and images projected on the back wall of the set, Panti describes some of the risqué acts she staged in the club, also recalling how she was invited to perform in fetish clubs in the United Kingdom. Most interesting, perhaps, is the account provided of the media’s response at the time. Suspicious Breda at the Irish Times, we are told, would not advertise G.A.G. (as it was then spelled) until she knew what the acronym meant. She seemed satisfied with Gays Against Germaine Greer, even though it was a fabrication. This incident becomes representative of how sexual vernaculars, to use Cindy Patton’s terminology – ‘the identifying characteristics of liminal sexualities’⁷³⁸ – are either misread, challenged, or rejected by normative discourse that distinguishes between the textual and the sexual. On the contrary, a sexual vernacular is de rigueur among queer communities. Taking the side of the moral majority, the People tabloid ran with the headline ‘Dublin Sex Orgy Sensation’ in a response that precipitated the eventual closing down of the venue.

‘You don’t have to pull something from your ass,’ we are cautioned, ‘to offend the easily offended.’ Panti continues to tell of her recent invitation to take part in RTÉ’s Celebrity You’re A Star; an offer that was revoked when she said she wanted to make her donation to HIV charities. ‘It was all a bit too gay,’ is her assessment of the debacle.

Another story comes from the experience of taking part in the National College of Art and Design’s graduate fashion show. When one tutor did not come on stage to receive flowers from Panti on behalf of her students, the performer approached the lady in the audience following the official ceremony. ‘Fuck off. I am a full-blown woman and I have never been so insulted in all my life’ was the lecturer’s response. In recalling the incident, what fascinates Panti most is the invocation of ‘the language of disease’ to describe her womanhood; as if womanhood, like ‘fully blown’ AIDS was potentially fatal.

As with In These Shoes? the production takes on an even more personal twist when Panti describes how people feel they can tell her anything assuming that she, a cross-dressed man, will not judge them. Responding to this history of shared secrets, Panti tells those gathered that she is HIV positive, something she has never divulged in public before. While there is a reasonably well-established history of HIV performance art, much of which involves self-harm and bloodletting practices,⁷³⁹ Panti does not follow this line of purgation. Instead, she talks through the original diagnosis, and describes her fears of dying, complete with an imagined rendition of ‘Ding, Dong the Witch is Dead’ at Glasnevin crematorium. She talks about attending HIV clinics through the years, and the shifting demographic of clients: first the gays, then drug addicts and haemophiliacs, followed most recently by migrant parents with their children. Delivered with comic relief, which included offering her glass of water to a spectator to drink from, the story gives voice to a greater history of untold experience, and marries a narrative of gender and sexual marginalization to a larger network of subaltern violence and social othering. Channelling ‘that great philosopher Whitney Houston,’ Panti ends with an affirmation of collectivity. Addressing the audience with outstretched arms, she announces: ‘without you, I’d have nothing.’

What Panti Makes and ‘Dos’

This chapter has foregrounded cross-dressing performer Panti as an accretive force in Irish queer culture. Panti does not only question the normative, but through a range of affective practices, she disidentifies with that culture and mobilizes queer communities of feeling. Panti enacts an unheimlich familial quality, that does not replicate the normative domestic structure that engenders literal and symbolic violence on so many queers, but resignifies that peculiarity as all-embracing and life-giving. Queers respect her skill as a performer, her passing social observations, and her intelligent political commentary, such as what features in her annual Christmas address in GCN (Gay Community News) or her speeches during Pride. More than that, however, people are moved by her ability to touch in all manner of ways. Around Panti, gender ambivalence, sexual excess, social marginalization, illness, creativity, pleasure and joy mischievously intermingle in a manner that does not simply critique the status quo, but is regenerative of those lives excluded by it.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has observed that queer criticism has been dominated by paranoiac cultural observations that essentially involve the struggle to understand how homophobia and heterosexism work. The most obvious danger in this approach, she cautions, is the reification of a hegemonic way of knowing that does not give adequate address to affective, reparative intervention:

The monopolistic program of paranoid knowing systematically disallows any explicit recourse to reparative motives, no sooner to be articulated than subject to methodical uprooting. Reparative motives, once they become explicit, are inadmissible in paranoid theory both because they are about pleasure (‘merely aesthetic’) and because they are frankly ameliorative (‘merely reformist’).⁷⁴⁰

Using camp as an example, Sedgwick highlights how although camp is most often understood in the context of deconstructive acts of parody, denaturalization, and demystification, its reparative impulse is equally important:

To view camp as, among other things, the communal, historically tense exploration of a variety of reparative practices is to do better justice to many of the defining elements of classic camp performance: the startling, juicy displays of excess erudition, for example; the passionate, often hilarious antiquarianism, the prodigal production of alternative historiographies; the ‘over’ – attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste of leftover products; the rich, highly interruptive affective variety; the irresponsible fascination with ventriloquistic experimentation; the disorienting juxtapositions of present with past, and popular with high culture.⁷⁴¹

While many queer cultural practices in Ireland may have reparative qualities, as a solo performer Panti’s role is somewhat unique. Indeed, what Gilles Deleuze remarks about literature is perhaps especially true of performers who play to the (melancholic) queer audience: ‘health as literature, as writing, consists in inventing a people who are missing. It is the task of the fabulating function to invent people.’⁷⁴² Panti’s affective innovations of this kind are apparent not only in what she does (crossing gender; channelling divas; retelling stories of days gone by; invoking lives passed on; reminding us of someone, but no one in particular …), but in her engagement with proximate (queer) others in the present, and her insistence that we do something too. While this approach inflects events such as the Casting Couch, the AMI, and the variety of lectures she has given, not to mention her frequent mingling with those in her vicinity, the strategy has become firmly established with the founding of her pub Pantibar in 2007. While the radical particularity of queer culture risks being neutralized by the kind of commodifying gesture that this branding might imply, it is important to recognize that access to commercial culture is very much part of the way in which marginal social groups have come to negotiate and manipulate cultural hegemony.⁷⁴³ Since the venue’s opening, Panti has broadened traditional conceptions of gay, pub, and indeed performance culture by scheduling a range of themed nights that might be more readily understood in the context of curated play. Indeed, the bar is referred to as a ‘Homo Activity Centre’ on the venue’s website.⁷⁴⁴ To date, events have included screenings and discussions of significant queer films (downstairs in Panti’s living room), a competition to become Panti’s PA (Performing Assistant), and an ongoing weekly crafts night known as Panti’s Make and Do Do. Each week, the assembled crowd are given art and craft tasks to complete, such as designing an ideal partner with plasticine and pipe cleaners, or making a coming-out card. After Panti talks through each piece of art, and announces a winner, individual works are displayed in an assigned cabinet, as proud parents might do with their children’s efforts.

The performative tenor to these forms of queer sociality exemplifies Panti’s commitment to a creative, reparative performance ethic. Gregory Bateson emphasizes the therapeutic dimension to play with:

The resemblance between the process of therapy and the phenomenon of play is, in fact, profound. Both occur within a delimited psychological frame, a spatial and temporal bounding of a set of interactive messages.⁷⁴⁵

Although Bateson discusses the therapeutic, neither he nor I do so to pathologize the encounters in question, but to stress their function in imagining communities into being.⁷⁴⁶ Arguing for the need to consider the possibility of this kind of embodied intervention further, Dolan asks ‘How might queer theatre become a kind of social ritual that audiences need for sustenance?’⁷⁴⁷ As I understand it, the coming together of queers and the doing of queer do not just signify ‘outward’ oriented symbolic dissidence. Rather, I suggest that the associated acts of intimacy, engagement, and sometimes carnivalesque revelry to which I refer contribute to the cultivation of an ‘internal’ dynamic necessary for the personal, social, and cultural constitution or restitution of participating parties.

Dressed to Express

In Frank McGuinness’s play Carthaginians (1988), gay Dido cross-dresses to direct his production of The Burning of the Balaclava in which, among other things, the artistic exploitation of the Troubles is examined. At the end of McGuinness’s work, it is Dido who stands in a graveyard among the dead, reciting the names of those killed during Bloody Sunday. Mirroring his own interlocution, the drama ends with the imperative ‘Play:’ play as interrogative, play as reparative, play as preparation for an alternative way of life.⁷⁴⁸ This creative imperative is given exemplary actuation in the performance tradition I have discussed here, especially in Panti’s work. In the performances that emerge from this community-based and community-identified artist, queers are afforded the opportunity to rehearse the constitutive reiteration of individual and collective identities, while also enacting ‘proactive resistance to, and defiance of, hegemony’s own unending production of what does and does not constitute’, in Judith Butler’s phrase, ‘bodies that matter’⁷⁴⁹. In this regard, we might even think about Panti’s work and associated queer performances as examples of Dolan’s utopian performatives that ‘provide[s] a place where people come together, embodied and passionate, to share experiences of meaning making and imagination that can describe or capture fleeting intimations of a better world’.⁷⁵⁰

Iris Young understands touch as ‘an orientation to sensuality’ and maintains, following Luce Irigaray, that ‘touch immerses the subject in fluid continuity with the object, and for the touching subject the object touched reciprocates the touching, blurring the border between self and other’.⁷⁵¹ In this chapter I have considered how certain unresearched queer performance practices in Ireland, in particular the work of Panti Bliss, counteract the production of affect aliens by blurring manifold material and symbolic borders between self and others, while rehearsing alternative forms of queer relationality through the production of affective communities.⁷⁵² Writing against trends discernible in mainstream and gay culture that attach shame to the varied practices of queer communities, the essay has focused specifically on the fleshy activism inherent in the coming together of queer bodies in a variety of spaces in search of the pleasure that comes with opening up to other bodies. As in Ahmed’s work, this too has political value: ‘The hope of queer politics is that bringing us closer to others, from whom we have been barred, might also bring us to different ways of living with others.’⁷⁵³ Elsewhere, following Muñoz, I have argued that ‘any thorough investigation of queer performance practices that seeks to retrieve or account for marginal identities and performance traditions should not look solely at that culture’s dissonances relative to the dominant, but also analyse that culture’s discrete world-making’.⁷⁵⁴ I reiterate this urgency here with the added insistence on distinguishing between identity and equal rights. If we think of the queer as a marginal (sexed) position assigned to certain figures within the social, we might also consider the impossibility of fully signifying that position. Instead of rushing to normativize the queer, as so many strands of discourse on partnership, marriage, and adoptive rights suggest, we might revel in the queer itself, and the disorienting affect that so much queer performance effects on ours and others’ lives.

Extract From: This is a revision of the essay ‘Touching, Feeling, Cross-Dressing: On the Affectivity of Queer Performance. Or, What Makes Panti Fabulous’ from Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance, edited by David Cregan.

Cross Reference: Gender and sexuality essays in Part Two

See Also: Cregan essay on the Abbey Theatre’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest