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Queercore: The distinct identities of subculture

College Literature, Feb 1997 by Michael du Plessis, Kathleen Chapman

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At the same time, Davis is engaged in a process of self-writing on multiple fronts. When she talks about her exclusion from the culture industry of Hollywood in her video `zine, she declares, "When they see a woman like me, they can't deal, so they dismiss me, but I'm way too big to be dismissed!" ("big" here could be both a reference to her stature and her import): this statement captures how persistently Vaginal Davis has asserted her identity. When the video begins, for example, she introduces herself, "Hello, I'm Vaginal Davis!" She repeats her introduction over and over again, while the video executes a series of eye-blink jumpcuts, or small glitches, which underline, the reiteration of her name and visually stress both her insistence and a struggle in self-naming-almost against the grain of the apparatus, as it were. This significance of self-writing and -naming for Davis as a black drag queen can be connected not only to queerpunk styles but also to Afrodiasporic practices of naming, most recently in rap (although Davis herself does not directly work with this musical form).5 Davis often practices self-aggrandizement, exemplified by utterances such as "my boldness and complete uninhibitedness" ("Myself" 107), while keeping a keen eye on racist/genderphobic exclusions. "[A]cting like he's never seen a big beautiful black drag queen before," she comments after an encounter with Brett Easton Ellis, who " [gives] me dagger eyes like he disapproved of my African-American flamboyountcy" ("Myself" 109). She remarks on the hip pseudo-tolerance of a Hollywood crowd: "[they] all think that they are being so progressive and cutting-edge because they are trying very hard not to be shocked by my giant black drag-queenedness" ("MonStar" 1). Davis will not let anyone rest comfortably with an assimilable presence. A scene from the video `zine shows how bricolage could work specifically to black queer punk ends. Davis's cohort, Fertile La Toyah, makes an appearance to address the question: "What Makes Fertile Mad?" White people who claim not to be racist make her mad, she answers, and she insists that all life in the U.S. is defined by racism. "We ain't all one big happy family like the little birdies! Fuck that shit!" At the end, Fertile is seen in a T-shirt with the legend "I'VE HAD 21 ABORTIONS" and a baseball cap with an X marked on it in duct tape, another big X visible behind her. "Soon I will be at your doorstep, me, Fertile La Toyah Jackson X, with my army of beautiful, beautiful colored people ready to tear your white, blue-eyed devil asses apart ... I will get justice by any means necessary." She rises from her seat, raises and cocks a rifle at the viewer, at which point the frame freezes, as if to forestall the inevitable shot.

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This scene spells out an intense rejection of the domesticated image of the benevolent black drag queen in mainstream media (most recently instantiated by RuPaul); through bricolage, it contests the marginalization of African American women and black queers from the rhetoric of Black Nationalism.6 Paul Gilroy has cautioned that the categories of "race" and "blackness" have stabilized themselves through a dependence on gender, masculinity in particular (7); in contrast to such dependence, Davis and Jackson conjoin race, gender, and sexuality in unpredictable, unruly ways. Their excessive invocation of Malcolm X in the video testifies instead to what Gilroy describes as "a desire to set the historical memory of black struggles loose in a world where memory and historicity have been subordinated to a relentless contemporaneity" (13). It is such memory and historicity that we should value and recognize in the queer counter-public sphere, and which Davis's work exemplifies.

Queercore: The distinct identities of subculture

College Literature, Feb 1997 by Michael du Plessis, Kathleen Chapman

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