Performative Cultural Drag. Oh! And Necklaces

Post in honor of the Genderplayful Marketplace, which is a simply brilliant idea that I have donated to and am thrilled to see funded.

The photo above is of a necklace I finished a few weeks ago. With the exception of a small enamel pin on the handle of my purse, it’s the only thing I now own in rainbow colors.

The necklace is the most recent step in my ongoing struggle to be visibly queer. Though perhaps “struggle” is too harsh a word. Work? Premeditated awareness and action thereupon?

During my time in Australia, much of this work and awareness was focused on gender presentation. To wit:

I was butch, is the thing. And now?

I am not so butch any more; it was time for me to say that. I am aggressive and queer and interested in gender in ways that make me link my stature, stance and poise to both masculine and feminine cultural tropes, because I like them and how they help me fill in the gaps in my personal lexicon.

(Sidenote: Taking pictures of myself, still weird.)

In the passage from there to here, from flannel shirts and a buzz cut to today when I am wearing a delicate gold necklace in rainbow colors and seven matching gold studs in my ears, I got a little lost in my understanding of gender. Or more specifically, I began to question an internal assumption I had made that my performativity was gender-based. This was brought to my mind again this morning, when I found myself wondering if I am one of the friends that Rona views as deeply invested in gender.

I’m here with the terms butch and femme in front of me now because when I was butch, it was about gender. I am still very in love with the butch/femme concepts, while slowly coming around to the idea that I probably don’t fit either word and should maybe go looking for some new ones.

The reality is that when I was dressing butch it was much easier for me to visibly display my queer/kinky/poly roots. It was much easier for me to walk into a radical queer space and feel comfortable. It was much easier for me to exchange small nods with genderqueer folk on the subway.

I think a lot, these days, about how to keep my personal performance commentative, obsessive, sharply aware and queer, and how to convey that performative ‘drag’ sensibility, when really, when I’m done I look like every other girl on the subway. Is there a word for that? And is there truly subversion there, in the idea of performing into a role that I could just as easily own without the same consciousness?

This is the same issue that is mirrored in my relationship with Zac. It is not an issue in our relationship, actually, but an issue about it, and one that in no way detracts from the relationship itself in all its damned wonderful glory.

Where’s my queer self in the two of us? He and I are a cis, male-performing guy and a cis, female-performing grrl, both with ‘mainstream drag’ performative expressions of image, language and (in my case) lifestyle. And yet it is important to me that my partnership with this man retain some obvious aspect of queer sensibility. When we cannot fit it into our visual performance, it has to find other places to manifest; our interactions, our language, our art. (This is why I call him my partner instead of my boyfriend, Jesse Custer be damned.)

I don’t want to let myself forget how valuable subversion is; that it is amazing and important and a *privilege* that I can be hired into a traditional corporate culture, build a career, and have multiple opportunities to challenge the preconceptions of my coworkers about the nature of sexuality and relationships through conversations of mutual respect. In part, I gain this privilege through the choices I make about my body and my performance.

If we’re being honest, I am a little afraid of where my life may be going in this recent performative shift. I fear that I will wake up one morning to realize I am living an uncritical, unaware lifestyle, that somehow my queer character will be subsumed if I don’t pay attention to it, nurture it, show it off, if even in some deeply subtle, quirky way. That it could easily become something I keep in the background (the bedroom?) of my life, without giving proper credit to the ways in which being queer informs my foreground.

I don’t want to ever forget to come out when I need to. I don’t want to stand by and let my queer character fade because my life would be easier that way. I would like to retain the hard parts of my personal history, because while they were hellish, they were also valuable. In essence, I see keeping myself queer as synonymous with keeping myself brave.

But let’s get back to the necklace.

While it is appropriate to say that I currently trend toward a very specific feminine aesthetic, and it is appropriate to say that I am doing so with a deliberate, conscious understanding of my gender identity, it still does not seem appropriate to call this “femme.” Gender is not my framework; I’m at a place where gender is an aspect of my performativity, but not its whole. I was, after all, consciously choosing my dress and presentation far before I was actively thinking about the nuances of my gender identity. I think very hard about the things I wear sometimes. Perhaps too hard; sometimes I have to walk the line between loving the careful building of image and tearing everything down because I feel suddenly drowned in frivolous trappings.

Right now my life is about equilibrium; there is performance in that as well. Performance in the way I dress, move, sit, speak, think. Performance in the way I write. Performance to convey personality (as quirky, as intelligent, as silly, as complex); performance to convey profession (as an art student, as a writer, as a marketer, as a manager); performance to convey culture (as a New Englander, as a New Yorker, as an American, as an academic, as a lover, as a queer person); performance to convey quality (as professional, as sexual, as sophisticated, as happy). Yes, sometimes when I put my clothes on in the morning I dress in a way that is meant to express “happy.”

So I’m wondering if there’s a word I can have that will indicate that when I put my clothes on my body every morning, when I paint my room and craft the aesthetics of my life, I do so in a conscious manner tantamount to a complete and well-developed language. The closest I have right now is performative cultural drag {mainstream arts young urban professional}. Goodness, that’s a mouthful. The poet in me insists that there must be an easier way, that someone before me must have tried to put this in words and succeeded.

This is a continued contemplation that I will leave for another post, as this one has lingered in my draft folder for far too long. In the meantime, I leave you with my favorite new couture collection: Jean Paul Gaultier’s Spring/Summer 2011 Collection, which was displayed in Paris this past fashion week. I want everything about it. Not in it, about it. I want everything that is spoken in the language of that high punk, those layered textures, the pumped silhouettes, the blue mohawks, the gender-bent illusion netting.

In the meantime, I will keep on writing my personal language of performativity, one rainbow necklace and enormous scarf at a time: