DRAG ARTISTS
& PERFORMERS CREATIVITY THRU TRANSGENDERISM
Vaginal
Davis - Drag Performer
Vaginal Davis is an originator
of the homo-core punk movement and a gender-queer art-music
icon. Her concept bands -- including Pedro Muriel and
Esther, Cholita! The Female Menudo, black fag, and the
Afro Sisters -- have left an indelible mark on the development
of underground music. Like Ron Athey, Ms Davis made her
name in LA's club performance scene, and has earned herself
a similar notoriety as a cultural antagonist and erotic
provocateur.
Set apart from gallery-centered art, and Hollywood movies,
and from those systems' necessities of high-polish, low-substance
production, Vaginal Davis's low-budget -- often no-budget
-- performance, experimental film and video practice has
critiqued exclusionary conceits from the outside. Davis
has been a prolific producer of club performance, video
and Xerox-produced Zines, and other forms of antagonistic
low-cost, high-impact work. Such as in her drag reconstruction
of Vanessa Beecroft's Navy SEALs performance, Ms Davis
derails collector-friendly raciness in spectacles of femininity,
queerness and blackness. She critiques both the gallery
system and the larger cultural trend that it mirrors,
with tongue-in-cheek self-exploitation and rude provocations
of racial and gender confusion.
Vaginal Davis is the key
proponent of the disruptive performance aesthetic known
as terrorist drag. Disrupting the cultural assimilation
of gay-oriented and corporate-friendly drag, she positions
herself at an uncomfortable tangent to the conservative
politics of gay culture, mining its contradictory impulses
to interrupt the entrenchment of its assimilatory strategies.
A self-labeled "sexual repulsive," Ms Davis consistently
refuses to ease conservative tactics within gay and black
politics, employing punk music, invented biography, insults,
self-mockery, and repeated incitements to group sexual
revolt -- all to hilarious and devastating effect. Her
body a car-crash of excessive significations, Vaginal
Davis stages a clash of identifications within and against
both heterosexual and queer cultures, and Black and Hispanic
identities. From bubblegum songstress Graziela Grejalva
to aging deviant John Dean Egg III, Davis's personas reject
the internal counter-cultural mandate to refuse self-criticism,
instead problematising the functions and assumptions of
normative trends within the margins. By renewing uncertainties
within alternative cultures and identities, Vaginal Davis
opens up spaces for their continual struggle towards renewed
and greater challenges, over and against these practices'
timid appeasement and appropriation by the mainstream.
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