'Even if we do not take things seriously… we are still doing them': Disidentification, ideology,...

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‘Even if we do not take things seriously ... we are still doing them’: disidentification,

ideology and queer performance

Stephen Greer

Published in Chow, Broderick, and Alex Mangold, eds. Žižek and Performance. Houndmills:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137410900

The queer potential for drag is its willingness to take fantasy seriously: to stage fictions of

gender, sexuality and the body to which we remain firmly attached, despite seemingly

determined disavowal. Yet, as Slavoj Žižek argues, the nature of ideological interpellation is

such that we persist in it, whether we choose to take it seriously or not: ‘Cynical distance is

just one way – one of many ways – to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological

fantasy’.1 How, then, should we understand the radical potential of queer performance if an

investment in a dominant discourse is the precondition of its existence? How might Žižek’s

critique of ideological relations – and of Judith Butler’s account of performative resistance –

drive a new and productive understanding of complicity in queer praxis?

In the following discussion, my mobilisation of Žižek’s arguments is queerly tactical – a

guerrilla discourse which seizes opportunities where they appear, rather than proceeding

through the orderly mapping of their discursive limits. Therefore, this chapter falls into two

parts. In the first, I consider Žižek’s theorisation of ideological interpellation as a process of

symbolic identification grounded in the misapprehension of its relational terms: in short, the

argument that the problem of ideology lies not in knowledge but on the side of reality itself,

in real social action. Arguing against the usefulness of ironic or parodic distance, I turn to

Žižek’s invocation of the Real – and his resistance of a ‘pre-ideological “authentic” kernel’2 –

http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137410900

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as the basis for a radical praxis grounded in the ‘recycling and rethinking’ of encoded

meaning.3 Here, I draw on Žižek’s exposition of Butler’s account of performative

(re)configurations of a hegemonic symbolic field as falling short of the radical possibilities of

the ‘act proper’, that which re-orders and re-defines what counts as reality. My intention is

not to resolve the differences between Žižek and Butler, but rather suggest the productive

conceptual terrain that might exist between performance engaged in a tactical, marginal

performative critique and the demand for a systemic overhaul of the symbolic order.

Accordingly, the second part of this discussion mobilises Žižek to offer a re-reading of José

Esteban Muñoz’s analysis of the concept of disidentification in the work of drag performer

Vaginal Creme Davis as a tactic of transformative resistance that eschews both identification

(integration) and counter-identification (rejection). In closing, I offer my own reading of the

Gay Shame events produced by UK-based performance collective Duckie, to suggest

potential implications of Žižek and Muñoz’s work for the understanding of British queer

performance and propose, briefly, how the notion of the act may allow us to articulate the

demand for queer potentialities yet to be fulfilled.

Queer restraint

‘Queer’ has the capacity to function as a falsely-unifying umbrella term, and I am conscious

that any claim to a stable body of work called queer performance is precarious. While being

wary of this fact, my reference to queer performance refers here to practice and practitioners

engaged in an anti-normative politics of the subject – commonly in rejection of heterosexist

ideological forms, but also challenging the ‘homonormative’ incorporation of dominant

heteronormative assumptions and institutions into gay culture. Often drawing on queer

theory’s critique of essentialist accounts of sex, gender, sexuality and identity and informed

by the history of an emergent lesbian and gay theatre following the 1960s, this body of work

is also frequently marked by an awareness of how particular performance strategies – the

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terms and conditions of production as well as the conventions of performance – may

constitute particular subjects within the public domain. Accordingly, queer performance’s

recurrent, reflexive interest in the conditions of performance has expressed the desire to not

only broaden the field of representation of sexualities – through a challenge to dominant or

stereotypical images, and the production of diverse alternatives – but to put the issue of

representationality itself into play. In other words, how do particular conventions of

performance constitute the representation of certain subjectivities while foreclosing

recognition for others? While in this essay I discuss drag performatives (already the contested

site of so much queer analysis), I am not implying any honoured status for these practices.

That is, I am not framing drag as an always preferred tactic for recognising and producing

‘alternative’ subjectivities. Drag forms only one element of the broader, diverse body of

queer performance practice. My intention is to treat drag and parodic performatives less as

the defining features of queer performance than as modes which might both articulate queer's

broader, recurring challenge to essentialist accounts of identity, and the problematics of

performativity as the basis for radical action. In other words, any claim on a distinctly radical

politics for drag demands the reflexive critique of the practices of drag itself.

The conception of productive constraint owes much to the work of Judith Butler, and the

notion of performativity developed through Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter

(1993). Performativity is distinguished from performance in that the latter assumes the pre-

existence of a subject: an actor who acts. In contrast, performativity argues for the

constitution of the subject through ritualised, public dramatisations of the body, in ‘the

reiteration of norms which precede, constrain and exceed the performer’.4 Accordingly, and

counter to a dominant ideology of gender-as-essence in which men and women already exist,

performativity understands gender as an ‘act which brings into being what it names’.5 This

logic figures gender as a system of stylised, repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory

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frame, however, it does not foreclose the possibility of intervention or reform.6 Though

individual agency might be limited to forms of improvisation within ‘a scene of constraints’,

the circuitous path of citation – repetition and (re)iteration – already demonstrates its own

failure: ‘norms are continually haunted by their own inefficacy; hence the anxiously repeated

effort to install and augment their jurisdiction’.7 Drag, for Butler, has radical potential in that

it ‘imitates the imitative structure of gender, revealing gender itself to be an imitation’.8 In

other words, drag cites gender norms so as to expose their citational status. In the words of

David Ruffolo, ‘drag is a notable example of how identity is a parody: it is not a copy of an

original, but a copy of the illusion of an original; drag is a copy of a copy’.9

Ideology as misrecognition

My initial proposition is to read in drag’s quality as a ‘copy of a copy’ a semblance of Žižek’s

account of the production of meaning within a chain of signification where meaning is

presupposed as already given: an illusion of predestination within the symbolic order where

the gesture of declaring oneself a free subject relies upon and sets in motion a process that

will retroactively ground it.10

In doing so, I resist the mobilisation of drag as the performative

rendition of normative or regressive forms which we can identify objectively and simply stop

doing. As I will go on to explore in greater detail, Žižek’s account of ideology emphasises a

misapprehension of the conditions of ideological interpellation rather than an ignorance of

their existence. That misapprehension takes the form of a perception of distance from the

structures of ideology which – rather than confirming autonomy – is the means through

which interpellation succeeds. He writes,

an interpellation succeeds precisely when I perceive myself as ‘not only that,’ but a

‘complex person who, among other things, is also that’ – in short imaginary distance

towards symbolic identification is the very sign of its success.11

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Consequently – and with implications for the claim to resistance through parody in

‘exaggeration, amplification, theatricalization’12

in camp performatives – cynical or ironic

distance may be understood as ways in which we ‘blind ourselves to the structuring power of

ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical

distance, we are still doing them’.13

For Žižek, ideology should not be understood only as a series of concepts, procedures or

assertions which might be examined objectively, but first in terms of

a kind of basic, constitutive naïveté: the misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of

its own effective conditions, a distance, a divergence between so-called social reality

and our distorted representation, our false consciousness of it.14

That naiveté takes the form of a belief that ideology is happening ‘over there’, and that our

subjectivity offers a safe and potentially objective distance from which to observe it – when,

following the interpellative logic of Butler’s account of subjectification, that subjectivity does

not proceed ideology but is an effect of its successful operation. In other words, the subject

capable of denying ideology emerges as an ‘effect-of-subject’ produced by ideology itself – it

is the performative outcome of interpellation’s success. Accordingly, the illusion of ideology

is found not on the side of knowledge but ‘already on the side of reality itself, of what people

are doing. […] What [people] overlook, what they misrecognize, is not the reality but the

illusion which is structuring their reality, their real social activity’. Ideology has a material

existence and is manifest in material action, through beliefs which are ‘radically exterior,

embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people’.15

This account of ideology as the misapprehension of relationality, expressed and constituted

through material conduct, finds further expression in Žižek’s reading of Butler’s account of

the Hegelian dialectic of Lord and Bondsman, a self-effacing contract which circuitously

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conceals its own origin, amplifying and confirming its logic through its own operation: ‘the

bondsman (servant) is all the more the servant, the more he (mis)perceives his position as that

of an autonomous agent’.16

I am, in other words, concerned with the particular ways in which

the circuitous operation of ideology constitutes its subjects, through a misrecognition which

produces a kind of ‘effect of essentialism’: material identities and bodies which precede their

ordering in reality. Žižek’s reading of Marxist commodity fetishism may illustrate more

firmly what I want to identify as an anti-essentialist – and potentially queer – impulse within

his account of ideological relations. Rejecting the reading of commodity fetishism as the

replacement of persons with things (wherein a relation between subjects assumes the form of

a relation between things), Žižek argues that the essential feature is misrecognition: that the

effects of a structured network are mistaken as qualities of the elements within that network.

In other words, Žižek’s account shifts from an understanding of relations as primarily

descriptive to one which acknowledges the constitutive powers of relationality. Thus,

commodity fetishism

consists of a certain misrecognition which concerns the relation between a structured

network and one of its elements: what is actually a structural effect, an effect of the

network of relations between elements, appears as an immediate property of one of its

elements, as if this property also belongs to it outside of its relation with other

elements.17

(Žižek 1989: 19)

The form of the network is not the result of the qualities of its elements: rather, the opposite

is true, in that the elements of a structured network acquire their qualities from the network of

relations itself.

The refusal of the Real

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From where, then, might a critique of ideology begin, in or through performance? If the

presumption of distance from ideological identification describes the conditions in and

through which ideology proceeds – and, indeed, ‘exerts a true hold on us precisely when we

maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it’18

– on what terms might we escape

its self-replicating trap? The answer, I think, may take several forms. Reflecting a

Foucaultian analysis that there is no space ‘outside’ of culture, Žižek proposes that the only

non-ideological position available is in the Real, understood in Lacanian terms as an

undifferentiated space beyond the signifying order of the symbolic. While the real remains

impossible to imagine or occupy, it persists as a point of resistance and antagonism in that it

cannot be articulated or integrated within the symbolic order of language.19

This position

exists as a theoretical supposition: if it is possible to assume a place that enables us to

maintain a distance from ideology, that place ‘must remain empty, it cannot be occupied by

any positively determined reality’.20

It is the refusal to conceive of a pre- or trans-ideological

‘authentic’ kernel which appears to stand outside of ideology but in actuality functions as the

very basis for ideology’s operation.21

The Real, then, functions through its absence as a

founding negativity, not as a means of arriving at a social phenomena’s ultimate meaning but

by allowing us to conceive of the ways in which ideology operates to conceal and patch up its

dysfunctions. Though we cannot occupy its position, the Real provides an ‘extra-ideological

point of reference that authorizes us to denounce the content of our immediate experience as

“ideological”’.22

The Real refuses ideology’s capacity to fully account for the world and its

social phenomena.

Here, Žižek’s analysis of Butler illuminates the radicalism of such refusal, and the limits of

performative resistance. For Žižek, Butler’s reading of Lacan ‘reduces resistance to the

imaginary misrecognition of the symbolic structure; such a resistance, although it thwarts the

full symbolic realization, nevertheless depends on it and asserts it in its very opposition’.23

In

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this, the possibilities of marginal reconfigurations are dependent on a big Other for their point

of reference, a predominant discourse that therefore ‘can be only marginally displaced or

transgressed’.24

This interpretation of Lacan, in turn, leads Butler to conflate the socio-

political and psychoanalytic notions of resistance and set a limited Lacanian ‘imaginary

thwarting’ against a pluralistic Foucaultian account of discourse as a heterogeneous field of

multiple practices, such as might better enable symbolic subversion and rearticulation.

Counter to Butler, Žižek proposes reading in Foucault an insistence on the ‘immanence of

resistance to Power,’ while finding in Lacan ‘the possibility of a radical rearticulation of the

entire symbolic field by means of an act proper’.25

The act moves beyond the self-referential

assertion of one’s subject position to restructure ‘the very symbolic coordinates of the agent’s

situation: it is an intervention in the course of which the agent’s identity itself is radically

changed’.26

As such, the act exceeds the confirmations of identity politics (which finds

everyone in their given place), instead re-ordering the terms which make identities possible.

Authentic politics is an art of the impossible, which ‘changes the very parameters of what is

considered “possible” in the existing constellation’.27

The act does more than ‘intervene in

reality in the sense of “having actual consequences” – it redefines what counts as reality’.28

Žižek’s challenge to Butler is that she overestimates the possibilities of performative

configurations while not allowing for a ‘thorough restructuring of the hegemonic symbolic

order in its totality’.29

Though Žižek disputes the potentiality of performative reconfiguration, he nonetheless

acknowledges the possibilities for tactical action within a predominant symbolic discourse.

While falling short of the systemic re-ordering of the act, such action might bring to light the

symbolic co-ordinates that the act proper might re-configure. Returning to the Lacanian

argument that the subject never fully recognizes itself in the interpellative call, he has

asserted:

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When subjects are confronted with a forced choice in which rejecting an injurious

interpellation amounts to not existing at all – when, under the threat of nonexistence,

they are, as it were, emotionally blackmailed into identifying with the imposed

symbolic identity (‘nigger’, ‘bitch’, etc.) – it is nevertheless possible for them to

displace this identity, to recontextualize it, to make it work for other purposes, to turn

it against its hegemonic mode of functioning, since symbolic identity retains its hold

only by its incessant repetitive re-enacting.30

The dependence of interpellation on ‘incessant repetitive re-enacting’ also describes its

contingency. While subjection designates ‘a certain kind of restriction in production, a

restriction without which the production of the subject cannot take place’31

, the citational

nature of subjectivity – or hate speech, as in the example above – marks its weakness. If

dominant cultural forms and practices are dependent on (re)iteration for their force, that

process might be interrupted or re-directed. A term once used injuriously – ‘queer’ – might

re-appropriated, ‘cited against its originary purposes, and perform a reversal of effects’32

as a

form of self-nomination and validation, rather than as abusive censure.

If hate speech enunciates a particular social structure which invokes and reconsolidates a

position of dominance, we might also imagine how that same speech (either consciously

repurposed, or perhaps when simply misheard or misunderstood) can provide for the

articulation and enactment of alternative social conditions – if only in describing their

possibility. In this, the convergence of Žižek and Muñoz’s thinking – explored below – may

further foster a reparative dynamic within the frequently paranoid trajectory of queer analysis

fixated on a reflexive and mimetic account whose faith in critical ‘exposure’ assumes an

endless ‘naïveté in those who make the audience for those unveilings’.33

If, as Mikko

Tuhkanen suggest, paranoid knowledge remains ‘clueless in the face of invention and

newness’34

because of its dependence on imitating and embodying its object, how might

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disidentification’s interest in world-making and hybrid forms offer productive alternatives?

Might, in turn, a reading of disidentification in the shadow of the act allow – as Jasbir Puar

has suggested – for a queer analysis that better subjects itself to the frame it employs, or a

praxis which recognises the potential complicitous relation of the resistance of heteronorms

to other norms?35

In the remainder of this discussion I will work towards an understanding of the potential of

resignification in queer performance as operating through an acknowledgement of the ‘proper

distance’ through which ideology functions – a ‘working on and against’ that neither buckles

under the pressure of dominant ideology nor attempts to break free in a counteridentifying or

utopian gesture.36

To poach terms from Michel de Certeau, it describes a tactical response to

the absence of a ‘proper’ place to call one’s own from where strategic action might be

imagined and carried out.37

In those terms, the queer body in performance – or, rather,

performances of the queer body – may further expose the tension between autonomy and

recognition: knowledge that ‘one must both be recognized as a subject who subtends various

performances, but that there must also be a self who is not reducible to performances’.38

Yet

acknowledgement of that tension, I suggest, is predicated on the conception of a radical

commitment yet to be fulfilled: it is a tactical action that enacts the call for systemic change,

even as it engages with a predominant discourse at the ‘local’ level.

Disidentification

Muñoz’s use of the term disidentification differs from that of Žižek. Writing of the logic of

passionate attachment which operates only insofar as it is not openly admitted, Žižek asserts

that which ‘holds a community together’ is not a shared mode of identification with the same

object but the delegation of love or hate.39

This nomination of a surrogate through whom the

community loves or hates is what Žižek describes as shared mode of disidentification.

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Recalling his theorisation of ideology, what Žižek’s ‘disidentification’ describes is a dynamic

of identification with identification itself – of the taking of another’s relations to real social

conditions as our own. It describes how the ‘proper distance’ to ideology is sustained through

the nomination of those who will be ‘close’ on our behalf – in Žižek’s example, an

understanding of faith as identification with the relationship of priests and saints to the

institution of the Church. While Žižek’s use of disidentification describes a ‘false distance’40

towards the co-ordinates of one’s social existence, Muñoz’s mobilisation of the same term

makes use of an unavoidable proximity. Sharing a reluctance to imagine ‘a flier who escapes

the atmospheric forcefield of ideology’,41

Muñoz’s disidentification proposes the

transformation of cultural logic from within, the ‘recycling and rethinking’ of meaning; it

describes neither assimilation nor strict opposition: ‘rather, disidentification is a strategy that

works on and against dominant ideology’.42

If Žižek maintains that ‘as cynical subjects, we

know full well that our understanding of reality is distorted, but we nevertheless stick to that

falsehood’,43

then Muñoz’s discourse of disidentification describes an attempt to co-opt that

distortion to alternative ends.

Muñoz’s examination of the ‘terrorist drag’ performances of Vaginal Creme Davis further

describes the discourse and ambition of disidentification as radical praxis:

Disidentification is a performative mode of tactical recognition that various

minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist the oppressive and normalizing

discourse of dominant ideology. Disidentification resists the interpellating call of

ideology that fixes a subject within the state power apparatus. It is a reformatting of

the self within the social. It is a third term that resists the binary of identification and

counteridentification.44

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Disidentification, then, is manifest in performance which imagines the possible reiteration of

subjectivity beyond dominant terms through the occupation and (re)appropriation of those

terms. It does not merely reject particular representations or conventions as demeaning or

discriminatory – racist, sexist, disablist etc. – or, crucially, claim distance from their

operation, but seeks to recycle and rethink encoded meaning 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’.45

It is

an attempt to intervene at the level of the social field.

As such, Muñoz proposes that disidentificatory identity performances should be understood

as ‘identities-in-difference’ which emerge ‘from a failed interpellation within the dominant

public sphere’.46

It is through disidentification with that public sphere that such identities

much contribute to function of a counterpublic sphere. This discourse – of publics and

counterpublics – owes much to the analyses advanced by Nancy Fraser (1990) and Michael

Warner (2002) who have argued that the constitution of the public sphere and ‘publicness’

have historically been predicated on exclusionary principles. In response, Muñoz conceives

of counterpublics as ‘communities and relational chains of resistance that contest the

dominant public sphere’47

inasmuch as disidentificatory performances expose what Muñoz

refers to as the ‘ideological/rhetorical context of state power’48

through a process of tactical

misrecognition – in other words, through mistaking the interpellative hail of ideology in a

way which exposes the narrow terms of recognition offered in that call. To paraphrase

Muñoz’s example, the cop calls out ‘You there! Stop that man!’ The disidentifying queer

acknowledges the hail but counters it: ‘A man? Where do you see a man here?’49

Disidentification, then, presents as the performative weaponisation of the uncertainty at the

heart of the scene of interpellation, offering not a compromise solution of limited recognition

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– a misrecognition that ‘one can stand to bear’50

– but the demand for new orders of possible

recognition.

Vaginal Creme Davis

As suggested above, Muñoz’s tactic for reading – and performing – disidentification is to

locate the claim on minoritarian subjectivities within publics which might appear to proscribe

their existence, in a manner which reanimates and re-directs the dynamic of foreclosure.

Accordingly, Muñoz’s account of Davis – a genderqueer artist, musician, curator, film-maker

and drag superstar – is grounded in a self-mythologising life history.51

Shifting between

affirmation and parody, Davis’ self-narrative offers a hybrid origin story of material fact and

hyperbolic fiction:

I was hatched a half-breed drag baby out of the primordial ooze of L.A. […] a

Vagisaurus rex who popped out of a leathery egg in a welfare hovel in South Central,

perfect as you now find me, complete with high heels.52

Davis’ gleefully inconsistent, impossible biography does not elide politically ‘dubious’,

harmful or contradictory elements of identity, but enacts their collision. Davis’ name, for

example, is offered as a homage to radical scholar and activist Angela Davis (notable for her

role in the civil rights movement and associations with the Black Panther Party) that performs

a disidentificatory ‘salute’ that addresses the exclusion of effeminacy and queerness from

heterosexual black militancy. It remakes of the homophobic and masculinist elements of

Black Power as to open it ‘to a self that is simultaneously black and queer’53

– not in simple

defiance or ‘correction’ of homophobia, but in reappropriation of homophobia’s attachment

to a queer other against which straightness is measured.

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Though such performance engages in the demystification of representation, ‘showing how

and when the object of pleasure is made’, it can be distinguished from a Brechtian practice

which “‘quotes’ or demonstrates a character’s behaviour instead of identifying with it’54

as it

resists a clean distinction between desire and identification (between ‘having’ and ‘being’).

Rather than pursuing release or illusory distance from imaginary identifications in order to

allow for their critical examination, Davis’ performances articulate the inextricability of

desire and desiring from the practice of ideology. To perform ‘Clarence’, Davis’ rendition of

a white supremacist militiaman. as an object of hate would only invoke distance; to desire

and to become that which should be hateful forces a re-examination of ways in which

ideologically-structured libidinal investments constitute the subject. Rather than renouncing

Clarence as possible love-object, Davis inhabits the site of prohibition to ‘spoil’ the sense of

an essentialized white purity, re-plotting the disavowals within Butler’s account of

heterosexual melancholy where the straight man ‘becomes (mimes, cites appropriates,

assumes the status of) the man he “never” loved and “never” grieved’.55

Davis loves and

refuses to grieve, and in doing so – to use the terms of Ann Cvetkovich’s exploration of

lesbian public culture – maintains ‘a space for shame and perversion within public discourse

rather than purging them of their messiness in order to make them acceptable’.56

This

disavowal of disavowal, then, can be understood in Žižekian terms as an attempt to ‘traverse

the fantasy’, not merely asserting a new identity but staging an embrace of ‘the negativity that

arises in one’s symbolic supports so that one might act in a way not circumscribed by

neurotic identification or existing ideology’57

– that is, as a break from existing social codes

that has the potential to re-order the entire social field.

Key to this dynamic is the operation of a ‘tactical misrecognition’ in which Davis views

herself as militiamen, even though her white face makeup ‘looks nothing like real white

skin’.58

In this, there are striking parallels here between Muñoz’s disidentificatory logic, and

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the discourse of performance ‘amateurism’ described more recently by Sarah Jane Bailes as

‘a form of labour that misses a mark or under-achieves intentionally within the conventions

that the work usually aspires to’59

– a mode that produces meaning through a wavering

between two horizons of value, between what could or would be achieved through virtuosic

performance and what is being achieved. In this frame, supposed ‘errors of presentations’

offer a means of detecting and illuminating the ‘disavowed workings of power and

exclusion’60

on which processes of representation depend. On those terms, we might

understand ‘failure’ as a conscious tactic for disrupting both the coherence of dominant

images and the broader social symbolic order through which they are (re)produced. Such

failure may take the form of a kind of over-investment, not in cynical distance but in

perversely enthusiastic attachment. Accordingly, the performance of Davis-as-Clarence

recites and recycles the tradition of black-face minstrelsy, where the ‘the image of the fat-

lipped Sambo is replaced by the image of the ludicrous white militiaman’ in a ‘too literal

photo negative reversal’ that finds naturalism’s pretensions to subtlety and tracelessness

inverted and writ large.61

It is, in other words, a practice which seeks to enact Žižek’s claim

that 'an ideological edifice might be undermined by a too literal identification'62

which closes

the required ‘minimum distance’ toward its explicit rules.

Shame and disidentification

In closing, I want to suggest some of the further possibilities and, indeed, challenges for

queer performance praxis of thinking through disidentification in the terms of Žižek’s

account of ideological interpellation and to do so through a brief reading of London-based

performance collective Duckie’s Gay Shame events. If, as I have suggested, Muñoz’s concept

of disidentification may be understood in terms of Žižek’s account of the misapprehension of

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ideological relations – of a false distance from its terms – I have nonetheless figured its

potential radicalism in relation to an existing symbolic field. Davis’ interventions, as

discussed above, are dependent on a certain predominant intelligibility, even as the limits of

recognition are tested (or invoked as to be refused). However, the thread of utopian and

impossible imagining in that work – of communities and recognitions which do not exist yet,

or which exist only fleetingly in the moment of performance – performs a recognition of its

tactical limits which simultaneously demands a more radical intervention. In this, I want

conceptualise the act proper as a model for radical intervention in much the same way as

Žižek figures the Real as the basis for ideological resistance – as a possibility, an empty

place, a theoretical supposition to which queer performance may orient itself even as it falls

short in any given instance.

Created in response to the perceived homogenisation and commercialisation of major Pride

events (and echoing queer critiques of normalisation), Gay Shame was conceived as ‘an

antidote to all that rainbow flag-waving, Kylie-impersonating nonsense’63

that eschewed

politics for celebration and were ‘more about dancers and costumes than placards’, in the

words of one late 1990s UK Pride organiser.64

Yet rather than rejecting spectacle or

commercialised images of the gay community in the name of a repoliticised Pride, Duckie’s

sequence of annual events (1996-2009) suggests the possibilities of what I have described

elsewhere as transformative participatory play – defined not by ironic distance but by the

performative occupation of cultural, social and economic practices as to generate (potentially

radical) alternatives.65

In that body of work, I recognise ‘shame’ not as acknowledgement of

collective failure or the admission of guilty pleasure, but marking instead the possibilities for

‘connection through a shared experience while leaving difference and singularity intact’66

–

in short, a counterpublic seeking to sustain and foster non-exclusionary alternatives to a

consumerist mainstream.

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Accordingly, Duckie’s shame sequence may be understood as disidentificatory in its refusal

to elide politically suspect or contradictory elements of any identity, pursuing instead the

creation of a counterpublic space in which terms for productive, pluralising identities and

identifications were allowed to circulate – sometimes challenged or inverted through parodic

exaggeration (echoing Žižek and Davis in in a too literal identification with gender norms),

but also allowed to assume what Butler has advocated for as ‘a status of givenness … if only

to see how they work as they are put to use’.67

At the core of Gay Shame’s dramaturgy were a

series of participatory performance conventions, a dynamic most evident in the recurring use

of a ‘marketplace’ format in which audience members would receive ‘Duckie money’ with

which to barter at performance stalls run by different artists and performers.68

Queer

consumption was neither valorised as subversive nor rejected as another manifestation of the

cultural logic of late capitalism, but rather presented as disputed – or disputable – territory in

which multiple logics of value and exchange might be contested. As such, Macho Shame’s

(2008) ‘festival of masculinity’ staged a range of tactical responses to gender through

performances which drew on different configurations of body, space and desire: sometimes

through spectacle – as in all-male burlesque group Bearlesque – but also through the

interactive staging of exposure and intimacy, as in Brian Lobel’s WankBank, which paid

audience members to create short, temporary webcam videos in a private booth for the

consumption of another ‘punter’ somewhere else in the building. Elsewhere, Charlie

Pulford’s Shame Pour Homme paid ‘nine bob’ for a donation to a semi-public urinal, sold

back as an exclusive eau du toilette. A tongue-in-cheek dress-code which warned that

‘effeminate homosexuals will be barred and women vaguely tolerated’ played out in the

masculine iconography of construction workers, football kits and business suits, with an array

of beards and drawn-on moustaches. Similarly, Girly Shame’s ‘festival of femininity’ (2009)

presented ‘an indoor po-mo-homo playground’ juxtaposing – for example – Johnanna

18

Lynsley’s interactive staging of lectures on female hysteria from 1900, Hewlett and Eaton’s

mother-daughter comedy about ‘power, abuse and New Age spirituality’, Barbara and

Yogashwara's Safe Space, and 1960s girl dance group The Actionettes. Mitch and Parry’s

Anger Management Olympics at Macho Shame, which offered the chance to write something

that made you angry on a plate and smash it in a coconut-shy made from a traditional Welsh

dresser, was followed at Girly Shame by Mitchelino & Parriola's Chocolatier – an invitation

to ‘cast your nipples in 97% cocao chocolate from the Amazon’ and have them ‘sold on for

double the price’.69

Significant here are the ways in which the events eschewed the possibility of ‘passive’

consumption, framing spectatorship and ‘audiencing’ as forms of exchange – as the

‘practical, effective procedure of people’.70

That is to say, the engagement with the

machinery of queer culture’s commodification was not offered as secondary critical

perspective but structured as an unavoidable element of audience members’ encounter with

the work, and each other. Following Žižek, then, I am interested in reading the potential of

the demand of participation as a way of drawing of attention to the error – even hypocrisy –

in our understanding of our relationship to ideological forms, a short-circuiting of the cynical

distance that allows us to ‘blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy’.71

We are, already, implicated and mere recognition of that complicity alone does not and

cannot constitute a radical break. Even if we do not take normative, sexist, racist etc.

renditions of the gendered subject seriously, we are still doing them. Accordingly, might we

even read the kinds of images circulating in Macho Shame and Girly Shame as the

acknowledgement of forms of passionate attachment, in that these renditions persist in part

because we want to them to – that they circulate as a function of bad conscience, as a ‘joy

taken in persecuting oneself, where the self persecuted does not exist outside the orbit of that

persecution’?72

My point here is not to insist on (queer) pessimism or (queerer) paranoia but

19

to argue that a performative praxis that re-appropriates dominant codes might simultaneously

draw attention to the limits of its own critique, even as it seeks to invoke new horizons of

cultural intelligibility – and that complicity may not signal failure of radicalism but act as an

enabling acknowledgement.73

That is to say, the tactical operation of disidentification may

plot the conditions under which certain subjects seem to ‘disappear’ from the symbolic

mandate, not through the wholly radical rebirth of the act but because they derive their

strength from the apprehension that they somehow stand outside of a predominant ideological

matrix.

In this regard, the mobilisation of Muñoz’s notion of disidentification in reading works like

Duckie’s Gay Shame sequence may permit a closer examination of the racial politics of

specifically British queer performance, not least in resistance of the belief that it is only

necessary to talk about race and sexuality in performance when discussing non-white

performers and audiences. If Muñoz's exploration of Davis' black nationalist politics

addresses an essential blackness which is 'decidedly heterosexual', might contemporary

British queer performance’s encounter with class drive us to examine an essential

homosexuality which is often ‘decidedly white’? That is to say, rather than deracinating

Muñoz’s account of minoritarian subjectivities – of queers of colour – we might move to

consider how Gay Shame's interrogation of mainstream Pride celebrations brings whiteness

into view as a field of reference. Indeed, the optic of race may be already present, counter-

intuitively, in Duckie’s self-titling as purveyors of ‘progressive working class entertainment'

(emphasis added). That is to say, the images of British identity present in the Gay Shame

events – whether as middle-class home-crafts, the consumer-citizen, or council-estate chic –

should be understood as images of different notions of white middle- and working-classness

that enact different forms of discipline and control. If the concept of the act designates ‘an

intervention in social reality that changes the very co-ordinates of what is perceived as

20

“possible”’74

(2001b: 167), might we better approach a restructuring of those very symbolic

coordinates in by acknowledging their self-effacement? The contribution of a Zizekian

understanding of disidentification to queer performance praxis, in other words, is a sharper

account of the impossible – of the potential terms of an ‘authentic’ politics which exceeds the

duelling mandates of celebration and appropriation, and better acknowledges, rather than

merely repudiates, its attachments.

1 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 30.

2 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London:

Verso, 1999), 98.

3 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers Of Color And The Performance Of Politics

(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 31.

4 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London and New

York: Routledge, 1993), 234.

5 Sara Salih, Judith Butler ( London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 64.

6 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New

York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 43-4.

7 Butler, Bodies, 237.

8 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 145.

9 David Ruffolo, Post-Queer Politics (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 26.

10 Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters

(London: Verso, 1996), 142.

11 Žižek, Ticklish, 258-9.

12 David Halperin, Saint Foucault (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997),

29.

21

13

Žižek, Sublime, 30.

14 Žižek, Sublime, 24.

15 Žižek, Sublime, 30-1.

16 Žižek, Ticklish, 258.

17 Žižek, Sublime,19.

18 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 21.

19 See Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (London: Fontana Press, 1991), 110.

20 Slavoj Žižek, ed., Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1995), 17.


22 Žižek, Mapping, 25.




26 Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), 85.


28 Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Four Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a

Notion (London: Verso, 2001), 172.



31 Butler, Psychic, 84.

32 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London and New York:

Routledge, 1997), p. 14.

33 Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2003), 141.

22

34

Mikko Tukhanen, ‘Mestiza Metaphysics’, in Queer Times, Queer Becomings, E. L.

McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, eds. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), 268.

35 Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2007), 23.

36 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 11-2.

37 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and

London: University of California Press, 1984).

38 Claire Colebrook, ‘On the Very Possibility of Queer Theory’ in Deleuze and Queer

Theory, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr, eds. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,

2009), 14.


40 Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek and Ernest Laclau, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality

(London: Verso, 2000), 103.

41 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 162.


43 Tony Myers, Slavoj Žižek (London: Routledge, 2003), 65.


45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., 7.

47 Ibid., 146.

48 Ibid., 168.

49 Ibid., 168-9.

50 See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 26.

51 For an overview of Davis’ works, see Hilary E. MacGregor, ‘Of Dada and Dr. Davis’, Los

Angeles Times, May 2, 2004.

23

52

Davis, quoted in Guy Trebay, ‘Ready to Fade Into Obscurity. Wait, He's Already There,

New York Times, May 24, 2004.


54 Elin Diamond, ‘Brechtian Theory / Feminist Theory – Toward a Gestic Feminist

Criticism’, TDR, 32:1 (1988): 82–94.

55 Butler, Bodies, 236.

56 Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 63.

57 Marcus Pound, Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grann Rapids, MI: William B

Eerdmans, 2008), 82.


59 Sarah Jane Bailes, Performance, Theatre and the Poetics of Failure: Forced

Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service (London: Routledge, 2011), 93.

60 Bailes, Failure, 34.



63 Out, ‘Walk Like A Man?’ July 10 2008.

64 Will Woodward, ‘Hardline gays attack “dumbed down” festival’, The Guardian, July 3,

1999, 14.

65 Stephen Greer, Contemporary British Queer Performance (Basingstoke and New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 159-61.

66 Mark Halperin and Valerie Traub, eds., Gay Shame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2009), 223.

67 Butler et al, Contingency, 269.

24

68

See Rachel Zerihan, ‘Gay Shame’, Dance Theatre Journal, 23: 2 (2009): 16-22, and ‘Gay

Shame Goes Girly’, Dance Theatre Journal, 23: 4 (2010): 11–15.

69 Owen Parry, ‘Gay Shame 2008 Masculinity and 2009 Femininity, Duckie, London’, April

2010. (http://owengparry.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/gay-shame-20089-duckie-london.html).

70 Žižek, Sublime, 31.

71 Ibid., 30.

72 Butler, Psychic Life, 75.

73 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 24.

74 Žižek, Totalitarianism?, 167.

'Even if we do not take things seriously… we are still doing them': Disidentification, ideology,...

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