During Catherine
Harper's exhibition at the Orchard Gallery, Derry, the main gallery
space became the pink glowing Ballroom of Possibility: a fifteen
metres long cerise sequinned curtain, five revolving glitter-balls,
a spot-lit bejewelled ironing board and matching iron, and the music
of 'true romance'. Visitors teeter at the dance-floor's edge - "this
could be the best night of your life, anything could happen"1.
In the dazzlingly white space beyond, a clothes rail offers Anatomical
Drag, a range of camp stitched knickers and Y-fronts referencing
but troubling phallic, vulval, and fantastical, anatomy. The invitation
is to 'choose your pants, face the music, and dance'2.
In the third dark space, Queenie (Harper's alter ego), projected
large and overblown, attempts seduction through the metaphors of
ironing. Repeatedly, pathetically, scarily, the tired and tawdry,
blonde-wigged and false-lashed Queenie breathes heavily and pouts:
'For that extra surge of steam, just press my button'.
In the streets
of Derry, Queenie herself enacts her desire. She knits, but she
knits a phallus, so-called 'feminine' craft, so-called 'masculine'
anatomy. She irons, but she smoothes her own Anatomical Drag
pants, 'feminine' domesticity, intersex3, drag. She ballroom
dances in golden heels, but she leads. She washes out the Walled
orifices of the Maiden City, but sits astride Her cannons. She Walks
the Walk in Foyle Street, Derry's one-time 'red light' street, but
turns no tricks. She refuses the query "are you a man or a woman?".
Harper's exhaustive
research into intersexuality4 allows her to propose sexed
bodies as temporal, mutable, malleable, evolutionary, materially
plastic rather than bipolar, dimorphic and fixed. By mobilising
anatomy, Harper's argument challenges normative biological discourses
from within biology itself. Through Anatomical Drag and the
performance of intersexuality, Harper combines, overlaps and crosses
conventional divisions of sex, assimilating, concentrating, translating,
(mis)recognising and blurring binary sexual categories and morphologies.
But more than
that, Harper finds a way to mobilise a fantasy of sexuality which
itself unties sex and gender from sexuality. Harper acknowledges
the binary system she critiques as essential to her debate. The
Oedipal scenario provides a useful social and familial norm around
which sexual difference, as framed via castration, is constructed.
But, that frame, which privileges the paternal phallus, essentially
places entry into desire out of the reach of the female5.
Queenie, however,
operates her desire in reference to the Oedipal phallus (for it
can never be overlooked), but separates sexuality from anatomy and
activates gender conventions unconventionally. Queenie performs
her sexed body through fantasy, and consequently enters desire without
difficulty. Parveen Adams writes of this 'other' sexuality as allowing
the subject "to enact differences in the theatre where roles freely
circulate"6. Queenie's Ballroom of
Possibility
materialises that theatre, and her Anatomical Drag - undergarments
offer roles for enactment. Queenie herself is propelled by a 'drag
queen' fantasy of femininity (with a nod to the 'monstrous feminine'7
and a wink to the 'lesbian phallus'8). Conventionally,
a drag queen 'should' have a penis - she is expected to be a man
in drag, just as a drag king 'should' be a woman in drag. Harper's
desire, however, is not to be a drag king, but, perversely, to be
a female impersonator. Consequently, Queenie operates beyond Harper's
anatomy, and therefore beyond the Oedipal construction of desire.
Queenie enters the realm of perversion, where she invents sexual
difference and enacts her fantasy through disavowal of the actualities
of both genitalia and gendered action. Harper's fetish is Queenie,
and via that ego split essential to fetishism, the Oedipal constraints
that tie sexuality to the anatomical body are overwhelmed by the
mind-force of fantasy.
There was great
pleasure in QueenieFest, most notably in the jouissance of Queenie
at large on the streets of Derry. From her local election campaign
forward, Queenie became a recognisable entity in the City, warmly
engaged with, lovingly danced with, fondly talked to, welcomingly
waved at:
she constructs
fetishes and substitutes
them, one for another; she multiplies fantasies and tries them on
like costumes. All this is done quite explicitly as an incitement
of the senses, a proliferation of bodily pleasures, a transgressive
excitement; a play with identity and a play with genitality. It
is a perverse intensification of pleasure.9
1QueenieOQueenie,
novel in progress, 2001-2.
2Artist's
statement, August 2001.
3Conditions
thought to affect 0.5 - 4% of the population - http://www.isna.org/articles/dregerart.html,
http://www.pfc.org.uk/campaign/pfcissue.htm,
http://www.afn.org/~sfcommed/pedethics.htm,
A. Fausto-Sterling,
The Five Sexes, in The Sciences, Vol.33, 1993, pp.
20-25.
M. Blackless
et al., How sexually dimorphic are we? Review and synthesis,
American Journal of Human Biology, Vol.12, Issue 2, pp. 151-166.
4Funded
by a Visual Arts Research Bursary from Goldsmiths' College, London,
1999-2002.
5Parveen
Adams, Of Female Bondage. Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis
(ed. Teresa Brennan), London and New York, Routledge, 1989, pp.
249.
6P.
Adams, Ibid., p. 264.
7Barbara
Creed, Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,
in James Donald (ed.), Fantasy and the Cinema, London: British
Film Institute Publishing, 1989, pp. 63-90.
8Judith
Butler, The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,
in Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: on the discursive limits
of 'sex', New York and London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 57-92.
9Parveen
Adams' description of her lesbian sadomasochist, op cit., pp. 262-3.
