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, intersex ³ , 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 intersexuality ⁴ 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 female ⁵ .

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:

¹ QueenieOQueenie , novel in progress, 2001-2.
² Artist's statement, August 2001.
³ Conditions thought to affect 0.5 - 4% of the population - http://www.isna.org/articles/dregerart.htm l ,
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.
⁴ Funded by a Visual Arts Research Bursary from Goldsmiths' College, London, 1999-2002.
⁵ Parveen Adams, Of Female Bondage. Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis (ed. Teresa Brennan), London and New York, Routledge, 1989, pp. 249.
⁶ P. Adams, Ibid., p. 264.
⁷ Barbara 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.
⁸ Judith 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.
⁹ Parveen Adams' description of her lesbian sadomasochist, op cit., pp. 262-3.

Catherine Harper: Anatomical Drag , Orchard Gallery, Derry, ugust/September 2001