Terrorist Drag: Fantasy or Your Worst Nightmare?

Jose Esteban Munoz describes growing up in his “hermetically sealed” Cuban American community where punk rock was the only avant-garde he knew and the only cultural critique of societal norms that was available to him. He identified with it in a way reminiscent of Lacan’s mirror phase in which an infant identifies with the whole and competent image of self presented in the mirror which is at odds with the reality of an out of control baby’s body. Misrecognition allowed Munoz to imagine he was something that he was not. In order to find himself within punk rock, an offshoot of dominant white culture, he had to deny who he really was. But sometimes misrecognition can be conscious, a deliberate strategy to transgress the limits placed on the individual by the dominant culture.

Such is the case with Vaginal Crème Davis. To explain how Dr. Davis uses humor and parody as a form of terrorism to undermine both straight white culture and reactionary components of gay culture, Munoz introduces the term disidentification, a strategy employed by those in the minority to resist Althusser’s interpolating call of ideology that fixes a subject within oppressive discourses. Davis began by going through a “snow period” where he hoped to assimilate into mainstream culture through a white boyfriend who would confer validation upon him through association. This was followed by a period of militant counteridentification, or resistance against white culture, in which he identified with the Black Panther Party. However Black Power had undertones of homophobia so Davis disidentified with male dominated Black Power by selecting Angela Davis as his point of identification. He employed an “intersectional strategy” by acknowledging sexuality, race, class and gender as existing simultaneously in his identity formation.

Drawing on Gramsci’s term organic intellectual, someone who is directly related to rising classes or groups outside of the dominant power structure who establish a new hegemony, Munoz emphasizes terms used to critique Davis’s act, such as homey, innate, country, to play up his grassroots connections to punk rockers, queers and the African American and Latino communities. So Davis uses his diverse affiliations to create a “war of positions” in which multiple sites are engaged to bring about political transformation. Just as subordinate groups (like queers and blacks) are not monolithic unified entities, the self, constructed within ideology, can be fraught with contradictions.

Davis’ performance in White to Be Angry plays upon the contradictions of plural identities. As a 6’6” queer African American Latino male, Davis does not try to pass as a white male when he portrays white militiaman Clarence. Nor does he pass as a female glamour drag queen when he is Vaginal Davis. He may be a freak among freaks but this doesn’t destroy him. He uses it to assert his subjectivity, his sense of self, and to deconstruct those elements of culture that have been used to keep others like himself in subordinate positions. As Clarence, Davis appears in whiteface. Black skin, identifiable under white makeup, brings up fears of miscegenation, contamination of racial purity, one of the fears of white supremacists. In traditional black minstrelsy, whites dealt with the anxiety of potentially threatening black males by symbolically controlling them through degrading parody. Davis takes this white supremacist strategy and turns it on its head. His whiteface pokes holes in the white racist bogeyman, divesting him of his power and reducing him to a pitiful joke.

In Davis, the drag queen who creates a fantasy of femininity and desire in the male viewer, becomes the white man’s nightmare when dangerous qualities, like blackness and queerness, are grafted onto the body of fantasy (in this case his own body) and made explicit. Discomfort, and desire within that discomfort, unsettle categories of race and gender. As Munoz states, Davis “clears out a space, deterritorializing it and then reoccupying it with queer and black bodies” to be used in a war of positions against multilayered discriminatory ideologies.

NOTE: Just by chance, I ran across a later article by Kobena Mercer in which he revises his interpretation of Mapplethorpe’s photographs of black men explicated in “Imagine the Black Man’s Sex.”
He admits that part of the reason for the revision was that he didn’t want his black gay critique of Mapplethorpe to be used by Jesse Helms and the ultraconservatives in their cultural offensive to censor art on moral grounds. His new reading is more in line with Munoz’ article. See “Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary” in Only Skin Deep of 2003 edited by Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis.