Anna Poletti. “The Fiction of Identity: Drag, Affect, Gender, Facticity.” Frame vol. 31,
no. 2 (2018): 35-52.
"Who one is has long been understood as an unshakeable reality authenticated and stabilised by specific facts that are treated as immutable: one's date of birth, the gendered identity inaugurated by the assignment of sex at birth, the genetic identity of one's parents, one's ethnicity or race." p.36
"Individual embodied identity is the ground that structures our individual passage through the social field and physical world, and is the fulcrum of our experience." p.36
"In both its personal and impersonal instantiations, identity works on and with the body (Puar 159-62)" p.37
"the accounts of lives of gender non-conforming and trans people who live or spend time in the world as a gender that differs from the one assumed to adhere to their sexed body, or as a person whose gender is indeterminate, disrupt the naturalised relationship between sex and gender (and object of desire) that underpins the discourses that naturalise patriarchy and heterosexuality (Bornstein)." p.37
"it is only by thinking the fact and fiction of identity at the level of the personal (embodied and intended) and the impersonal (discursive) that we can begin to grasp the complex and shifting practices through which identity is produced and reworked." p.39
"The truly subversive potential of drag, for Butler, comes from the way collectives of drag performers - often referred to as a house and family - reformulate heterosexual kinship relations through the resignification of terms like "mother" to refer to the relationships of mentorship, love, support and friendship that form between drag performers who share an aesthetic (Bodies 240-1)" p.40
"The legibility and consistency of performance, in each iteration, is central to identity functioning as a stable category; daily practices of self-presentation constitute the self that other people see and come to rely on; they do not express it. The "success" of an identity performance is dependent on its legibility, and the terms of legibility - what can "count" as a good enough instance of self-presentation - are structured by discursive formations." p.42
"The fearless performance of drag queens like Velour works to keep open, or re-open, gender as a space where we might "forag[e] a better good life from the freshly uneven ground we're wobbling on" (Berlant, "Big Man"). The "we" who is "wobbling" in Berlant's formulation are those minority communities whose ways of being and forms of intimacy come off second best when the discourses that render the truth of identity are structured by hierarchical forms of exclusion that posit norms and forms of gender, race and sexuality as the natural fact of human experience." p.44
"Certain identities and populations are viewed as deviations from the norm, and claims about this deviation often cite the materiality, fixed reality of the body as evidence." p.44
Use for the essay!
"In publicly flailing, and in using their artform to open up a space in which audiences can flail within the genres of identity of gender and race, drag queens utilise the tension between fact and fiction creatively in order to foster new conversations about identity that ask us to remain attentive to this tension." p.49
"Who one is has long been understood as an unshakeable reality authenticated and stabilised by specific facts that are treated as immutable: one's date of birth, the gendered identity inaugurated by the assignment of sex at birth, the genetic identity of one's parents, one's ethnicity or race." p.36
"Individual embodied identity is the ground that structures our individual passage through the social field and physical world, and is the fulcrum of our experience." p.36
"In both its personal and impersonal instantiations, identity works on and with the body (Puar 159-62)" p.37
"the accounts of lives of gender non-conforming and trans people who live or spend time in the world as a gender that differs from the one assumed to adhere to their sexed body, or as a person whose gender is indeterminate, disrupt the naturalised relationship between sex and gender (and object of desire) that underpins the discourses that naturalise patriarchy and heterosexuality (Bornstein)." p.37
"it is only by thinking the fact and fiction of identity at the level of the personal (embodied and intended) and the impersonal (discursive) that we can begin to grasp the complex and shifting practices through which identity is produced and reworked." p.39
"The truly subversive potential of drag, for Butler, comes from the way collectives of drag performers - often referred to as a house and family - reformulate heterosexual kinship relations through the resignification of terms like "mother" to refer to the relationships of mentorship, love, support and friendship that form between drag performers who share an aesthetic (Bodies 240-1)" p.40
"The legibility and consistency of performance, in each iteration, is central to identity functioning as a stable category; daily practices of self-presentation constitute the self that other people see and come to rely on; they do not express it. The "success" of an identity performance is dependent on its legibility, and the terms of legibility - what can "count" as a good enough instance of self-presentation - are structured by discursive formations." p.42
"The fearless performance of drag queens like Velour works to keep open, or re-open, gender as a space where we might "forag[e] a better good life from the freshly uneven ground we're wobbling on" (Berlant, "Big Man"). The "we" who is "wobbling" in Berlant's formulation are those minority communities whose ways of being and forms of intimacy come off second best when the discourses that render the truth of identity are structured by hierarchical forms of exclusion that posit norms and forms of gender, race and sexuality as the natural fact of human experience." p.44
"Certain identities and populations are viewed as deviations from the norm, and claims about this deviation often cite the materiality, fixed reality of the body as evidence." p.44
Use for the essay!
"In publicly flailing, and in using their artform to open up a space in which audiences can flail within the genres of identity of gender and race, drag queens utilise the tension between fact and fiction creatively in order to foster new conversations about identity that ask us to remain attentive to this tension." p.49
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