Performing Monstrosity: Queer and Transgender Tactics of Resistance in Twenty-first Century U.S.

Langes, Rae A.

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-26ts-sj43

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Performing Monstrosity: Queer and Transgender Tactics of Resistance in Twenty-first Century U.S.

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This dissertation is a theoretically informed project that blends ethnographic and archival research methods to examine how queer and transgender performance artists deploy monstrosity as a tactic to question the terms by which LGBTQ people are granted or denied humanity in twenty-first century United States. While there is an abundance of research in critical humanities studies that investigates how the figure of the monster is deployed in popular literature, film, and television as a metaphor for LGBTQ people and practices, the response of LGBTQ performance artists to the social and material effects of these cultural productions is largely under-examined. This project works to fill that gap by tracing how butch lesbians, effeminate gay men, and transwomen of color, many of whom are from Latin America, adapt figures and scenarios from classic monster tropes and tales (Homer’s Myth of the Sirens, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) to critically reflect not only their lived experiences and desires, but those of the transnational queer communities in which their performances are produced. This is crucial as the voices of these artists and communities remain marginal, if not excluded, in dominant discussions of LGBTQ identities, cultures, and histories in the U.S. Focusing on performance art staged in Chicago and New York City between 2003-2017, I theorize the artists’ different approaches to the monster as embodied, aesthetic, and choreographic tactics that enact feminist resistance against heteronormativity and its neoliberal offshoots – homonormativity, transnormativity – which have spurred what I term the “defanging” of LGBTQ politics, representation, and practices. In the process, I show how the performances of the artists in this study foster monstrous worlds that breach the hegemonic borders of gender, sexuality, race, and the nation.

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