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• 1 2019-04-08T01:21:02-07:00 Objects: Extension of the drag body, Thing Power, Affect 32 plain 857005 2019-04-20T20:26:01-07:00

  "The notion of bodily extensions in performance offers further disruptive potential; augmentations unsettle the seemingly given, prompting new ways of seeing and thinking thebody." (154)

  
  
  There is a really interesting way in which objects are involved in drag, because usually they are part of how the drag persona develops and shows themselves. Drag without objects wouldn't really be drag as we know it today: drag performers live with their accessories, their clothes, their props, their make up. Matter is fully part of a drag's persona. Indeed I think that drag uses matter as an extension of the self, of the body and of the persona. This is something I explore in the origins of the word drag, because it often implies an object itself or an object being dragged, sometimes the origin of the use drag for drag queens is believed to be from the fact that dresses would be dragging on the floor.

  "drag is about materiality—about making the unreal real through cosplay. Through the use of costumes, cosmetics, and other accessories, cosplayers are able to bring to 'life' a figure that was once considered artificial or 'unreal'[50]anime, manga or gaming characters [...]  Through the acts of constructing and wearing a costume, the fan constructs his or her identity in relation to fiction and enacts it.'[51] Therefore, just as drag is typically thought of as enacting a gender role, so here cosplay is about enacting a fictional character, where the costume and the player provide material form for the behaviour and narrative of the immaterial character."  (5)

  
  
  
  
  
  Drag performers are known to use matter to enhance their gendered performance. Indeed, many drag kings and queens use objects to add some socially imposed gender body traits. Thus, some drag queens use some paddings to enhance what their vision of a woman is and what vision of femininity they want to give by adding more hips, more shape, more bust and giving a Femme Realness. On the other hand, some drag kings add what they call packing, which is a penis illusion, but also fake hair . Another thing drag performers do is, sometimes, to hide the parts that has been constructed as being assigned to one gender, like breasts or the penis and testicles by using duct tape to conceal so that their performances feels more real. However some drag personas choose to not do it because they are against the idea fact that body parts are symbolizing gender whereas some performers even go as far as doing some surgery to give more credibility to their drag personas and this gives a sense of adding to the body in order to make in more 
  
  
  To go further into my understanding of how objects play an important role as a part of the Drag persona I want to use some examples in cosplay presented by Bainbridge and Norris which claim that the:

  "'set of clothing,' functions as a suture not just between the unreal character and the real performer, but also between the real performer, the larger cosplay community, the performer and the spectator. Importantly this set of clothing is created; the authenticity of the costume very much depends on the craft that goes into its making, bringing to the fore skills in needlework and design. It sutures the cosplayer to a larger community because costumes are often created through the assistance of online forums, cosplaying sites (for example cosplay.com) and other peer communities devoted to assist in the creation and craft of costumes." (2)

  
  Materials are fully part of the performance, they are the medium of a drag persona or a cosplayer to play with boundaries, that is what they use to express their art and to express their messages, the objects start having a certain affect and take over a part of the performance. Through make up, pieces of clothing, artifacts they try to capture a certain feeling. There is a notion of self-styling in fashion used by everyone, however performers use it to another level, to present themselves under another light, to send messages other that the emanation of one's own identity. Objects in a cosplay become part of a multi-identity that embody and play with different kinds of binaries and by the affect they transmit, gender performance through matter sometimes always gives some sense of powerfulness, this is something that according Kumbier is acquired through objects. She says that her relation with what she calls her technologies, both as a drag queen and a drag king, affect her and others.
  
  
  
  She gives us two different examples in her text, which show how much objects are important in here relation to gender and power: "By wearing that dress, I embodied and performed my femininity in contrast to my usual gender-neutral presentation. I experienced myself as aggressively, pub- licly queer and feminine, and felt empowered that I could be both at the same time." (194) Here she chooses to showcase a part of her that she has never really shown. As a queer woman it is hard to be able to affirm your sexuality and your gender at the same time, because they are disconnected to what society expects of you. The fact that she only chose what she wanted others to see of her, presenting a single side of her identity for a night, was very important to me. It made me think of the time I went to my own prom, with a friend, who is a girl and went there expressing a masculinity that wasn't especially mine. I wish I would have had her courage to be able to show both my queerness and my masculinity, not imposing a divorce and having to choose between both of them, because accepting both would fight against prejudices against queer men: "If we can communicate this choice... in a visually accessible but complex and possibly confusing way [...] we are publicly altering the definitions of gender" (195). Objects help us by their affect to communicate a message that would be hard to communicate on her own, and to challenge actual binaries in society. This is something that is explored in Bennet's Vibrant Matter: "Thing power: the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle" (6).  Kumbier talks a lot about the other affects of her tools on the performer and on the audience, she says that she uses tools that are inherent to the straight female identity imposed on women in a different way to advocate for queerness in femininity: "Instead, these performances were about taking that standard and challenging it, so that the same combination of tools (lipstick, mascara, nylons, lingerie) would produce wildly different results." (195).
  
  
  
  One of the most interesting part of her essay is when she talks about her relation to phallic objects and the power that is attributed to them by associating them to masculinity can empower a woman who performs as a drag king or that is fan of a drag king: "because for the drag king fan, the possibility of desiring and owning that phallus, that masculine energy (carnal or otherwise) is much more real. Watching women perform convincingly as men, working their dicks and getting tips stuffed in their pants by adoring audience members, fe- male fans are empowered with the knowledge that (with practice and some technological assistance) we, too, can posses that dick, can be- come the performing subjects of our desire" (197-8). It gives the power to someone that has always been oppressed by patriarchy, even in the world of drag, to go against it, to mock it and to have the sense that they are living it. A simple filled sock between their legs or a dildo can help someone feel really powerful because they feel as if they are part of the dominant group for a moment, they feel as entitled as someone from the dominant group and they confuse people and go against gender norms. 
  
   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
• 1 2019-04-08T14:37:30-07:00 Object Drag: Performing as Parts of the Human Body or Other Non-Human Bodies 26 plain 2019-04-20T20:43:09-07:00 Here, I would like to analyze how objects are capable of performing drag. As gender is usually a human construct, drag for an object would be to play something else or an exaggeration of itself that can be used to criticized our hierarchy. The terms I am going to use in this part are unfortunately anthropocentric because language was made by us for us and will surely be inaccurate to start studying objects, however I will try my best. I am going to use two ways of analyzing objects in order to study their agency and the way they could be performing drag. The first one is post-anthropocentric, it considers objects as things that we can't really understand and puts everything on a flat map based on flat ontology, which is putting people on the same level based on the fact that as humans we are in the impossibility of understanding objects because of the withdrawal of the object, that is considered as independent and presents itself with excess, which means that we only know what an object is superficially. It breaks the idea that objects are defined by their relations to the subjects, which would render my part about Objects as part of the drag persona obsolete and it states that we can't really know anything else but ourselves and that things can't know each other. 
  
  
  
  The second one is a posthumanist way of seeing objects and their agencies, it is called vitalist materialism. In this theory, objects are seen and studied by studying their relations to other objects and subjects in the world, it is believed that the objects have agency. It is based on a monist world and includes: "human bodies; other animate organisms; material things; spaces, places and the natural and built environment that these contain; and material forces including gravity and time. Also included may be abstract concepts, human constructs and human epiphenomena such as imagination, memory and thoughts; though not themselves ‘material’, such elements have the capacity to produce material effects." (1). This philosophy stems from Spinoza's monism, Braidotti uses it to see the whole universe as a self-organizing entity made of matter. Even if everything is matter and everything is equal, Bennet differentiates two types of agencies within vitalist materialism:

  "[An] actant, recall, is Bruno Latour's term for a source of action; an actant can be human or not, or, ,most likely, a combination of both [...] An operator is that which. by virtue of its particular location in an assemblage and the fortuity of being in the rigbt place at the rigbt time, makes the difference. makes things bappen. becomes the decisive force catalyzing an event. Actant and operator are substitute words for what in a more subject­ centered vocabulary are called agents. Agentic capacity is now seen as differentially distributed across a wider range of ontological types." (9)

  In Object-Oriented Philosophy, there is a theory that you only notice a tool once it is broken, and I think we can make a good analogy of drag from that. When an object resists to the use we are supposed to make of it is when we notice it's appearance and we either throw it, try to fix it or use it for something else. I think that this is something really relevant to drag because most of the time people who perform drag are oppressed based on their gender or their sexuality, and they are criticized when they stop responding to what society expect from them and try to to challenge the hierarchy and the binaries. When they perform drag they are seen as the broken tools are as challenging the box in which society has put them in at birth.
  
  Objects can be performing both as parts of the Human Body or Other Objects. Connell argues that: "similar to the means through which drag performances destabilize a heterosexual claim to originality, these objects undermine the anthropocentric ‘claim to originality’ that OOOs also aim to subvert. The conclusion of the thesis asserts that drag opens up an unstable and uncanny ontological wake, through which all objects are revealed as radically queer." (iii). She explores throughout her essay, giving several examples, how objects challenge the subject-object binary if they are seen through a Object-Oriented Ontology lens by performing human drag, imitating human parts. One of the examples I would like to study is the mirror. 
  
  
  
  Indeed, we often see mirrors to be not reflection of ourselves but separate entities that show us another human body, because we sometimes have a hard time seeing our own image. The reflection created by the mirror is kind of performing drag of ourselves because the image they send back depends on how clean is the glass, how lit is the room, how big is the mirror, what time of the day we look at ourselves. It sends a reflection taken during a moment of our life, not our essence. Most of the time it sends us a different image than what we are and/or what we think we are. As the  Connel's mannequin does, the mirror mocks the body, and by being a fake replication of what we are it undermines the experience that we have as humans. Therefore, it renders the subject's experience fragile and goes in the direction of abolishing this dominance that is asserted.
  
  However, the mirror cannot perform human drag on its own, it needs a human to stand in front of it to be able to give a reflection so this example couldn't work with Object-Oriented Ontology. Whereas in Vitalist Materialism it could make sense because the mirror affects the human and the human affects it, there is an interaction, both are part of a web in which each interactions makes parts of the web evolve constantly because it is self-organizing. Moreover what is different from Connel's objects, is that all of them are somewhat related to desire, either they imitate genital part, or the whole human body, they are in relation to human's sexual desire (sex doll and dildo). According to her, by creating desire in the human's mind the object also goes against the subject-object binary because it means that in some way objects succeed in imitating the human but also that they are brought up to the subject's level.
  
  
  
  She states that "She fear[s[ that the normalization of the dildo in popular culture has meant the loss of some of its subversive potential. What needs recuperation, then, is a sense of both the dildo’s queer potential and its potential to promote a rethinking of desire from a flat ontological erotics, in which every being—human and object—is an equal yet autonomous, uncannily withdrawn partner of desire." (100). This fear of Connel's could be related to the criticism I made about RuPaul's Drag Race and mainstream drag. Usually when something subversive becomes mainstream it is appropriated by people that are on top of the hierarchy and a new hierarchy is created instead of being egalitarian.
  
  
  
  Moreover even if the object doesn't create a hierarchy, if it destroys it we need to be sure that won't be more reified because we will descend at the same level as objects. Object-Oriented Ontology's Flat ontology doesn't promise a better life for everyone which could bring us to this ending, whereas vitalist materialism sees all matter as interconnected: "And in a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may verywell be to harm oneself. Such an enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is good for humans." (13) Therefore for the system to work better it would be useful to create a Zoe-egalitarian society in order that hurt or hierarchy doesn't hurt the whole pyramid.
  
  
  
  Objects are also able to perform drag of non-human others, which I find very interestin, because as you can see in the video rather than challenging the subject-object binary, objects can also challenge the organic-inorganic binary by having grenades perform as avocados and poker chips as potato chips. This gives another understanding, the same understanding that the broken tool gives because it is out of the concept that these objects have in nowadays' society. What I find even more useful in this video is that it ties a loop because it deconstructs human expectations by creating another human creation: Guacamole. We find this notion of objects playing on society's expectation also in Connel's analysis of the purse: 

  "the purse, used as a container and tool, both mimics the human body and intersects with strange, undefinable moments of bodily desire that a subject cannot completely control. Yet instead of reinforcing the Freudian reading, Tanning overdoes it with a nearly camp sensibility, one that appropriates Freudian symbolism—and takes it to an extreme—in order to make the object it subsumes weird again. This exaggeration disturbs Freudian symbol-referent causality, revealing the inadequacy of the Freudian reading as an authoritative discourse by way of an exaggerated performance." (29)

  
  Here we can see that the 'over performance' of what society expects of you (heteronormative psychoanalysis in this case) can be used as a weapon against this same hierarchical and anthropocentric system. Drag therefore can be seen as a weapon for objects to fight too, even if it's really anthropomorphist of me to say that because I don't know if drag would be the right word to describe what objects do.