Constituting the (Affective) Family in Disneyland Drag
On a Sunday evening we gathered for a private party deep within the labyrinth of Tokyo Disneyland. On the upper floor of an indiscernibly new and blandly expensive hotel, down an anonymous, quiet hallway, just within a heavy, ornate wooden door I presented my ticket to an elaborately bejeweled woman. She held a fan delicately to conceal most of her face as she reached demurely with a satin-gloved hand for my ticket. Her eyes, darkly shadowed, drifted below the fan as she murmured to the young man behind her in a restrained black suit who opened a second door for me. He smiled slyly as he bowed, ushering me in. The room was moody and richly lit, expansive but intimate in the fashion of old dinner clubs, with a small stage curving out into the floor, a gleaming baby grand piano poised. Jazz inflected house music played as guests moved from the tables surrounded by deep, cushioned couches. Candles flickered, incongruously raw and unrestrained within the carefully controlled Disney setting. Bare arms, flashing jewelry, carefully sculpted hair caught the light.
Ian, a K.A. teacher and a British musician who earned a living making soundtracks and commercial audio for advertisements, stood behind Taka, Kanna’s husband, who was deftly working the mixer between the turntables, beat-matching another deep house track from Chicago’s 1990s club scene. Emily, a Japanese-American, and Alison, another recent hire from Oxford, pulled me over to their table just as Kanya, one of the organizers sashayed over to us, dressed in an exquisite ballgown. He bent forward, dramatically kissing Alison and Emily on the cheeks in greeting before pulling me into a tight embrace. “Don’t I look so good?!” He laughed at his own false vanity. “Only slightly better than usual,” I teased and he playfully pushed me away as he turned to say hello to some other guests.
Kanya had been working several months as Kanna’s assistant in the K.A. office. He handled administrative paperwork, scheduling, and correspondence with parents. On Saturdays he helped Kanna oversee the smooth flow of students throughout the day, ensuring they had snacks, were in contact with their parents, knew what train to take home, and looked after them when they were hanging out in the lounge just downstairs from the cramped office space. He had lived in Chicago for a short time in the late 1990s. It was there he had met Kanna and Taka where they were well-known regulars at underground dance clubs and friends with some of Chicago’s most influential house DJs. All three of them experienced difficulties in finding work when they returned from the U.S. They had been too long out of the Japanese job market, their cultural adaptions had made the particularities of Japanese workplaces onerous, uncomfortable, or even hostile to them. Though not kikokushijo, they had all undergone a transformative experience in Chicago and the return to their native Japan was difficult and sometimes disheartening. Kanya had worked for a while at Disneyland as a guide where he excelled. “It’s all a big performance! And I’m so naturally genki (energetic) that it makes sense! And it helps to actually not be like normal Japanese because I can just be myself!” But the intense schedule had exhausted him and he’d moved back into his parents’ house and taken the part-time and less stressful work at K.A. under Kanna. From managing the dream-desires of visitors to Tokyo Disneyland to facilitating the English-language environment of K.A. under Kanna’s guidance, Kanya is emblematic of a globalized translating membrane, of a bricolaged identity, one skilled at transferring needed affect and creating brief, intense connections necessary to stabilized relations. Kanya’s abilities at metamorphosis and adaptation do not unmask a pragmatic skill at concealment but instead a persistent sense of always becoming different across the drifting transitions from Chicago raver to Disney Cast Member to cheery greeter for chattering kikokushijo, exclaiming over one girl’s shoes as she entered the school, “These are so beautiful! They are like magic!” The eight-year old girl replied, gazing down at her sneakers sparkling with pink glitter, “They could take me anywhere sometime!”
Kanya, in his drag personae of Lady J, and several other drag queens had organized the private party as a performance for their latest revue. The guests, around 150, each bought tickets for a dinner and the drag show, in effect supporting their friends by giving them a chance to perform while getting to participate as audience in erotic, lighthearted gender-play. Tucked away in the reaches of Tokyo Disneyland, the drag show began with a choreographed dance routine by a trio of young men in black leggings and leather or latex straps across their well-defined chests. Sitting at a table with Thomas and Emily, we wondered what Kanya was going to deliver.
He’d been talking about rehearsals and outfits and make-up and song choices and choreography for weeks in the office, so much so that it had become distracting and he had to be reminded to pay attention to some bit of paperwork or a child’s question. His giddiness was infectious though and sharing his plans with him amid the Saturday chaos added another delicious ingredient to the circus-like sensation of identity, performance, and contact that pervaded K.A. at its most frenetic. His queer difference was unabashed and within the space of the school, hardly unexpected: together the staff resembled an oddball Japanese comedy straight from central casting. But his vocal enthusiasm highlights how the desires and becomings of the staff themselves were not excluded from the work of running the school and teaching the students, but integral to it. The variegated outside the teachers and staff represented constituted the very liveliness of the school itself. As a space, the school was ambiguous, an extra-territorial exception to the city around it. Rethinking the safe-haven that Charlie hoped K.A. would be for differently articulated Japanese kids, the space was a very volatile intersection of multiple differences. Unscripted, outside the curriculum, untrained for the most part, the teachers represent a kind of knowledge worker surplus. All were under 35 except for one, most were in their late 20s to early 30s. They had lives elsewhere—as students, journalists, artists. Even Kanya and Kanna, with their lives abroad, had inadvertently prepared themselves to always be off-kilter within normal Japanese society as they bore their globalized difference right into an environment where their own sensibilities aligned so well with those of the students. This multiplicity and its organic possibility is reflected by Thomas: “I think kids got taught the "culture" of each teacher - unconsciously. All the stuff about "open future" came from the teachers, not KA or curriculum or mission.” Thomas makes a distinction between the official character or performance of KA with its structure, and the unquantifiable capacities and action the teachers brought into the intimate space of the classroom.
Understanding K.A. to be spatially practiced as an elsewhere—an unplaceable amalgam of all the other places we (students, teachers, and staff) actively brought into the space through experience, desire, body memory—helps to recognize the fundamental tension of the school: a disciplinary location to organize the proliferation of possibility under the sign of narrowly institutionalized and formal academic success. But also: a heterotopia replete with flows of becomings racing in, drifting across, moored, mired, cut loose. It was an outlier on the vast network of service assemblages catering to an elite class of Japanese professional. The circulation of white-collar parents to international offices, factories, job sites through bureaucratic networks and relays produced the very structural conditions for the “strange children” their own offspring were continuing to become. It made perfect sense that a raver party-girl with a sensitivity for good Chicago house music and a drag queen (also with a keen hear for house and dance moves to match) should manage the rambunctious tumble of kids who passed through the school doors every week. Charlie, the lead teacher and co-founder, is Japanese-American. His mother, who is Japanese, had moved back to Tokyo from Seattle to help him with the business side. She managed the books and took care of most of the official interactions with the city government and tax offices. The school brimmed with a nearly uncontainable diversity and even as it spun round within the classrooms, it also was able to flow outwards in ways that were necessary to interface with existing spatial and social assemblages of meaning, legitimacy, and authority. Difference was contained.
Until it was onstage. Ian was on the piano with his jazz trio and they began playing a sultry rhythm. The lights, already low in the lounge, dimmed further and the electric blue fabric draped at the rear of the stage shimmered with the spotlights tightening on the empty center. Then Lady J, dressed even more lavishly than before, swayed slowly till she she stood before, still and radiant. She slid her hands sensually up her sides and then framed her face as she began to lip sync to the 1936 jazz-pop standard “Why Don’t You Do Right?” as sung by Amy Irving for the 1988 comedy “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”. The Disney film is a mix of live-action and animation with one of its stars being a voluptuous redheaded singer in a nightclub. Her sexy, caricatured allure was so compelling that Kanya had taken her name and transformed it for his draq queen identity: Lady Jessica, shortened to Lady J.
The sensual and skillful enactment of the fictional character through transposition into one of Disneyland’s own carefully constructed fantasy rooms seems at once to operate in a seamless fantasy space always onstage and so complete as to constitute a finished world. Lady J is working the stage hard in a mimetic possession. Hers is an emotional manipulation and a passionate but calculated display of a controlled interiority in which every frontline employee at Disneyland is trained in. “[D]irect emotional manipulation is involved in the prohibition, first uttered in orientation, not to talk with Guests about backstage. Miyo, a young Cast Member: ‘Trainers say, people have dreams about Disneyland, you cannot break their dream, it would break their heart’” (Raz 2003, 231). But breaking hearts is exactly the intention.
Lady J rocked her hips and slowly walked the stage, bending forward towards us in the audience seductively to reveal the deep, prosthetic cleavage she wore in imitation of the impossible curves of Jessica, the Disney character. Backstage is already becoming visible. Lady J stepped down into the audience. She stroked an upraised cheek, draped her arms across shoulders, flirted her way through the audience much in the way Jessica, the animated chanteuse, reaches across the on-screen boundary of cinematically real bodies with her own fantastic touch, an alien sexiness winking seductively at lifelike speeds measured in frames per second. Lady J has seized upon the fantasy of the make-believe seemingly made real as a girl on film. There is no impersonation possible in this performance for there is no person as referent as there is in versioning Brittany Spears or Marilyn Monroe.
Walter Benjamin describes “[t]he cult of the movie star” as a product of the movie industry. But here “the cult of the movie star” is absent any actual person and only comes to (simulated) life through Disney’s manufacture of a character comprised of the intense labor of drawing and coloring individual animation cells. Disney’s Jessica is the fragmented self Benjamin recognizes in the deconstruction of the actor before the movie camera whose on-screen image “is composed of many separate performances” (Benjamin 1968, 230). Jessica is a composite sketch distilled from hardboiled detective novels and as such she signifies male noir nostalgia of a vulnerable female subject. The character is a fiction overlaid on fantasy, becoming a “movie star” avatar able to cast the “phony spell of a commodity” until she morphs off-screen and onstage, incarnated through Kanya’s deviant drag (Benjamin 1968, 231).
The layered fantasy is built upon impossibilities: the exaggerated anatomy of Jessica as referent for Lady J’s deviant mimesis intended not to seamlessly embody a cartoon alive within a “real” cinematic world but to queerly capitalize on its fantasy perfection-projection. Lady J’s complex play on stage takes on globalized conceptions of American cultural hegemony, the cinematic personae and its commodity form, Tokyo Disneyland’s dizzying, centrifugal imaginaries, and produces for us the pleasure of watching performance as play that works across these multiple valences at once. Her sensual lip-syncing continues and Lady J takes bodily possession of the animated Jessica. Lady J is amplifying the intense uncanny of the actor who knows not itself and reconciling her own svelte reenactment and its months of labor with the animated commodity character, itself cast up by alienated labor. The Japanese drag queen has hijacked another icon from the menagerie of America as (white) woman, a representational trope stretching back through colonial and anti-colonial fantasies alike (Taussig 1993, 177). At the same time Lady J is unmaking the smooth emotional façade Disneyland works so hard to create, both onscreen and in the manicured fantasy of the space itself. The animated character and the drag queen seem suddenly interchangeable, crossing over into one another worlds and uninhibited by the fascist control exuded by the romantically imagineered streets and amusements below. Jessica, the character, is a prosthetic component to the film as a kind of artificial sexuality and mouthpiece issuing a command for a future of greed. Lady J has her own prosthetics as she too is attached queerly to Japan and to Tokyo Disneyland, if only as an ex-employee slyly pirating its symbolic asset. She mouths another verse:
The K.A. staff among the audience is gathered together enjoying this mimesis of the animated American bombshell come to life in the form of our friend and co-worker. We are party to this mimesis. In a surprising flash I think how we are sitting ensconced in a faux luxury, with cheap gilt and stain-resistant carpets, plastic chandeliers and diluted drinks, in much the same way the corporate salarymen in Akemi’s club sit, waiting for their own performance of female affect to reconstitute their homosocial bonds. We are a family too and Lady J is performing her own ministrations upon us. Her voiceless refrain is too true: Get out of here and get me some money too. The message drifts on the close air, it floats around us, restlessly. In the hostess club it might perhaps fall more heavily with the real urgency. In a way we are all playing in a kind of corporate drag where the woman tells us exactly what is required but you know, she’s only playing. See her sultry wink? She’ll never get old and her breasts are eternally firm, if plastic. We are not in a space designed to confirm our gender roles but instead, a space of eternal youthfulness and imagination, feelings and possibility somersaulting themselves into dizzy ecstasy.
The entire scene is nearly too much to think. The performance is exotic several times over, almost collapsing under the weight of its many layers of significations. The excess is one of mimesis, “the power to both double yet double endlessly, to become Other and engage the image with the reality thus imagized” (Taussig 1993, 255). Kanya, on the very artificial dreamscape cultivated by Disney, is performing one of its guarded properties. Not only is Lady J siphoning off Jessica’s animated energies, she is investing them in queer betrayal beneath the knowing, carnival masquerade mockingly recalibrating the white, male space of the voyeurs’ burlesque lounge. The performance is eminently political and a séance to conjure the disembodied woman of film into a possessed moment where their celluloid sensuality becomes Lady J’s lithe gestures. Together they scorn the capitalism their affective performances have been working so hard for.
Ian, a K.A. teacher and a British musician who earned a living making soundtracks and commercial audio for advertisements, stood behind Taka, Kanna’s husband, who was deftly working the mixer between the turntables, beat-matching another deep house track from Chicago’s 1990s club scene. Emily, a Japanese-American, and Alison, another recent hire from Oxford, pulled me over to their table just as Kanya, one of the organizers sashayed over to us, dressed in an exquisite ballgown. He bent forward, dramatically kissing Alison and Emily on the cheeks in greeting before pulling me into a tight embrace. “Don’t I look so good?!” He laughed at his own false vanity. “Only slightly better than usual,” I teased and he playfully pushed me away as he turned to say hello to some other guests.
Kanya had been working several months as Kanna’s assistant in the K.A. office. He handled administrative paperwork, scheduling, and correspondence with parents. On Saturdays he helped Kanna oversee the smooth flow of students throughout the day, ensuring they had snacks, were in contact with their parents, knew what train to take home, and looked after them when they were hanging out in the lounge just downstairs from the cramped office space. He had lived in Chicago for a short time in the late 1990s. It was there he had met Kanna and Taka where they were well-known regulars at underground dance clubs and friends with some of Chicago’s most influential house DJs. All three of them experienced difficulties in finding work when they returned from the U.S. They had been too long out of the Japanese job market, their cultural adaptions had made the particularities of Japanese workplaces onerous, uncomfortable, or even hostile to them. Though not kikokushijo, they had all undergone a transformative experience in Chicago and the return to their native Japan was difficult and sometimes disheartening. Kanya had worked for a while at Disneyland as a guide where he excelled. “It’s all a big performance! And I’m so naturally genki (energetic) that it makes sense! And it helps to actually not be like normal Japanese because I can just be myself!” But the intense schedule had exhausted him and he’d moved back into his parents’ house and taken the part-time and less stressful work at K.A. under Kanna. From managing the dream-desires of visitors to Tokyo Disneyland to facilitating the English-language environment of K.A. under Kanna’s guidance, Kanya is emblematic of a globalized translating membrane, of a bricolaged identity, one skilled at transferring needed affect and creating brief, intense connections necessary to stabilized relations. Kanya’s abilities at metamorphosis and adaptation do not unmask a pragmatic skill at concealment but instead a persistent sense of always becoming different across the drifting transitions from Chicago raver to Disney Cast Member to cheery greeter for chattering kikokushijo, exclaiming over one girl’s shoes as she entered the school, “These are so beautiful! They are like magic!” The eight-year old girl replied, gazing down at her sneakers sparkling with pink glitter, “They could take me anywhere sometime!”
Kanya, in his drag personae of Lady J, and several other drag queens had organized the private party as a performance for their latest revue. The guests, around 150, each bought tickets for a dinner and the drag show, in effect supporting their friends by giving them a chance to perform while getting to participate as audience in erotic, lighthearted gender-play. Tucked away in the reaches of Tokyo Disneyland, the drag show began with a choreographed dance routine by a trio of young men in black leggings and leather or latex straps across their well-defined chests. Sitting at a table with Thomas and Emily, we wondered what Kanya was going to deliver.
He’d been talking about rehearsals and outfits and make-up and song choices and choreography for weeks in the office, so much so that it had become distracting and he had to be reminded to pay attention to some bit of paperwork or a child’s question. His giddiness was infectious though and sharing his plans with him amid the Saturday chaos added another delicious ingredient to the circus-like sensation of identity, performance, and contact that pervaded K.A. at its most frenetic. His queer difference was unabashed and within the space of the school, hardly unexpected: together the staff resembled an oddball Japanese comedy straight from central casting. But his vocal enthusiasm highlights how the desires and becomings of the staff themselves were not excluded from the work of running the school and teaching the students, but integral to it. The variegated outside the teachers and staff represented constituted the very liveliness of the school itself. As a space, the school was ambiguous, an extra-territorial exception to the city around it. Rethinking the safe-haven that Charlie hoped K.A. would be for differently articulated Japanese kids, the space was a very volatile intersection of multiple differences. Unscripted, outside the curriculum, untrained for the most part, the teachers represent a kind of knowledge worker surplus. All were under 35 except for one, most were in their late 20s to early 30s. They had lives elsewhere—as students, journalists, artists. Even Kanya and Kanna, with their lives abroad, had inadvertently prepared themselves to always be off-kilter within normal Japanese society as they bore their globalized difference right into an environment where their own sensibilities aligned so well with those of the students. This multiplicity and its organic possibility is reflected by Thomas: “I think kids got taught the "culture" of each teacher - unconsciously. All the stuff about "open future" came from the teachers, not KA or curriculum or mission.” Thomas makes a distinction between the official character or performance of KA with its structure, and the unquantifiable capacities and action the teachers brought into the intimate space of the classroom.
Understanding K.A. to be spatially practiced as an elsewhere—an unplaceable amalgam of all the other places we (students, teachers, and staff) actively brought into the space through experience, desire, body memory—helps to recognize the fundamental tension of the school: a disciplinary location to organize the proliferation of possibility under the sign of narrowly institutionalized and formal academic success. But also: a heterotopia replete with flows of becomings racing in, drifting across, moored, mired, cut loose. It was an outlier on the vast network of service assemblages catering to an elite class of Japanese professional. The circulation of white-collar parents to international offices, factories, job sites through bureaucratic networks and relays produced the very structural conditions for the “strange children” their own offspring were continuing to become. It made perfect sense that a raver party-girl with a sensitivity for good Chicago house music and a drag queen (also with a keen hear for house and dance moves to match) should manage the rambunctious tumble of kids who passed through the school doors every week. Charlie, the lead teacher and co-founder, is Japanese-American. His mother, who is Japanese, had moved back to Tokyo from Seattle to help him with the business side. She managed the books and took care of most of the official interactions with the city government and tax offices. The school brimmed with a nearly uncontainable diversity and even as it spun round within the classrooms, it also was able to flow outwards in ways that were necessary to interface with existing spatial and social assemblages of meaning, legitimacy, and authority. Difference was contained.
Until it was onstage. Ian was on the piano with his jazz trio and they began playing a sultry rhythm. The lights, already low in the lounge, dimmed further and the electric blue fabric draped at the rear of the stage shimmered with the spotlights tightening on the empty center. Then Lady J, dressed even more lavishly than before, swayed slowly till she she stood before, still and radiant. She slid her hands sensually up her sides and then framed her face as she began to lip sync to the 1936 jazz-pop standard “Why Don’t You Do Right?” as sung by Amy Irving for the 1988 comedy “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”. The Disney film is a mix of live-action and animation with one of its stars being a voluptuous redheaded singer in a nightclub. Her sexy, caricatured allure was so compelling that Kanya had taken her name and transformed it for his draq queen identity: Lady Jessica, shortened to Lady J.
The sensual and skillful enactment of the fictional character through transposition into one of Disneyland’s own carefully constructed fantasy rooms seems at once to operate in a seamless fantasy space always onstage and so complete as to constitute a finished world. Lady J is working the stage hard in a mimetic possession. Hers is an emotional manipulation and a passionate but calculated display of a controlled interiority in which every frontline employee at Disneyland is trained in. “[D]irect emotional manipulation is involved in the prohibition, first uttered in orientation, not to talk with Guests about backstage. Miyo, a young Cast Member: ‘Trainers say, people have dreams about Disneyland, you cannot break their dream, it would break their heart’” (Raz 2003, 231). But breaking hearts is exactly the intention.
Lady J rocked her hips and slowly walked the stage, bending forward towards us in the audience seductively to reveal the deep, prosthetic cleavage she wore in imitation of the impossible curves of Jessica, the Disney character. Backstage is already becoming visible. Lady J stepped down into the audience. She stroked an upraised cheek, draped her arms across shoulders, flirted her way through the audience much in the way Jessica, the animated chanteuse, reaches across the on-screen boundary of cinematically real bodies with her own fantastic touch, an alien sexiness winking seductively at lifelike speeds measured in frames per second. Lady J has seized upon the fantasy of the make-believe seemingly made real as a girl on film. There is no impersonation possible in this performance for there is no person as referent as there is in versioning Brittany Spears or Marilyn Monroe.
Walter Benjamin describes “[t]he cult of the movie star” as a product of the movie industry. But here “the cult of the movie star” is absent any actual person and only comes to (simulated) life through Disney’s manufacture of a character comprised of the intense labor of drawing and coloring individual animation cells. Disney’s Jessica is the fragmented self Benjamin recognizes in the deconstruction of the actor before the movie camera whose on-screen image “is composed of many separate performances” (Benjamin 1968, 230). Jessica is a composite sketch distilled from hardboiled detective novels and as such she signifies male noir nostalgia of a vulnerable female subject. The character is a fiction overlaid on fantasy, becoming a “movie star” avatar able to cast the “phony spell of a commodity” until she morphs off-screen and onstage, incarnated through Kanya’s deviant drag (Benjamin 1968, 231).
The layered fantasy is built upon impossibilities: the exaggerated anatomy of Jessica as referent for Lady J’s deviant mimesis intended not to seamlessly embody a cartoon alive within a “real” cinematic world but to queerly capitalize on its fantasy perfection-projection. Lady J’s complex play on stage takes on globalized conceptions of American cultural hegemony, the cinematic personae and its commodity form, Tokyo Disneyland’s dizzying, centrifugal imaginaries, and produces for us the pleasure of watching performance as play that works across these multiple valences at once. Her sensual lip-syncing continues and Lady J takes bodily possession of the animated Jessica. Lady J is amplifying the intense uncanny of the actor who knows not itself and reconciling her own svelte reenactment and its months of labor with the animated commodity character, itself cast up by alienated labor. The Japanese drag queen has hijacked another icon from the menagerie of America as (white) woman, a representational trope stretching back through colonial and anti-colonial fantasies alike (Taussig 1993, 177). At the same time Lady J is unmaking the smooth emotional façade Disneyland works so hard to create, both onscreen and in the manicured fantasy of the space itself. The animated character and the drag queen seem suddenly interchangeable, crossing over into one another worlds and uninhibited by the fascist control exuded by the romantically imagineered streets and amusements below. Jessica, the character, is a prosthetic component to the film as a kind of artificial sexuality and mouthpiece issuing a command for a future of greed. Lady J has her own prosthetics as she too is attached queerly to Japan and to Tokyo Disneyland, if only as an ex-employee slyly pirating its symbolic asset. She mouths another verse:
You're sittin' down and wonderin' what it's all about
You ain't got no money, they will put you out
Why don't you do right, like some other men do?
Get out of here and get me some money too
The K.A. staff among the audience is gathered together enjoying this mimesis of the animated American bombshell come to life in the form of our friend and co-worker. We are party to this mimesis. In a surprising flash I think how we are sitting ensconced in a faux luxury, with cheap gilt and stain-resistant carpets, plastic chandeliers and diluted drinks, in much the same way the corporate salarymen in Akemi’s club sit, waiting for their own performance of female affect to reconstitute their homosocial bonds. We are a family too and Lady J is performing her own ministrations upon us. Her voiceless refrain is too true: Get out of here and get me some money too. The message drifts on the close air, it floats around us, restlessly. In the hostess club it might perhaps fall more heavily with the real urgency. In a way we are all playing in a kind of corporate drag where the woman tells us exactly what is required but you know, she’s only playing. See her sultry wink? She’ll never get old and her breasts are eternally firm, if plastic. We are not in a space designed to confirm our gender roles but instead, a space of eternal youthfulness and imagination, feelings and possibility somersaulting themselves into dizzy ecstasy.
The entire scene is nearly too much to think. The performance is exotic several times over, almost collapsing under the weight of its many layers of significations. The excess is one of mimesis, “the power to both double yet double endlessly, to become Other and engage the image with the reality thus imagized” (Taussig 1993, 255). Kanya, on the very artificial dreamscape cultivated by Disney, is performing one of its guarded properties. Not only is Lady J siphoning off Jessica’s animated energies, she is investing them in queer betrayal beneath the knowing, carnival masquerade mockingly recalibrating the white, male space of the voyeurs’ burlesque lounge. The performance is eminently political and a séance to conjure the disembodied woman of film into a possessed moment where their celluloid sensuality becomes Lady J’s lithe gestures. Together they scorn the capitalism their affective performances have been working so hard for.
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