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• 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.