Vaginal Davis & Robespierre - Queens (Make the World Go Round) QUEERCORE EXPLOSION #23
12016-02-25T13:08:14-08:00Brita Loeb942120b745a4be9609a81faa3ba80521f37067e867901This playlist consists of tracks curated for an as-yet unreleased collection of early 90s queer rock and punk entitled Queercore Explosion! The songs are mostly ...plain2016-02-25T13:08:14-08:00Brita Loeb942120b745a4be9609a81faa3ba80521f37067e8
"Davis is a black drag queen, a grande dame of the queer underground in Los Angeles, on the margins of both the Los Angeles art world (as not-commercial) and the gay scene as well (black, queer punk-rock drag queen she is" (Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects, 126).
A shallow narrative of the Los Angeles punk scene tells the story of heteronormativity: white and straight. White males, like Darby Crash, remained closest- a fact that speaks to the difficulty of minority identification in a hardcore scene. Yet, drag legend Vaginal Creme Davis challenged dominant culture, and punk subculture. Rising to popularity from her zine Latoya Jackson, Davis also performed at punk shows as the front-woman the band, Afro Sisters. Grace Dunham in her New Yorker article articulates that "...she [Vaginal Davis] referenced and drew inspiration from iconic black radicals like Angela Davis, after whom she named herself.” She flaunted her intersectional identities, performing sexual identity and gender.
Self-described as African-American and Mexican-American, Davis examined her Chicana background and its mix with blackness, especially through her group, Cholita. In performing her various minoritarian identities and the intersection of them (mostly via drag), Davis in a true punk fashion reject dominant modes of normalcy, with what Munoz deems "terroristic drag." Davis' guerrilla tactics aimed to critique punk's whiteness, as she infiltrated a dissent, but nonetheless mainly white male culture through mixed media: zines, performance art, and of course her bands- PME, Cholita, and Black Fag. Duhham pays homage to Munoz's term, for she writes. “Muñoz was the first person to use the term “terrorist drag” to describe the work of Davis—in particular, the way she interrogated rather than obscured her cultural otherness.” (The White to Be Angry)
She unlike other artists depicted in this chapter acts and represents anxieties of the queer body, through her queer body of work that engages the objectification of women's bodies. In such a way, Davis interrogates straight culture, her attack on white-male norms. Munoz writes of Davis' provocative versatility that she is "...a drag queen, who enacts, documents, and theorizes an array of drag characters" (162). In this way, Davis blurs the line between performer and critic through guerilla-like performance.