The White to Be Angry

Excerpts

[…] The work of drag superstar Vaginal Creme Davis, or, as she sometimes prefers to be called, Dr. Davis, spans several cultural production genres. It also appropriates, terroristically, both dominant culture and different subcultural movements. Davis first rose to prominence in the L.A. punk scene through her infamous zine Fertile Latoya Jackson and through her performances at punk shows with her Supremes-like backup singers, the Afro Sisters. Fertile Latoya Jackson’s first incarnation was as a print zine that presented scandalous celebrity gossip. The zine was reminiscent of Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger’s two-volume tell-all history of the movie industry and the star system’s degeneracy. The hand-stapled zine eventually evolved into a video magazine. At the same time as the zine became a global subcultural happening, Davis’s performances in and around the L.A. punk scene, both with the Afro Sisters and solo, became semilegendary. She went on to translate her performance madness to video, starring in various productions […].

[This text] focuses on the performance work done through The White to Be Angry, a live show and a compact disc produced by one of Davis’s other subculturally acclaimed musical groups, Pedro, Muriel and Esther. […]

Disidentification is a performative mode of tactical recognition that various minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology. Disidentification resists the interpellating call of ideology that fixes a subject within the state power apparatus. It is a reformatting of self within the social, a third term that resists the binary of identification and counteridentification. Counteridentification often, through the very routinized workings of its denouncement of dominant discourse, reinstates that same discourse. In an interview in the magazine aRude, Davis offers one of the most lucid explications of a modality of performance that I call disidentificatory. Davis responds to the question “How did you acquire the name Vaginal Davis?” with a particularly elucidating rant:

“It came from Angela Davis – I named myself as a salute to her because I was really into the whole late 60’s and early 70’s militant Black era. When you come home from the inner city and you’re Black you go through a stage when you try to fit the dominant culture, you kinda want to be white at first – it would be easier if you were White. Everything that’s negrified or Black – you don’t want to be associated with that. That’s what I call the snow period – I just felt like if I had some cheap white boyfriend, my life could be perfect and I could be some treasured thing. I could feel myself projected through some White person, and have all the privileges that white people get-validation through association.” [1]Tommy Gear and Mike Glass, “Supremely Vaginal”, aRude 1 (fall 1995): p. 42.

The “snow period” Davis describes corresponds to the assimilationist option that minoritarian subjects often choose. Though sanctioned and encouraged by the dominant culture, the snow period is not a viable option for people of color. More often than not, snow melts in the hands of the subject who attempts to acquire privilege through associations (be they erotic, emotional, or both) with whites. Davis goes on to describe her next phase:

“Then there was a conscious shift, being that I was the first one in my family to go to college – I got militant. That’s when I started reading about Angela and the Panthers, and that’s when Vaginal emerged as a filtering of Angela through humor. That led to my early 1980’s acapella performance entity, Vaginal Davis and the Afro Sisters (who were two white girls with afro wigs). We did a show called ‘we’re taking over’ where we portrayed the Sexualese Liberation Front which decides to kidnap all the heads of white corporate America so we could put big black dildos up their lily white buttholes and hold them for ransom. It really freaked out a lot of the middle class post-punk crowd – they didn’t get the campy element of it but I didn’t really care.” [2]Ibid.

Thus the punk rock drag diva elucidates a stage or temporal space where the person of color’s consciousness turns to her or his community after an immersion in white culture and education. The ultramilitant phase that Davis describes is a powerful counteridentification with the dominant culture. At the same time, though, Davis’s queer sexuality, her queerness and effeminacy, kept her from fully accessing Black Power militancy. Unable to pass as heterosexual black militant through simple counteridentification, Vaginal Davis instead disidentified with Black Power by selecting Angela and not the Panthers as a site of self-fashioning and political formation. Davis’s deployment of disidentification demonstrates that it is, to employ Kimberele Crenshaw’s term, an intersectional strategy. [3]Kimberele William Crenshaw, “Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew”, in “Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment”, ed. Mari J. Matsuda et al. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993), pp. 111-32. Intersectionality insists on a critical hermeneutics that registers the copresence of sexuality, race, class, gender, and other identity differentials as particular components that exist simultaneously with each other. Vintage Black Power discourse contained many homophobic and masculinist elements that were toxic to queer and feminist subjects. Davis used parody and pastiche to remake Black Power, opening it up via disidentification to a self that is simultaneously black and queer. […]

At this point in the live performance, about halfway through the number, Davis has removed the long gray beard, the jacket, and the cap. A striptease has begun. At this point Clarence starts to be undone and Davis begins to reappear. She has begun to interact lasciviously with the other members of her band. She gropes her guitarist and bass players as she cruises the audience. She is becoming queer, and as she does so she begins to perform homophobia. […]Davis is once again inhabiting phobic images with a parodic and cutting difference. […]By becoming the serial killer, whose psychological profile is almost always white, Vaginal Davis disarticulates not only the onus of performing the positive image, which is generally borne by minoritarian subjects, but also the Dahmer paradigm [5]Translator’s note: Jeffrey Dahmer was a white American serial killer who murdered, raped, dismembered and in some cases ate or taxidermied the body parts of seventeen boys and men of colour between 1978 and 1991. where the white cannibal slaughters gay men of color. […]

By the last number Vaginal Davis has fully reemerged, and she is wearing a military fatigue baby-doll nightie. She is still screaming and writhing on the stage, and she is soaked in rock’n’roll sweat. The Clarence persona has disintegrated. Long live the queen. During an interview Davis explained to me that her actual birth name is Clarence. What does it mean that the artist who negotiates various performance personas and uses Vaginal Creme Davis as a sort of base identity reserves her “birth name” for a character who represents the nation’s current state of siege? Davis’s drag, this reconfigured cross-sex, cross-race minstrelsy, can best be understood as terrorist drag – terrorist insofar as she is performing the nation’s internal terrors around race, gender, and sexuality. It is also an aesthetic terrorism: Davis uses ground-level guerrilla representational strategies to portray some of the nation’s most salient popular fantasies. The fantasies she acts out involve cultural anxieties around miscegenation, communities of color, and the queer body. Her dress does not attempt to outmoded ideals of female glamour. She instead dresses like white supremacist militiamen and black welfare queen hookers. In other words, her drag mimesis is not concerned with the masquerade of womanliness, but instead with conjuring the nation’s most dangerous citizens. She is quite literally in “terrorist drag”.

While Davis’s terrorist drag performance does not engage the project of passing as traditional drag at least partially does, it is useful to recognize how passing and what I am describing as disidentification resemble one another – or, to put it more accurately, how the passing entailed in traditional drag implicates elements of the disidentificatory process. Passing is often not about bald-faced opposition to a dominant paradigm or a wholesale selling out to that form. Like disidentification itself, passing can be a third modality, where a dominant structure is co-opted, worked on and against. The subject who passes can be simultaneously identifying with and rejecting a dominant form. In traditional male-to-female drag “woman” is performed, but one would be naive and deeply ensconced in heteronormative culture to consider such a performance, no matter how “real”, as an actual performance of “woman”. Drag performance strives to perform femininity, and femininity is not exclusively the domain of biological women. Furthermore, the drag queen is disidentifying-sometimes critically and sometimes not – not only with the ideal of woman but also with the a priori relationship of woman and femininity that is a tenet of gender-normative thinking. […]

Both modalities of performing the self, disidentification and passing, are often strategies of survival. (As the case of Davis and others suggests, often these modes of performance allow much more than mere survival, and subjects fully come into subjectivity in ways that are both ennobling and fierce.) Davis’s work is a survival strategy on a more symbolic register than that of everyday practice. She is not passing to escape social injustice and structural racism in the way that some people of color might. Nor is she passing in the way in which “straight-acting queers” do. […] ​​​​

​[H]er performance as Clarence functions as an intervention in the history of cross-race desire that saturates the phenomenon of passing. Passing is parodied, and this parody becomes a site where interracial desire is interrogated.

Davis’s biting social critique phantasmatically projects the age-old threat of miscegenation, something that white supremacist groups fear the most, onto the image of a white supremacist. Cross-race desire spoils the militiaman’s image. [6]Author’s note: Here I risk collapsing all antigovernment militias with more traditional domestic terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis. Not all militiamen are white supremacists, and the vast majority of white supremacists are not in a militia. But Davis's Clarence is definitely concerned with racist militias whose antigovernment philosophies are also overtly xenophobic and white supremacist. It challenges the coherence of his identity, his essentialized whiteness, by invading its sense of essentialized white purity. The militiaman becomes a caricature of himself, sullied and degraded within his own logic.

Furthermore, blackface minstrelsy, the performance genre of whites performing blackness, is powerfully recycled through disidentification. The image of the fat-lipped Sambo is replaced by the image of the ludicrous white militiaman. […]

 […] The cultural battle that Davis wages is fought with the darkest sense of humor and the sharpest sense of parody imaginable. Her performances represent multiple counterpublics and subjects who are liminal within those very counterpublics. She shrewdly employs performance as a modality of counterpublicity. Performance engenders, sponsors, and even makes worlds. The scene of speed metal and post-punk music is one which Davis ambivalently inhabits. Her blackness and queerness render her a freak among freaks. Rather than be alienated by her freakiness, she exploits its energies and its potential to enact cultural critique.

A close friend of mine and I have a joke that we return to every June. Upon the occasion of Gay Pride, a celebration of lesbian and gay visibility and empowerment held early in the summer in many major North American cities, we propose a gay shame day parade. This parade, unlike the sunny Gay Pride march, would be held in February. Participants would have certain restrictions to deal with if they were to properly engage the spirit of gay shame day. First of all, loud colors would be discouraged. Gays and lesbians would instead be asked to wear drab browns and grays. Shame marchers would also be asked to carry signs no bigger than a business card. Chanting would be prohibited. Parade walkers would be asked to maintain a single file. Finally, the parade would not be held in a central city street but in some back street, preferably by the river. While we cannot help but take part in some aspects of pride day, we recoil at its commercialism and hack representations of gay identity. When most of the easily available and visible gay world is a predominantly white and male commercialized zone (the mall of contemporary gay culture), we find little reason to be “proud”.

Some of these sentiments have recently been taken up in an anthology edited by Mark Simpson titled Anti-Gay. [7]Mark Simpson, ed., “Anti-Gay” (London: Freedom Editions, 1996). With its minimalist black courier print on a plain safety-yellow cover, the book makes a very low-key visual statement that would be appropriate for our aforementioned gay shame day. Simpson’s introduction focuses on the failure of “queers’ grandiose ambitions”. He claims “that by focusing on the shortcomings of gay and refusing to be distracted by how terrible heterosexuality is supposed to be, Anti-Gay may even offer the beginnings of a new dialectic, a new conversation with the world, one that is rather more interesting than the current ones.” [8]Ibid., xix.

I am in accord with some of Simpson’s remarks. The gay communities we live in are often incapable of enacting any autocritique that would engage the politics of gender, racial diversity, and class. But rather than being critical about the politics of the mainstream gay community, Simpson merely seems to be bored by a conversation that he feels has ceased to be “interesting”.

At one point in his discussion, Simpson mentions the homogeneity of the book’s contributors: “It [Anti-Gay] doesn’t promise to be more inclusive than gay (contributions by only two women, only one bisexual and none from people of colour.)” [9]Ibid. Simpson’s attack on “gay” is not concerned with “gay’s” exclusivity, its white normativity, or its unwillingness to form coalitions with other counterpublics, including feminist (both lesbian and straight) and other minoritized groups. My own playful critique of the gay community, manifested in the gay-shame-day joke, emanates from a deep frustration on my part toward what I call mainstream or corporate homosexuality. By contrast, to be “antigay” in Simpson’s sense of the word is to offer criticism in a “been-there-done-that” style whose main purpose is to register tedium.

The forms of “antigay” thinking put forth in Vaginal Davis’s work are vastly different in origin and effect than Simpson’s Anti-Gay. Davis’s brand of antigay critique offers  something more than a listless complaint. This additional something is a sustained critique of white gay male normativity and its concomitant corporate ethos.

“Closet Case”, another track on PME’s album, is, upon first glance, a critique of closeted homosexuality. Further analysis also reveals that the song critiques an aesthetic, rather than a type of individual. The song’s lyrics depict a mode of living that is recognizable (especially from Davis’s perspective as a working-class gay man of color) as a bourgeois Southern California brand of urban gay male style.

The closet here is not necessarily the one inhabited by those who engage in homosexual acts but deny a gay identification. Instead, the queen depicted in this song is more recognizably in the closet about his age, appearance, and quotidian habits. Davis satirizes the closet queen whose style is easily recognizable on a map of urban Southern Californian homosexualities. A quick review of the particular type of queen being delineated is useful here. Brand names like Ray Ban and Trans Am, as well as cellular phones and condos and the price tags associated with these commodities are integral to this queen’s identity. Equally important is the leisure-time salon tan, facial scrubs, and collagen injections. Most important of all is the “buff” gym-built body. Davis’s song offers the anatomy (physical, behavioral, and socioeconomic) of the normative and corporate homosexual. The closet case of the song is an elite within a larger spectrum of gay communities, and Davis’s satirical parody atomizes this cultural type. Humor is used to mock and degrade this mode of apolitical gayness, disrupting its primacy as a universal mold or pattern. Antigayness here is used as a way of lampooning and ultimately disrupting a modality of white gay male hegemony. […]

“Queerness” and “blackness” need to be read as ideological discourses that contain contradictory impulses within them-some of them liberatory, others reactionary. These discourses also require hermeneutics that appraise the intersectional and differential crosscutting currents with individual ideological scripts. Davis’s work is positioned at a point of intersection between various discourses (where they are woven together); and from this point she is able to enact a parodic and comedic demystification, and the potential for subversion is planted. Disidentification, as a mode of analysis, registers subjects as constructed and contradictory. Davis’s body, her performances, and all her myriad texts labor to create critical uneasiness and, furthermore, to create desire within uneasiness. This desire unsettles the strictures of class, race, and gender prescribed by what Guattari calls the “social body”. A disidentificatory hermeneutic permits a reading and narration of the way in which Davis clears out a space, deterritorializing it and then reoccupying it with queer and black bodies. The lens of disidentification allows us to discern seams and contradictions and ultimately to understand the need for a war of positions. [10]Translator’s note: Muñoz refers here to Stuart Hall, who has adapted Antonio Gramsci’s theorisations for race analysis. According to Hall, Gramsci’s notion of the war of positions (as opposed to an outdated orthodox Marxian war of maneuver) “recognizes the ‘plurality’ of selves or identities of which the so-called ‘subject’ of thought and ideas is composed. ”

Excerpts from: Muñoz, José Esteban: “The White to Be Angry: Vaginal Davis’ Terrorist Drag”. In: Social Text, No. 52/53, Queer Transexions of Race, Nation and Gender, Autumn/Winter 1997, Duke University Press, pp. 80–103.