CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Peroni, Rodrigo |
|---|---|
| Title | Queer Utopia and Reparation: Reclaiming Failure, Vulnerability, and Shame in Drag Performance |
| Summary | This thesis discusses the critical and queer utopian potential of two performances by Ongina and Alaska Thunderfuck - two contemporary American drag queens. Based on Ongina’s “Beautiful” lip-sync performance and Alaska Thunderfuck's “Your Makeup Is Terrible” video clip, I argue that the performance of failure, vulnerability, and shame troubles multiculturalist discourses for their perpetuation of the neoliberal and masculinist values of individual success (chapter 1), authentic autonomy (chapter 2), and proud stable identity (chapter 3). While and because these performances defy the drag genre’s conventions and drive us to reconsider the prevalent forms of resistance to heterosexism, they also engender a queer utopian potential that allows the imagining and experiencing of alternative ethics. I rely on José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of disidentification and Eve Sedgwick’s notions of paranoid and reparative reading to propose queer communitarian bondings that are not radical nor durable but more inclusive and self-transformative. By interpreting ugliness as failure, I argue that in uglifying themselves Ongina and Alaska expose the meritocracy of neoliberalism and suggest an ethics based not on aesthetic pleasure but on a reparative appreciation of the awful that queers the very notion of community for not holding on to stable identities nor individual achievements. Drawing on a Levinasian discussion of vulnerability and care, I discuss how Alaska disidentifies with the reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race's deployment of vulnerability as relatable authenticity while suggesting an alternative ethics with which to encounter the Other based on witnessing, risk, and ungraspability. In turn, the affect of shame, as delineated by Silvan Tomkins, is reconsidering in its performativity: Ongina challenges the ideological rhetoric of multiculturalism that positions pride and shame in a binary relation of visibility and invisibility and engender communitarian bonds based on depressive love. Finally, this study provided a discussion of the shortcomings of multiculturalist identitarian politics in regard to its assimilationist and exclusionary logics; and imagined alternative queer horizons where ethical responsibility does not follow from individual sameness but from the unevenness of our relationships. |
| Supervisor | Timár, Eszter |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/peroni_rodrigo.pdf |
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