I think the goal is precisely to become a disappointment to our parents
July 19, 2016 4:03 AM   Subscribe

Performance duo DarkMatter on being LOL killjoys and drag as politics. (SL Guernica Mag). A great interview with trans South Asian performance artists Alok Vaid-Menon and Janani Balasubramanian, aka DarkMatter. DarkMatter's performances include It Gets Bougie, The Story They Never Told Us, White Fetish, Padma & Parvati Patil, and When Brown Looks in the Mirror and Comes Out White (all YT links). “I hear white men have huge—” “—Empires”
And when I say drag, too, this is what I’m most trying to get at: that cis-gendered women can also be drag queens. Drag is about a social recognition that gender is so LOL. It’s a recognition that because gender is LOL, I’m going to have fun with it. For me it’s like, we’re all already drag queens, but some of us have already acknowledged that we’re drag queens. (interview)
posted by spamandkimchi (20 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
If you ever get a chance to see them in person, please do. They are amazingly talented. They give no fucks about white people's opinions, especially cishet white people, and it's an interesting feeling to see that expressed so blatantly in a room of (mostly) white people. But it's not hatred, just determination. I felt really challenged by the performance. I spoke to them afterwards and told them I was just starting my transition and they gave me a huge hug.
posted by AFABulous at 6:33 AM on July 19, 2016 [5 favorites]


DarkMatter: "A white woman once asked me where I was from. No, where I was really from."
Guernica: "To watch the trans South Asian performance-art duo DarkMatter perform..."
posted by Bugbread at 6:39 AM on July 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Alok Vaid-Menon: "Honestly, the issue with the way we talk about gender right now is that the term “gender identity” is completely wrong; it’s a terrible direction. Actually, gender is a relational system. My gender is produced by talking to you. The type of gender that I’m creating right now with you is very different than the type of gender I have with Janani, it’s different than the type of gender I have with my mother. It’s contingent on space. I have to make evaluations of, can I wear a dress right now, can I not, because of my proximity to violence? These are all decisions that I’m making, because gender is something that I don’t own."

These two are so phenomenal. What I wouldn't give to see them perform.
posted by libraritarian at 6:47 AM on July 19, 2016 [9 favorites]


AAAAAH WTF I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF THESE TWO AND I LOVE THEM. Thank you for this post!
posted by sunset in snow country at 7:22 AM on July 19, 2016


FWIW, these folks are super controversial.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:25 AM on July 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


For me it’s like, we’re all already drag queens, but some of us have already acknowledged that we’re drag queens.

That's my favorite quote. Very thought-provoking, the whole thing.
posted by xingcat at 8:11 AM on July 19, 2016


Socialist Worker had a couple pieces on DarkMatter recently
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 8:20 AM on July 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


Damn, the Dan Savage burn is intense.
posted by thedaniel at 10:14 AM on July 19, 2016


This is something that I think people do innately know: that who they are changes from space to space.

So this confuses me. While I'm happy to see gender as a made thing, evolving, accreting over time, in listening to other people, cis and trans, it appears that this is not at all universally held, and that for many people gender is far more intrinsically felt and not subject to change. Almost like there is a hidden axis of gender, those built with a gender compass that points their sense of self in a particular direction, and those without that compass.

Additionally, the question "I have to make evaluations of, can I wear a dress right now, can I not, because of my proximity to violence?" in the middle of speaking about gender as relations-system and not identity, seems really off, as though presentation were a core component of gender...and again, in listening to others, this does not seem to be the case.

So I guess I don't really understand what I am reading, when I read this interview. On a personal level, a lot of it makes sense (as someone who, it has become increasingly clear, does not have that compass built-in), but it seems dramatically inapplicable to so many of the stories we have heard.
posted by mittens at 10:55 AM on July 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


Yeah, I love Darkmatter, but I have similar questions, mittens. I know for me, my agender identity is non-negotiable to me, but it's the interaction between me and others can shift it into the forefront or not. It makes me want to think deeper and more nuanced about how much my gender is 'mine' or not. Like what are we really, in relationship to others?

I inherently feel agender but am read as female all the time, and it would take a huge effort on my aesthetic presentation for me to read as androgynous, which works against what I am given biologically. I do not have much desire (currently) to change my female-presenting appearance, but I am still fiercely agender regardless. We can contain multitudes of experience and feelings. I am always agender to myself and that is a non-negotiable, but my gender performance and the identity that people force upon me is dependent on the relationship I have with the person. My gender performance and how I am read is definitely dependent on how I feel in relationship spatially to that person, and even my mannerisms and behaviors shift (because societal conditioning, jfc), but I think my inner sense of gender views everything as a social construct. Fascinating thoughts!
posted by yueliang at 12:08 PM on July 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


We can contain multitudes of experience and feelings.

nodding. That is an excellent description of exactly how I've been feeling lately.
posted by Annika Cicada at 3:55 PM on July 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


I understand what Alok means by gender as relational, because that's how I view my own gender. Almost every aspect of my identity is constantly in question, but gender's one particular one where I've decided it's a losing battle to try and fight for who I "really am" when the practicality is that I'm going to be parsed by others based on their take on my gender and what I think about it is irrelevant. (Hell, I find the idea of having your own gender identity respected, especially if it's something less commonly recognized, to be rooted in a level of privilege beyond cis-privilege.)

If I was given the space and tools to really define my gender as I see fit and get other people to recognize it, I'd be non-binary. I adopted Mx as a teen long before the word "genderqueer" even existed. But there are very few spaces that recognize non-binary genders, and in those spaces I am not seen, recognized, acknowledged as one. I don't make any effort to present in a particular gender, don't wish to change my body in any way to reflect some concept of gender, and having been raised/lived in multiple cultures, people's categorization of "this is masculine" or "this is feminine" are so different that trying to collate them together creates contradictions. (For instance, attention to appearance is seen as femme in Western culture, yet in my South Asian culture it's very masculine - but these men, including my dad, would be seen as feminine in the West because he actually cares about dying his moustache every once in a while.)

Meanwhile, the spaces where I clearly do not fit rigid gender expectations don't have a category for non-binary ("3rd gender" is reserved for AMAB folks since there is a long historical lineage). They just consider me a "failed woman" of sorts. I'm F on my ID, and F I will always be, so why fight it. Issues that affect women affect me - I can't say "I'm non-binary!" and evade that. As far as the world is concerned, I'm 100% cis female, so that's that.
posted by divabat at 8:21 PM on July 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


Divabat, I have thought a lot about how a person getting to ID as some form of gender "off the binary" can make cis people feel like that person has a privilege that cis people don't.

I think about a cis woman growing up in the morass of toxic femininity and having to suffer that shit growing up through teenage years (I'm watching my two daughters go through this now) and my heart hearts for cis women.

So, I think I get how you feel the way you do about it.I imagine it must feel something like "why do they get to escape the gravity of the toxic mess of cis gender but I gotta stay here a deal with this mess?"

And I don't know that I have any answer to that, other than I imagine growing up as a cis girl was hard and I have a lot of respect for what cis women had to go through.

I guess in my opinion, shifting off your comment a bit and towards Alok and darkmatter a little, I think we'd all be a lot better off if we found a way to talk about our individual experiences and relationships with gender in a way that our critiques of gender do not deny others their own experiences with gender. Basically I see a trend in trans circles towards a "universal theory of gender" and I think the notion of being trans in the first place kinda undermines that whole enterprise from the start.

I think of Judith Butler, how she talks about about gender abolitionists, saying (paraphrased) that there are quite a lot of people who derive joy and comfort from their gender. That we must be careful not to erect moral prisons around what gender must be for others in the process of our critique. I think Alok says a lot of fantastic stuff but there is also a good bit of what they say that feels to me like erecting moral prisons around groups of people and that makes me feel sad.
posted by Annika Cicada at 9:40 PM on July 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


Here's where I am referencing Judith Butler from (previously on metafilter as well)
posted by Annika Cicada at 10:01 PM on July 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


And um, when I say "getting to ID as" I mean "getting a chance to live their authentic lives as". That was written poorly. apologies.
posted by Annika Cicada at 10:14 PM on July 19, 2016


divabat, I think it's so interesting, because I pretty much share a lot of your conclusions, if not your experiences, but because of that, I care extremely little what people think of me and my gender, so gender is not relational to me. The relationships I focus on regarding this, is the way that people treat me is always dependent on their relationship to upholding normativity and a failure to understand the continuum of gender. I myself try to resist assimilating into gender policing to fit into society, and try hard to not be an ideological enforcer for that type of harmful, normative understanding. Therefore, how I self-define is my own commitment to my gender identity, as a resistance against others and a self-honoring of my own existence's liminality.

I never expect to be read properly, but I keep demanding my pronouns because I am entitled to my self-definition of myself, and that's very unshakeable for me, especially after going through so much internalized toxic femininity and masculinity and my own experiences with gendered violence. It's one of the few things that is selfish to me, and I think the saying "you can be agender/non-binary and present however you want" meant to me that I do identify this way, and that's it. No ifs, ands, and buts.

But I also think that has a great deal with how I do present as a cis female, and consider it as a drag costume made out of skin, sex characteristics, and clothes, and do not have body dysphoria, so I think I have different pains than someone else who has a different relationship with their body than I do. I just feel uncaring about it. I click my tongue with disapproval everytime that someone has a failure to read me, but it doesn't erode my own sense of the non-binary. Everyone else is failing on that account, and that's their damn fault for not seeing me as who I am, fuck them unless we can build a relationship and listening understanding on that.
posted by yueliang at 8:13 AM on July 20, 2016 [2 favorites]


yueliang: I feel the same way you do about other aspects of my identity (my race, my queerness, my mental health status, my name) but because I've already spent so much of my energy on those, trying to fight for a gender label that will only ever apply in teeny tiny situations seems like a waste of energy for very little reward. What difference would it make in my life, really, if I was more openly non-binary and people could respect that? I get misgendered on the regular anyway even without trying and it already takes up energy trying to get people to understand that I am under no circumstances a "he" or a "Sir" (thanks Singapore Airlines and your apparent inability to consider that it is possible to be a heavy-busted girl in a dress with a super short haircut). If 99% of the time I'm going to be filtered as She for mostly official purposes, and there is no material difference to my life experience for being actively non-binary, why bother?
posted by divabat at 9:01 AM on July 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


Speaking only for myself, I don't see how my gender is strictly or even mostly performative. I can be alone and naked and look in the mirror and think "that can't be right!" I have extraneous parts and missing parts, and medical intervention will help that to an extent. But that's for me and not a performance for anyone else. I feel more authentic on testosterone.

Maybe that is because I've absorbed that "men have beards and women don't" or whatever. I don't know. It's complex. I do know that the happier I am with my body, the less I care what other people think about my presentation. But regardless of my presentation, I definitely feel "male."

I know my experience isn't universal and anecdotally it seems to be less and less common as there is more awareness and acceptance that non-binary is a valid identity. It's one of those things that I can't have an intrinsic understanding of, just like I don't have the experience of being a person of color, but I fully support genderqueer, genderfluid, agender and other non-binary folks, and I will fight for you.
posted by AFABulous at 10:30 AM on July 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


I think how we all view gender is dependent on how we each perceive the competing maps of what a body is and how a gender lives in it. The lines of battle have been established at the disputed borders of all these maps and have been laid over trans people as proof that a particular map is more accurate or better. I think this is extremely unfair to trans people who don't feel like their body should be defined by someone else'e map, yet there are considerable numbers of groups of trans and cis people who feel like this is a perfectly reasonable burden to place on the entire trans community.

"I'm trans" because I am that way. My reasons as to why do not need to make sense to myself or anyone else, nor do they have to fit into any ideas of what gender is historically or what it's supposed to be. There are so many oppositional groups (trans to cis, leftist to conservative) drawing maps over my body and trying to determine for me exactly how I get to exist along their ideology. I get very upset with this because I feel like I do not actually have agency no matter where I go. I always have to conform with whatever ideological territory that has been mapped over me in a particular space without my consent. I say I "have to" because when I don't, the social constructs begin falling apart in unpredictable ways and I find myself in one or even up to dozens of a hundred different ideological conflicts that I wish to be no part of. I just want to be me. Not evidence, not a data point, just me.
posted by Annika Cicada at 11:20 AM on July 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


divabat: "If 99% of the time I'm going to be filtered as She for mostly official purposes, and there is no material difference to my life experience for being actively non-binary, why bother?"

Yeah, I am the same way too. I guess to me, both experiences exist at the same time for me and it just depends on how I feel at the moment. Neither of them are contradictions, it depends on how much labor I want to perform at the moment. I actually believe I overlooked this when I wrote my original comment and it gave off an incomplete image, since I don't demand my pronouns at around the same rate I do demand my pronouns. I still identify as non-binary regardless of how people treat me, and consider my gender a non-negotiable though, so I still find it fairly awesome how we have different conclusions towards the gender relationship we have towards ourselves and others, and that both are valid.
posted by yueliang at 1:35 PM on July 20, 2016 [2 favorites]


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