Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Exhibiting the expulsion of transgression 21
of gender roles that regulate the behaviour of the gendered
individual. 10
Cohen’s performance of drag can be described as a politically
subversive act owing to the fact that it undermines the perception of
gender as natural by displaying the very act of the performance of
gender. 11 Like the US Queer Nation, 12 Cohen disrupts the gender
norms and the accepted and unchallenged heterosexual matrix.
Queer Nation’s aims to expose and destabilise heterosexual values are
achieved through tactics of increasing the visibility of homosexuality.
This is achieved, in terms of what Hennessy 13 describes as inserting
‘gay spectacle into the centres of straight consumption’. Cohen’s
performances strategically strive for the same aim as that of Queer
Nation, to challenge the sovereignty of heterosexuality by bringing
homosexuality from the margins of society into the centre. Cohen’s
performances achieve this aim by the development of a series of
characters from his Pieces of you performance. This work uses the
song of Jewel by the same name, Pieces of you, to examine identities
that an individual should be ‘ashamed of’. The marginalised and
persecuted identities Cohen explores are Ugly Girl, Faggot and Jew. 14
These identities explored by Cohen share the association of being
characterised as inherently deviant. As such these deviant identities
are subject to social control, which encompasses their disciplining,
marginalisation and subordination. 15 Yet, by seeking to define and
control deviant identities the paradoxical effect of strengthening the
bonds of individuals within these groups is forged. This paradoxical
effect refers to Michel Foucault’s use of the term ‘reverse discourse’
that establishes an identity around which a subculture might begin to
form and protest. 16 The homosexual, established as a deviant identity
within the nineteenth century embodies the possibilities inherent
within the ‘reverse discourse’, in that according to Dallimore 17 once
identified, the homosexual began: 18
... to speak on its own behalf, to forge its own identity and culture,
often in the self-same terms by which it had been produced and
10 R Baker Drag (1994) 107.
11 R Alsop et al Theorising gender (2002) 228.
12
US Queer Nation came to attention in 1990 by engaging theatrically in public in
order to challenge dominant gender norms. They re-appropriated the term queer
to claim ideas of difference associated with its embrace of the various
communities of sexual dissidents. See Alsop et al (n 11 above) 95.
13 Alsop et al (n 11 above) 228.
14 Cohen later developed these characters separately and inserted them into
appropriate events such as his Ugly Girl (1998) performance at Loftus that is
discussed at length in the following section. See S de Waal & R Sassen in Carman
(n 7 above) 15.
15
T Spargo Foucault and queer theory (1999) 20-22.
16 E Showalter Sexual anarchy. Gender and culture at the fin de siècle (1990) 14-15.
17 Showalter (n16 above) 14-15.
18
Hence, the re-appropriation of the term ‘queer’ by US Queer Nation and Cohen’s
use of the term faggot to identify himself.