C: My identifiers and qualifiers often change upon the audience or interaction. When I am by myself, I feel utterly neutral, like a jellyfish out of water. I recognize my whiteness—my Western-Euro-mutt American whiteness. My Southerness. My sexuality—hungry, but also working through some heavy digestion! My able-bodiedness more and more amplified but for years it was an invisible force, granting me privileges that I didn’t even mark as such. I have recently adopted the pronound “they” in addition to “she” and “her”; I think this mostly has to do with my increase in developing my identity as a writer. In that space I am de-sexed, all-encompassing gender. I also have been trying to embrace a masculine self, forgotten so long ago.
LD: What does drag mean to you?
C: Drag to me is a playful, solemn, ceremonial extension of gender performance. A way to emphasize or deemphasize some gender roles, but often drag extends out from gender. I think it is performative but I cannot deny the immense sacred place it is for some people, though I myself am not currently in that space.
LD: Why do you perform/present in drag?
I think my drag is hyperfemininity. Femme, cleanliness, curvaceous beauty is my drag. It is a way of contrasting my intensely filthy, radical nature, a nature that wholly survives based on intelligence, with a femme self. This femme self is powerful, and for now, she works for me.
LD: What has been you experience of performing/presenting in drag in Asheville?
C: I have no idea where to start on this question… Asheville is far too divided in my experience: as my hometown and as my student-queer-activist turf. In Asheville my home, I feel skinned down and sore, but also untouchable, in my femme “drag;” in Asheville my turf, I feel too familiarized and almost stuck.
LD: Does drag inform/relate to your gender identity?
C: I was a very fat, lonely, imaginative child with a deflated sense of self-esteem in regard to my appearance. When I was introduced to the notion that big, (white) curvy women could induce male attention by emphasizing their classic (white) femininity, that became my mode. Now I love it—I do, and if no one believes me they should see the way I check myself out in my home before I go out--but then, at a younger age, it was a farce. I wanted to believe someone someday would possibly desire me—I was relentlessly sexual in my own self and my head but no one wanted me. I felt I “failed” as a girl. No willowy, slender, nymphet sexual awakening for me. I feel drag, whether the “drag” of me that pulls on a tight skirt and heels, or the drag that performs in front of an audience is directly associated with the disjunct in my feminine performance. I was always drawn to masculine power, androgynous looks—I identified with boy characters and boy pastimes, but felt with my body (fat, soft, round, and so, so, so white) I could never achieve it. I had to do a 180. In that hyperfemme self I am rediscovering my androgyny—my fierce, but prematurely neutered, warrior male self.
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