Femme Queens and Gender Glitches: Performing the Technology of Becoming-monster
Katrīna Dūka
2020-2022
FEMME QUEENS AND GENDER GLITCHES: PERFORMING THE TECHNOLOGY OF BECOMING-MONSTER is a practice-led research situated in the intersection of Feminist Theatre Practices, Gender Studies, Feminist New Materialism, Posthumanist Feminist Theory and Monster Studies. Through transposing the notion of glitch from digital technologies to gender technologies, I adopt a femme drag practice in order to create a methodology for performing a deviant and monstrous femininity that aims to shift narratives of womanhood. This research derives from the observation that much feminist theatre practices employ critical mimicry, irony, and grotesque as a strategy for deviation, which, I argue, reinscribe the idea of an inherent abjection of feminine bodies. Therefore, I take an approach that is engaged in creating excess meaning rather than an aesthetics of excess. Through embracing the notion of monster as a disrupting, yet world-making figuration, I engage in speculative fabulation to create a solo drag performance The Ghost of Me. Drawing from the process of making this performance work, I propose principles for thinking and doing femininity on stage that are based on body glitch, identity glitch, and narrative glitch, as well as through an ethics of vulnerability.