Border Queers/Queer Borders: Dragtivism with The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

• In Event: 3548 - Embodied Resistance: Activism and Protest for Social Justice (Cosponsored with the Section on Sociology of Sexualities)

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In Border Queers/Queer Borders I discuss how Border Queer communities challenge theoretical and constructed (dominant) borders for cultural value through bodily practices, thereby providing the possibility necessary for empowering different conceptions and interpretations of/for identity.  Border Queer communities are not interested in maintaining only binary understandings of gender and basic conceptual schemes rooted in reductive universals; they instead are focused on a galaxy of possibilities for thinking and practicing identity and embodiment, and actively build through their reflexive experiences of self and community queer possibilities for understanding varied bodies.  In this chapter, an analysis of drag activism associated with The Los Angeles Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence provides an example of a border queer community, where theoretical conceptions of abject/object bodies, thought projects for the body, and also material possibilities for the existence of varied queer bodies/embodiments can be viewed, experienced, interpreted, and used as a springboard for one’s conception of the self through example and community validation. I argue that within border queer communities and collectives, empowerment is constructed reflectively to the practice of possibility, and where the consequence of such communities is the actual queer(ing) of borders for body and identity conceptualization.

Author

• Ryan Ashley Caldwell, Soka University of America