Gender Drift

Abstract

Staged as a drift between and beyond the terms of normative gender, Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie (2013) suggests a reconceptualization of the Situationist dérive as a practice of molecular becoming. In this essay, I offer Preciado's work as a way of understanding how queer dramaturgies may involve something other than a stable, coherent subject and instead figure what Rosi Braidotti has theorised as a non-unitary or nomadic mode of subjectivity. At the same time, Preciado's emphasis on the spatial, cultural and ‘pharmaco-pornographic’ conditions which materialise the contemporary subject may usefully resist renditions of the queer or trans subject as endlessly or effortlessly fluid. In exploring these ideas, I consider two performances – Rosana Cade's Walking: Holding (2011) and Nando Messias’ The Sissy's Progress ­­(2014) – as articulating the necessity for queer, trans and gender non-conforming people to appear in public spaces while simultaneously foregrounding the literal, material conditions -- and risks -- attached to gender that drifts from its most normative instance. These works invite us to rethink the potential of queer spatiality in terms of contact, exposure and situated embodiment.