HYPER FEM
I want to make a piece about gender.
I have been brewing it for two years.
It began in a field at Glastonbury Festival. Each day I was invited to construct a character to be part of an improvised performance on a mock TV Set. And without fail every day I was drawn to the shortest dresses, the highest heels, the longest wigs the fakest boobs, and all of the make up.
Someone said, ‘you look like a drag queen.
And I thought that much like;
equal pay
high payed employment opportunities
and chances for social mobility
I thought that being a drag queen was something that was not on offer to me as a woman…but when have I ever listened to what I can or can’t do
I have been thinking about how femininity always feels like a performance. A performance that doesn’t feel mine. A performance that I see on other people that feels controlled and commodified by the patriarchy. I wanted to perform a femininity that until this point I have eschewed, rejected and judged. I spent most of my teenage years rejecting the highly sexualised femininity I saw presented in the media by the patriarchal heteronormative capitalist society. I presented in a way that attempted to show that I knew about and opposed these structures which sought to make my body a socio-economic sexual commodity.And, when I was 16 and that boy told me I looked like a drag queen, an attempt to undermine my relationship with my gender, the insult twirled away. I have always wanted to be a Drag Queen…
Drag, when it is done well, is a political, satirical performance that plays with gender performativity, fluidity and sex. The Drag Queen performs aspects of femininity that allow her to steal off into the night, escaping political constructs of the patriarchy and slipping out of the confines of the male gaze. I look at Drag Queens, and sometimes I see how playful, powerful and politically subversive femininity can be. I wanted it, I wanted to play with femininity like those beautiful men do. I want to using my body as the site of the performance of ‘Hyper Fem’ and to attempt to challenging or subvert the scripts generally written for the female body in a performance. I wondered whether the performance of femininity could still be subversive when positioned on my female body?
So I began. I received some funding from Arts Council England and begin my Research.
I began with Peggy Phelan’s ‘Unmarked’ where I first encountered the work ‘Hyper Fem’ being used to describe the performance of exaggerated (sexual-aggressive-powerful) femininity by drag queens in the documentary ‘Paris is Burning’ shot by Jennie Livingson. To learn more about drag from my friend Kieran. I asked him to teach me about the sexy, subversive, powerful femininity I had seen him perform as Roxytocin. Roxytocin(Roxy) is Kieron’s drag persona, she is archetypal mother whilst maintaining an androgynous aesthetic. She is fiercely loving and inclusive re-addressing power imbalances in queer spaces and will kill if you threaten the equilibrium of that space or any of her babies. She is the perfect host/ door woman, which is where I met her, on the door of a queer night in Bristol. So I invited Kieron to come to teach me how to be like Roxy for a day. Over the course of the day Kieron morphed into Roxy, he/she taught me how to do my makeup, how to dress and how to walk. He/She encouraged and supported me to do these things in a way I had never done them before. He/She caught me when I fell and held me up rather than holding me down.
I felt safe, sexy and free.
I hadn’t expected this to happen.
I realized that maybe Hyper Fem wasn’t as much about drag as I had anticipated. It was about performing femininity whilst feeling safe. It was about appearing ‘sexy’ without feeling like I was at risk of sexual assault. I realized that I haven’t felt like this for a long time.
It felt radical. It felt subversive. It felt powerful, and I realized that Hyper Fem is somewhat about re-dressing my relationship with men.
I am nearing the end of my research and development phase now, I have spent time with Strike a Light at Gloucester University, The Arnolfini in Bristol and Interval Artists Collective. I have performed three times, in a university, The Wardrobe Theatre and a very small room at Interval. I am learning more about what I think the performance is, I am also learning about how to work with other people on my solo work and how to work in a way that supports my access needs. I would like to thank the stellar team of people who have surrounded me on this project, Keiron Gurner, Caroline Williams, Jo Bannon, Emily Williams, Olivia Ware, Tessa Bide, Viv Gordon, BlackBark Films,
and Ruby Glaskin.
I will be working on the piece again in January at the Trinity Centre as one of the Ignite Artists in Residence, and am looking for financial support for this stage of the project.
If you are interested in finding out more about the project, or supporting this work in any way please contact Viki on vbrowne@live.co.uk
