Vaginal Davis, Queercore Punk and Terrorist Drag
Vaginal Davis describes herself in various terms which lack exact definitions: “homo-core punk”, “cultural antagonist”, “erotic provocateur”, and most prominently, “the key proponent of the disruptive performance aesthetic known as terrorist drag”. All of her work is also blatantly anti-normative, anti-capitalist, and anti-authoritarian. She shouts to her audience “Twee & Sympathy: A Manifesto”: “Don’t question authority / Eradicate it!“ For Davis, everything comes back to sexual liberation (“Our first priority must be: Liberate the world from its sexual repression”), and the world’s construction reflects this repression. As one quickly learns from browsing her (blatantly lo-fi) website, Vaginal Davis not only defies categorization but despises it, and while her art is not centered around it, a rejection of the “gallery system” is necessitated by all of her work.
While such a rejection is not uncommon amongst queer artists, Vaginal Davis’s conviction is unmatched, as one quickly learns when trying to find record of her art in any archive. Her website is conspicuously lacking in any such depictions, with some pages simply listing works with no suggestion of how they might be accessed. Some of the only exceptions are when Davis has created a full gallery in one theme, as she did in 2015 with “Come On Daughter Save Me”, an exhibition made up of cheap clay, nail polish, and perfume.
Powerful depictions of human faces, genitals, and unknown body parts are accompanied by a declaration of open revolt. The purpose here is not the gallery — instead, Davis focuses on “low-cost, high-impact work”, from these type of short-run galleries to various concept bands to prominent zines to performance art. In the same vein as this gallery, her significant catalogue of experimental video work is described as “low budget — often no budget”. As such, the best way to find record of Davis is through informal record — such as YouTube.
Aside from “disrupting the cultural assimilation of gay-oriented and corporate-friendly drag,” in her performance work, Davis also focuses on the intersections between femininity, queerness, and blackness. The above work showcases Davis’s interaction with such themes in a complex critique of French culture. These themes are more significant than any unified style; as Davis says “My medium is the indefinite nature of my own whimsy”.
Vaginal Davis’s work thus spans from black, latinx, and queer interjections into the punk scene (where she largely began her art) to punk interjections into black, latinx, and queer politics and art. Much of this is not only societal critique, but also self-reflective and self-critical. José Esteban Muñoz (who coined “terrorist drag” regarding Davis) theorized significantly regarding her work, which intends to interrogate and make hyperbolic instead of hide her cultural otherness. Some have described such a tactic as a reclamation of camp; others have named it “anti-camp”. More significant is that Davis’s work interrogates our ideas of acceptability, in the cultural mainstream, in queer circles, in punk circles, and everywhere.
