THE DRAG QUEENS’ POSTHUMANIST BODIES – One but several, material but incorporeal, worlds across worlds.

by Nguyen Huy Hoang (he/him)

Student Fulbright University Vietnam

hoang.nguyen.210052 (@student.fulbright.edu.vn)

Anthways, 2024 © Nguyen Huy Hoang

Beyond the dualistic bodies

Amidst the sculpted bodies as perfectly preserved in the ambient light of the stage, I breathed in a reality of the drag queens’ own making. They populated the stage like a stretched veil of bodies and clothes, enmeshed with light. The voices of iconic pop stars like Lady Gaga along with the audience’s periodic cheering pulsated through my skin. I listened inwards, towards echoes of hardening sounds, my body dissolved at the point of contact. Then, I came to learn a dance that hitherto is strange to my swirl of being. It was almost an automaton. Suddenly, behind the curtain, or perhaps the shade of their moving dress, I found myself in the world(s) of their craft, world(s) which are no less real than that of mine before I met them. 

The practices of drag queens as central to the articulation of transgressive gender norms have been influential as an interdisciplinary locus of study, ranging from gender activism, literary works to queer aesthetics (see Muñoz, 2009; Seitler, 2014). Such lines of approach, extrapolated to the drag queens’ doing in Vietnam, would yield a unified image of bodies caught in socio-cultural webs, manifested in the ongoing homophobia against “bede” (bê-đê), those who do not identify as male or female in Vietnamese societies. In fact, the leader of Queens of Phoenix—a rising group of drag queens based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam—commented on how harsh the audience’s reactions were, “going so far as to throwing broken glasses on stage,” when the group went on tour in Ha Noi, the capital of Vietnam. Their bodies then are configured as a site of possibilities countering the post-socialist and hegemonic gaze associated with “bede” as a cultural lexicon, especially when the model of drag queens was imputed to Vietnam during the 1990s (see more on the morphology of homophobia in Vietnam’s post-revolution period in Tran, 2011). 

This article, in engaging with the selective thinkers from philosophy, focuses on the drag queens’ possibilities for gender reification not in disembodiment, or beyond the socio-cultural configurations but from within their bodies. The localized ethnographic engagement with the Queens of Phoenix, concurrently and methodologically, gives way to the anthropologist’s more intimate and affective co-experiencing of gendered bodies. Therefore, in this article, I seek to chart a conceptual shape for the drag queens’ bodies that ties specifically to the question of their ontological principles, how they experience their bodies, not merely think or reflect on them, and in doing so, what a shape might be comes out differently to each reader. 

As such, I argue that the drag queens of Queens of Phoenix‘s sexed bodies are not merely a site of gender re-imagining, but of ontological possibilities traversing what the material boundaries for a body are in the first place. In particular, I will draw upon the interlocutors’ conceptualization of their bodies to probe how the inscription of gendered meaning presupposes the body. This sets the stage for the body to be investigated in its ontological conditions, the merits of which are neglected in the scholarship of Donna Haraway’s and Judith Butler’s feminist philosophy. In strategically pursuing diverse notions of “desire,” the drag queens enact what can be understood in Gilles Deleuze’s term as an ontological exercise. This situates a more strategic reading of the body, one that propels a turn towards an ontology capable of multiplicities. In the end, I arrive at a polymorphous arena beyond what is allowed for one body: a stratum of linguistic utterances and affective solidarity among and across several of them. 

According to one of the charismatic founders of Queens of Phoenix– Jean Phoenix, gender is not just a malleable social category, it is where sex realizes itself in the first place. In specific, the biological bodies, through extensive and continuous training, can be manipulated for a more feminine appearance. Bodily conditioning takes place until it becomes a given that you know “how to utilize butt-pads for more evocative bodily contours, evoke certain muscle groups, and break your masculinity,” asserted Jean. Anybody, gay, gen girl, straight, or lesbian, can always be trained to transgress the behavioural norms expected of men, physical boundaries even, to cultivate that feminine facade of the drag queens. 

By setting up the body as biologically malleable, this ethnographic vignette sets the stage for a re-reading of bodily possibilities away from a form of biological determinism. Such naturalization of sex and gender is what Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and The Subversion of Identity (1990) argued against. The dualist formulation in gender studies, for them, problematically lays claims to an immutable, “pre-discursive” sexed body through which gender is made sense of and traced back to (Butler, 1990, p.11). Succinctly put, gender, more discursive, presupposes sex as a material meaning-making edifice. For the drag queens at the Queens of Phoenix, however, sex and gender alike are a fabrication, just as when Judith Butler declared that sex is also a social construct.  

Materiality in its primacy

First, I will examine how the inscriptions of gender norms and acknowledgement of sex presuppose the drag queens’ bodies, assuming their liability in a cultural landscape. The article proceeds by situating the line of analysis on the drag queens’ conceptualization of their bodies in parallel with Haraway’s and Butler’s analysis of the body, or lack thereof in their scholarship of gender subversion. It follows that a clear-cut epistemological consideration of the body in mind/body dualist ontology fails to consider the body in its ontological implications. 

To start with, Mika, a kinky swooner in the team who has mastered the art of feminization, expounded on the intricacies, and perhaps, contradictions, in the transformation process into a drag queen. Distinguishing between the two distinctive parts of her identity, one of a drag queen, and one of the so-called original self, she explicitly stressed their incompatibility, lamenting the temporal and spatial exclusivity with which each self occupies her body: “One can not exist while the other is in existence.” On some occasions, “[her] body refuses to reconcile that it belongs to a female, even protesting against going filming under such guise.” Her body’s rejection to embodying a woman problematizes a clear-cut separation between the mind and the body: Her body thinks and decides instead, whether to go ahead with drag or not. In the case of Mika, a dualist logic implicated in mind/body metaphysics affords nothing but a blunt reductionism of the body to a material template preconditioned for meaningful cultural dialogues fashioned by the mind. Subverting the mind with a new hierarchy centring on the body as a site of creative potentiality and reflexivity would not do the job either. So much so about a bad form of idealism and biological determinism, opting for either of them fails to bring awareness to “[both] the bodily basis of thought and the cognitive component of bodily processes” (Blackman, 2021, p.5). Mika’s primacy of the body, as a point of genesis for acts of decision-making,¹ illustrates what ontological possibilities are left out of the mind/body incompatibility and separation. 

This theorization takes shape due to my reading of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and Donna Harraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), both of whom configure the body as only a given in the politics of gender subversion and in the larger economy of regulating discourses and gender asymmetry. In Butler’s framework, the sexed body should not be naturalized, not as a passive medium awaiting signification. The body is, instead, a set of changing boundaries, mediated between the socially signified and the politically maintained (Butler, 1990, p.44). Her appeal to a corresponding genealogical reading of the body in its specificities and determination in systems of power hints at its “cultural possibilities” in its ability to performatively re-invent itself under otherwise deterministic discourses (Butler, 1990, p.119). While Butler’s polemic aims towards a less stable ontology of gender, she refrains from an ontological reading of the body in its inert, materialistic, and inherent properties, thus limiting the chart of its possibilities to the social, cultural, and political landscape that conditions its emergence only. As such, just as there is “no true body beyond the law,” there are few possibilities beyond such very law (Butler, 1990, p.119).

From the standpoint of Donna Haraway, the body, as a “material-semiotic actor,” draws its potentiality from the image of the cyborg at a particular speculative conjecture of technology and fiction (Haraway, 1991, p.208). The cyborgs are a hybrid entity between organisms and machines, amounting to a breakdown of the dualistic distinction between materialism and idealism (Haraway, 1991, p.152). While this expanded definition of the body ensures a more cautious, partial, and polyvocal reading of what constitutes and produces it, revolving more around peripherals than a centred narrative, it “[foregrounds] knowledge as situated conversation at every level of its articulation” (Haraway, 1991, p.200). To conceive of the cyborgs requires a shift in the modality of thinking, one that entails epistemological escapes from existing categories like humans and animals (Haraway, 1991, p.200). In this instance, while Haraway acknowledges the complex materialistic, ontological nature of the body in this technology-fiction conjecture, it is subordinated to the epistemic orientation of what the cyborgs are in the first place. Recast differently, Haraway’s constant recourse to a cybernetic, bio-informatic assemblage dictates the terms, epistemologically speaking, for possible forms of bodily production, those that are certainly far away from what the drag queens and I included, were imagining with the inert ontological capacity of the body for actions and changes.  

The first part of this article has illustrated the drag queens’ conceptualization of the body outside the naturalized sex/gender logic, pushing towards the body’s materiality as primary in that regard. Substantiated along the way is my critique of Butler’s and Haraway’s formulation of the body, both of which fail to situate it in an ontologically rich examination of the bodies. On this note, I progress into Deleuzian philosophy as a frontier capable of a pure ontological investigation into the body outside of historical specificities and epistemological constraints. Hereby, Gilles Deleuze attempts a new ontology altogether whereby the body’s existence is recognized as fundamental. Specifically, I will introduce “desire”, a key theoretical concept in his ontology, and how it urges a more due reading of the body’s ontological conditions in the setting of the drag queens’ performance.

An interplay with desire

For once, on the point of bodily conditioning, Mika also revealed another thrust that necessitates the transformation: you have to “muốn,” or “desire.” “Desire” here escapes the sexual connotation and pleasure that is usually directed towards definitive goals or determinate objects in the mind. To be a drag queen entails working towards an infinitude of things, “talent, attention, catwalking, posing, identity,..” – Mika listed out feverishly. Even after the drag queens have become the drag queens, they continue this forever-becoming project. They can always achieve more drag-queen-ness.“One always has to reinvent herself against the backdrop of her past” – uttered pensively Mika. “Desire” here realizes its determination insofar as it exercises its capacity for determination. “Desire” is fundamental to becoming and re-invention. 

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1983) postulate the same indeterminacy and capacities for newness in the channelling of “desire.” As opposed to how psychoanalysis defines “desire” in terms of “lack”, an “incurable insufficiency of being” always contingent on the fantasy of unattainable exterior objects to make sense of itself, “desire” for Deleuze and Guattari is autonomous, self-constituting, and creative (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p.26). It is made up of “connective syntheses,”² which engineers beings as “units of production” in a process of mutual becoming, one that opens up pure multiplicities and metaphysical possibilities (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p.26). Aside from setting the groundwork for the body’s ontology as exemplified above, this theoretical concept by Deleuze and Guattari helps flesh out the mechanism through which the drag queens’ conscious mobilization of “desire” in a performance vis-a-vis the responses from the audience. 

One consensus shared by the drag queens is that before stepping on a stage, one must “assess what kinds of audience they will cater to.” This act of relational assessment points to a retrospective curation of their performing bodies across a spectrum of shapes, sizes, proximity, and sexual plays: To what extent should one’s body be too evocative, close to that of the audience, or invite sexual and bodily contact? For the drag queens, approximating the audience’s desire means outlining the most effective route for an affective synergy³ between their bodies and those of the audience, only so can the performance be a mutually constitutive success,⁴ a crisscross between lines of becoming. “Desire” is not an innocent, arbitrary artifice, but its intensities vary to accommodate the “states through which a subject passes,” those states brought out by affective connections among bodies (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p.17).

To further elaborate on the metaphysical conditions of such mobilization of “desire,” I turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “the virtual.” For the two theorists, “desire” can never be externalized in a “sensible form [or] conceptual signification” but whose existence is temporary, always in shifting modalities (Deleuze, 1994, p.183). It is only fair to say that desire are forces embedded within “the virtual.” “The virtual” is a field of conditions for the genesis of real experiences; and these conditions are pure differences or metaphysically primary matter (May, 2005, p.87). Beings are only able to constitute their identities in “the actual,” a working term for lived reality by Deleuze, when drawing and actualizing conditions from “the virtual” (Deleuze, 1994, p.208). Nevertheless, it is wrong to limit the actualization of “the virtual” to the actual, for the former is not a mere “copy for which substance provides the original model (May, 2005, p.49).” Precisely for this characterization of “the virtual,” it posits a source of inexhaustible metaphysical possibilities for the becoming of beings. 

A bar, a stage, and a dancing pole can be considered concrete effects of their actualization, wherever they are in the virtual. In a performance, the drag queens’ bodies encounter⁵ not the bar, the stage, or the dancing pole per se, but their version in the virtual, giving rise to multiple usages of a pole used in conjunction with a body, for example. This conceptual orientation from Deleuze helps restore the vital dynamism to the otherwise inanimate objects in the performing bar as well as the bar itself. The drag queens’ bodies then strategically connect with such, all for the success of their performance. Of course, the role of the audience here regarding the mobilization of desire matters.

To continue, the drag queens’ bodies not only mobilized “desire” in Deleuzian terms in relation to those of the audience; “desire” re-conceptualizes the body at its fundamental, independent of a drag queen’s performance. And this is what distinguishes Maya, the charismatic leader of Queens of Phoenix, from the rest, for whom, most explicitly Mika, there is a distinction between the performing self and the original self. “Maya is Maya, there is no Pham Trung.” The birthmark inscribed within the name “Pham Trung,” Maya’s original name, lost its provenance to a radicalizing becoming-body, one that needs not any stage or gender-bending performance to accumulate ontological stability. It is a performance in and of itself, so much as it is a continuous act of coming primal with its ontology. 

Maya also brought to the fore a powerful charge on “desire” as fundamental to any materialistic body outside the apparatus of sex and gender: “The point of having sperm implantation, sex toys and other artificial methods for reproduction is to pose an alternative to sexual organs. The important thing is that one is willing to love/desire, even the husband can go so far as to give birth for his wife.” Sexual organs are no longer indicative of a naturalized sex category, but their insignificant role in the ontogenesis of a body. The role of sex and gender altogether, according to the adamant statement by Maya, bores no ontological implications for the body. The ontogenesis is no longer treated as dealing with “the genesis of the individual but rather designates the becoming of being” (Smith, Protevi, and Voss, 2023). It is desire, a fundamental state of the body that transcends the functions of body organs. Giving birth that is otherwise ineligible by the designated sexual organs is an act of coming primal with their ontology and their desire.  

By tracing the application of Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of “desire” under different conjunctions with the drag queens’ conceptualization of their bodies, this section reinforces an ontological formulation of the body exclusive of the component of gender altogether. This does not cancel out the vital role of “desire” as a fundamental determination of the body that propels utmost resonance among bodies. At the same time, for Maya, desire needs not to be directed towards the goal of becoming a drag queen with indeterminate possibilities of gender meanings, nor strategically relayed across bodies, but instead, always capable and inherent in hers; and by extension, in those that are yet to become a drag queen.

Arena of voices and resonance

The last portion of the article returns to Maya as someone who enacts herself and impacts her body’s corporeality through her utterances. Transgressing the idea of voice as exclusive to one person, she arrives at a polymorphous arena beyond what is allowed for her own body, entertaining the possibility of coalition across bodies. At first, Maya perceptively picked up the conundrum of translating what she desires through languages: “Even if language is mediated through gender social idioms, the important thing is still the feeling and judgment in the head. That way, somehow the words will be answered!” Mediated as though one’s expression is through a finite ecology of linguistic categories, Maya believed what is uttered can be effectively felt, even carrying the reverberation of what is not. As a biological male, appropriating the pronoun of “cô,” or “miss/sis” helps Maya not only bypass gendered roles’ address but construct an affective space conjured up by her to actualize “cô” as an identity vis-a-vis her body as a material reality.

Maya’s instantiation of such a new spatial configuration enacts what Deleuze would call a “sense-event,” the event that arises when a particular proposition comes in contact with the world (Stivale, 2014, p.36). By uttering a proposition, the speaker ascribes a quality to the states of thing to which the proposition is referring (something happens to the world through one’s proposition), while manifesting oneself as a corporeal being in the world capable of uttering (one exists at the moment one speaks) (May, 2005, p.102). To affirm oneself through language, or to be more precise in Maya’s scenario, through her own voice in redefining linguistic categories, despite their inadequate expressiveness, is to open up new possibilities for the body’s corporeal state. 

Here, the idea of voices, metaphorically formulated for more attunement to the bodily re-imagining by the drag queens, now literally manifests in the act of lip-syncing as the most unforgettable feature of any drag performance. To lip-sync is to embody the voice of any pop artist, and by embodiment, the stage is a transgressive medium for affective connections and spatial collapse across corporeal bodies, that of the drag queens and pop artists. Each voice is a register into a larger “assemblage” of identities (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.406). To explain in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, “assemblage” is a becoming that brings elements together, all the singularities and traits of each body and each existence into “an unfixed, shifting mass of movement, speed and flows (Stivale, 2015, p.93).” 

The notion of voices as indicative of identities collapses into polymorphism and resonance, almost a horizontality of different bodies across the world(s). World(s) here can be that of the drag queens in Vietnam, that of the pop artists in Western countries, or that expressed and created at any moment the drag queens perform with voices.⁶ The act of voicing as an event of linguistic utterances, forms the larger assemblages which “come to compose bodies and worlds simultaneously (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010, p.6).” The possibilities of multiple voices and assemblages open up materialistic connections (or collapse) not only among bodies but across the world(s): “Maya is Maya, but Maya is different from herself. On stage, I am a mature woman. I am a Marilyn Monroe, a waacking dancer, a woman of colour. I have an aura, it occupies the entire stage.” 

This is a materialist ontology for Deleuze.⁷ It rides on process, contingency, as well as impersonal and pre-individual forces, it is not easily instantiated by concrete, politically recognizable figures (Smith, Protevi, and Voss, 2023). This is Maya’s calling, invoking “desire” through which unstable, indeterminate ontological beings can come together to entertain the possibility of coalition in the Butlerian sense while maintaining diversifying points of actualization without risking totalization and identity-making. In this last part of the article, I have argued that Maya’s conceptualization of her body transcends a corporeality-laden entity, but an assemblage of her voices and materiality. Her becoming is a becoming possible across different spatial localities, so as those of many others, afforded by the drag queens’ shared access to one same voice in any song.

Worlds between and in the bodies

This article has traced the articulations of bodily possibilities across theoretical strands to leverage the ontologically rich nature inherent in the bodies of the Queens of Phoenix’s drag queens.  In particular, the body, with its Bulerian subversive and inter-penetrating becoming, negotiates the symbolic boundaries and as a consequence, re-define what an idea of the body can be in such a process of negotiation, a cyborg for example, to pace Donna Haraway (1991). “Desire” as an affective orientation and ontological condition of one body is utilized vis-vis others and mapped onto the virtual images of performance tools. Decoupling and connection re-frame possibilities not in an otherwise preconceived idea of what a body is and its material boundaries but what a body and its parts can do. Voices then compose new coalitions across the arena of bodies. In this space of resonance, what worlds are expressed through the beautiful vibration of drag queens’ vocal cords, even if they do not sing? 

“Learning about drag queens means adopting completely different worldviews. From the beginning, you had to be ready to receive, ready to ask, and listen to the answers.” Maya concluded avidly. Concurrently, she pulled up her imaginary skirt, chiming in acutely that it was “drag,” which according to her, used to be an erotic gesture of the females to reveal what was hitherto unseen for the males. In this affective encounter, my body is forced to think, to reconcile with what it is not, to enact ways of becoming with the drag queens’ bodies. As a part of the audience and their “personal photographer,” at least according to their passing of words to the bar’s staff when I entered the venue with them, my body learned to breathe, to listen, and to dance in the world(s) of their own making. It has been a privilege for me to witness the Queens of Phoenix whenever they drag up their clothes!

Reflection on Ethics and Consent

The project started in March 2023, when I met the drag queen team at the bar and asked for their permission to tag along, which the team leader graciously approved. Later in August 2023 when the research design was formulated, I explained the purpose of the study to them and asked for their verbal consent to conduct semi-structured interviews (all of which were recorded and stored on my phone with password protection) and participant observation at their common house. This is where they re-convened to put on makeup before travelling to the show. 

There were a total of ten interviews conducted throughout the fieldwork period from August 2023 to December 2023. Since the drag queens’ schedule was quite busy, I used convenience sampling to interview whoever showed up at the common house, including the drag queens’ personal assistants as well as the costume and hair designers. Nevertheless, I focused my attention on the founders of the group to understand their business model, the group’s vision, and their in-depth personal reflection after years-after-year in the industry. 

I applied anonymization and pseudonyms in this submission to protect all the drag queens’ personal information, especially those on social platforms or their house addresses. Their privacy is thus preserved. The team’s name (Queens of Phoenix) is also a pseudonym to avoid any identification of the specific drag queen group in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam with whom I worked, since competition among different groups in the city is an issue, the point of which was articulated by the leaders of Queens of Phoenix.

This article was the outcome of an Independent Study supervised by Professor Tram Luong at Fulbright University Vietnam. While the study, according to the regulations at my university, did not require a formal application for Institutional Board Review (IRB), Professor Tram Luong’s rigour and meticulousness in overseeing the research design, procedures, and interview questions have been fundamental to the ethical gloss of the study. 

Declaration of Competing Interest

The research theorizes on the image of the non-humans as capable ontological entities in larger ecological relations and the process of worlding, or building world(s). Located at the intersection of posthumanism, interspecies ethnography, and Indigenous cosmopolitics, Nguyen’s work radicalizes hitherto conceptual and metaphysical systems about non-humans in anthropology. Inspired by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the anthropologist Viveiros de Castro, Nguyen aims to investigate ‘difference’ at the fundamental level of thought, the form of which is fashioned reflexively at the contingency of the ethnographic data, namely of the whales-fishermen relations in Quy Nhon, Vietnam as his current thesis. Associating himself with an emergent theoretical strand in anthropology called “The Ontological Turn” as “a machine for thinking in perpetual motion” in the words of Martin Holbraad (Holbraad, 2012, 265), Nguyen finds himself in a type of anthropology that keeps turning, keeps asking philosophical questions about the non-humans, and by extension, the humans, ourselves.

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