This paper examines the motivational role of ambivalence in the genesis and reproduction of drag performance ritual, focusing on a particular drag cabaret in Atlanta, Georgia. Drag ritual has evolved as an institutionalized performance genre in response to a core set of ambivalent conflicts in the culturally modeled subjectivities of gay men due to the psychocultural hegemony of hetero‐normative models of gender and sexuality. This situation means that the gay male life‐course is characterized by a dialectic of transgression and conformity stemming from conflict derived from both masculine and feminine self‐representations, understood here as the "double‐bind of gay selfhood." The paper argues for theoretical expansion within cultural models analysis and emphasizes the relevance of performance theory, feminism, and the analysis of culture and power in psychological anthropology.
490 seeing the eyes of god in human form: iconography and impersonation in african and hindu traditions of trance performance in the southern caribbean keith e. mcneal university of houston Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 16:12 12 August 2015
ABSTRACTThis article links analysis of the body and of visual culture within religious studies through comparative examination of two southern Caribbean ritual traditions: Shango, or Orisha Worship (African), and Shakti Puja, or Kali Worship (Hindu). Both are centered upon subaltern ceremonies of trance performance and spirit mediumship. The article examines a primary difference in the impersonation of divinity evident between the two traditions-performing with one's eyes open on the African side versus closed on the Hindu side-and accounts for this contrast in terms of inverse relations between religious iconography and use of the body as a vehicle of ritualized form, referred to here as inverse conventions of "iconopraxis." However, this level of differentiation is built upon a deeper, but no less cultural use of the body as a tool of entranced ritual praxis shared by each tradition. Each tradition therefore exploits similar phenomenological affordances of the human body in order to cultivate alter-cultural experiences of ceremonial ecstasy that, in turn, are modulated by differing conventions of iconopraxis. The analysis highlights the polymorphous nature of embodiment in accounting for similarities and differences of cultural symbolism in the ritual arts of trance.The body can always be viewed in a multiplicity of ways, with a focus on separation or connection, finitude or transcendence, stability or change.Drew Leder, The Absent Body
This paper considers queer refugeeism from Trinidad and Tobago to the UK in relation to the political economy of (im)mobility in and out of the Caribbean. Gay rights have been embraced by liberal democracies as the newest form of human rights, what has been called "homonationalism." Mirroring other double-binds of liberal inclusion, I show how queer asylum-seekers get caught betwixt and between two globallystratified homonationalisms while confronting the realpolitik of European asylum law not only as queer refugees but also in terms of transnational social mobility otherwise unavailable to them. The British asylum system therefore materializes as a bordering operation that more often than not denies lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) asylum-seekers their rights under the sign of their humanitarian protection. I consider whether homonationalisms everywhere-as assemblages of human rights discourse-should be thought of as "post-political" projects, a concept critical to growing bodies of political theory and cultural critique. This is because humanitarianism touts "rights" as universal and moral, therefore transcending the political. However, as a result of their practical effects, I show how the institutional practices deemed postpolitical in the case at hand should be understood as attempts to deflect and defuse the
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