Going Ape

Abstract

In this paper, I focus on performances made by women artists that transgress the species boundary separating human beings from apes. Kathryn Hunter's Kafka's Monkey and Coco Fusco's Observation of Predation in Humans: A Lecture by Dr. Zira, Animal Psychologist – and, to a different extent, Cookie Lyon's gorilla act on the second-season opener of the television show Empire – put forward queerly utopian ape impersonations that I read as drag. Transspecies drag shares its in-built capacity for political claims-making with its human counterpart; Kafka's Monkey and Observation of Predation in Humans are unsparing in their critique of patriarchy, coloniality and the cultural chauvinism of humanity writ large. I draw on recent pioneering scholarship on tranimalities, Donna Haraway's work on apes and the sly logic of these performances themselves in order to sketch out the outlines of a theory of simian feminism – a politics that makes an ambivalent virtue of the exclusion of women and animals from the category of the human itself. Transspecies drag is the performative face of this politics, one of its modes of being in the world. As Mel Chen might have intuited, crossing the variously taxonomic, gendered and racialized borders that Kafka's Monkey and Observation of Predation in Humans seem calculated to transgress does not demean Hunter and Fusco so much as provide them with an alternative vantage from which to explore the many queer analogies and points of metonymic transfer that bind human beings to their various others. In so doing, Hunter and Fusco have begun to elaborate a new language that radically expands the conditions of possibility for trans*, feminist and queer performance and critique in, of, and beyond the human.

Notes

1 As Gowri Vijayakumar astutely observed in a conversation with me about this moment, Cookie’s re-gendering is also evocative of the logic of the surprise reveal – the unexpected disclosure of the trans* subject’s purportedly ‘true’ sex – that sustains trans*phobic anxieties about queer bodies.

2 There is of course an extensive literature on the politics of drag in general, which is largely outside the scope of this essay. Esther Newton’s now-classic monograph Mother Camp (1979) is a valuable entry point to this intellectual genealogy.

3 I feel justified in this perhaps perverse extension of Judith Butler’s terminology by her own unequivocal insistence that ‘the field of power … exceeds and encompasses the axis of sexual difference, offering a mapping of intersecting differentials which cannot be summarily hierarchized either within the terms of phallogocentrism or any other candidate for the position of “primary condition of oppression”’ (1990: 13–14).

4 As Adorno puts it, the ‘victim’ of Kafka’s prose has ‘his feelings [agitated] to a point where he fears that the narrative will shoot towards him like a locomotive in a three-dimensional film’ (1986: 96).