Gender Drift

Abstract

Staged as a drift between and beyond the terms of normative gender, Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie (2013) suggests a reconceptualization of the Situationist dérive as a practice of molecular becoming. In this essay, I offer Preciado's work as a way of understanding how queer dramaturgies may involve something other than a stable, coherent subject and instead figure what Rosi Braidotti has theorised as a non-unitary or nomadic mode of subjectivity. At the same time, Preciado's emphasis on the spatial, cultural and ‘pharmaco-pornographic’ conditions which materialise the contemporary subject may usefully resist renditions of the queer or trans subject as endlessly or effortlessly fluid. In exploring these ideas, I consider two performances – Rosana Cade's Walking: Holding (2011) and Nando Messias’ The Sissy's Progress ­­(2014) – as articulating the necessity for queer, trans and gender non-conforming people to appear in public spaces while simultaneously foregrounding the literal, material conditions -- and risks -- attached to gender that drifts from its most normative instance. These works invite us to rethink the potential of queer spatiality in terms of contact, exposure and situated embodiment.

Notes

1 Originally published under the name Beatriz P. Preciado, Testo Junkie has since been reissued under the author's given name Paul B. Preciado; Preciado's older publications reflect their former title.

2 Since 2010, transition- related medical care been funded by the French public welfare system through its inclusion on the ALD 31 (or ‘affection de longue durée’) list of long-term, evolving or disabling conditions that require prolonged and expensive therapies.

3 For further discussion, see Greer 2018: 206-12.