UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Dance, Dress, Desire: Drag Kings, Prison Wear, and the Dressed, Dancing Body A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Critical Dance Studies by Tania Nicole Hammidi December 2010 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Marta Savigliano, Chairperson Dr. Dylan Rodriguez Dr. Vorris Nunley Professor Erika Suderburg Copyright by Tania Nicole Hammidi 2010 The Dissertation of Tania Nicole Hammidi is approved: ____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ ____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the support and friendship of some wonderful people. My committee, in particular, has been a dream team, in Robin Kelley’s sense of the word. Each has inspired a belief in achieving the impossible and doing so with grace, integrity, depth, and health. Each committee member in their own way has modeled for me the kind of scholar and professor I hope to become. For their generosity, patience, and faith as I waddled through this project, I thank them. Each are snappy dressers in my humble opinion, a fact that has been neither inconsequential nor unimportant in my growth and development as a scholar of costume and performance. Thank you. My gratitude to the U.C. Riverside Department of Dance for being a fertile intellectual climate to journey as a graduate student. I thank my graduate colleagues and friends – with special mention of Hannah Schwadron, dancer, friend, and yoga instructor – for suggesting that doing a downward dog could inspire a new world view, in seconds. I am heartily thankful for my dissertation chair, Dr. Marta Savigliano, whose encouragement, supervision, and support from early graduate classes to the last moment of the dissertation fostered in me the courage to dive deep, press the writing, and remain as intricate as possible in shaping thoughts and feelings, into words. The time, music, and thoughts Dr. Savigliano and I have shared have been wonderful moments of joy and growth. Working with Dr. Dylan Rodriguez, Professor Erika Suderburg, and Dr. Vorris Nunley has been nothing short of amazing. I would not have been able to make the iv connection between dress, architecture, and the state without Dr. Rodriguez, nor understood the depth of these connections. Likewise, the conversations about art, lesbian, and feminist histories with Professor Suderburg gave me hope, a sense of belonging, and pride in my work and in the people who’s footsteps I hoped to follow as a scholar-artist, including her’s. To Dr. Nunley, I thank for teaching me about the harlot of the arts, rhetoric, as connected to ornamentation and knowledge. All three, as Dr. Savigliano, have been invaluable in getting through this project. Thank you! Gracias! Shukran! Merci! My late parents, Beulah Marie Combs, and Ibrahim Beesheer Hammidi did not make it to see me through this project. I am eternally grateful to them. My parents were funky, smart, and had passion. They would have liked this work. To my brother, Marc Alain Hammidi, I thank for being my muse, buddy, and an extremely intelligent walker of life. There are many friends, performers, and scholars that I wish to acknowledge. Thanks to Sean Dorsey, Julius Kaiser, Kyrham Mutazioni Profane, Ocean, Gremlin, The Windy City Smarmies, Heywood Wakefeld, Team ITCH (Taisha Pagget, Meg Wolf, Sara Wolfe), Julie Tolentino, Ron Athey, Juliana Snapper, Pig Pen, Jennifer Doyle, Robert Summers, Deborah Najor, Nadine Naber, Dina Al-Kassim, Akira Lippit, Jasbir Puar, Laura Farha, Chris Lymbrotos, Amanda Taylor, Meesh Mousavi, Deborah Martin, Evren Savci (my writing buddy), and Ying Zhu for great performance, fly-by coaching, strong shoulders, movement training, good jokes, books, and spirits. I would like to make special thanks to my vocal coach, Juliana Snapper, for taking this drag king beyond the lip-synch, both intellectually and artistically, to song. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Dance, Dress, Desire: Drag Kings, Prison Wear, and the Dressed, Dancing Body by Tania Nicole Hammidi Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Critical Dance Studies University of California, Riverside, December 2010 Dr. Marta Savigliano, Chairperson In this dissertation, I make an argument for the inclusion of a more rugged critical approach to costume in performance, focusing on contemporary drag king performance as a genre. I make the argument that clothing fundamentally effects choreography. I further suggest that dance studies provides a fertile ground for recognizing and interpreting kinging as a physical practice, even while LGBTIQ dancers, choreographers, and performers continue to confront the homo- and trans- phobias of the dance industry and linked scholarship produced to interpret dance. Forwarding a notion of “the dressing, dancing body” as a response to humanist conceptions of “the fleshy body” as a unified, biologically-based entity, I challenge the homo- and trans- phobia of the industry and of normative dance scholarship by providing an intimate, scavenger, and multi-sensual methodology for approaching costume in performance. This gesture transgresses the stable boundaries of interpretation and subject-object relations at its core, queering conventional scholarship and invoking desire, feelings, vi imagination, texture, sound, and ornamentation into the formula of knowledge production. I look at the costumes of drag kings in contemporary drag king cabaret and at women’s prison uniforms in the context of federal incarceration as material sites where dress, desire, and dance come together in U.S. statecrafting. What brings these two seemingly disparate subjects together – drag kinging and prison wear -- is their common enemy: a violent state praxis designed to corporealize normative U.S. citizenship by controlling the dress and movements of all bodies. I foreground the centrality of the sartorial in the subject-formation of drag kings and female political prisoners, as a strategy for accounting for kinging’s exclusions from normative dance on the one hand, and for exposing how the U.S. State historically invests in dress policy and enforcement. Finally, drawing out a theory of sound and drag king subject formation and of “sonic rub” of drag king costumes as they touch the performing body, this dissertation in its repose offers a critical approach to drag kings attentive to embodiment, costume, and the sonic home-base of the drag king performance. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract vi List of Figures ix Chapter 1. SEXUALITY, DANCE, COSTUME Introduction 1 The Dressed, Dancing Body 5 Approaching Costumes 7 Ornamentation 11 Contributions, Methodology 16 Dress Histories 23 Drag Kings and Dance: Boxing Hegemony 34 Dissertation Chapters Breakdown 45 Chapter 2. ORNAMENTATION AND IMAGINATION Knitting Dreams 52 Ornament as a Crime 57 Becoming Oriented 61 Imagination and Liberation 73 A Picture of Love 77 Drag King Dream City 81 Building, Dressing, Dwelling 87 Chapter 3. PRISON WEAR, SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, AND AN UPTURNED COLLAR The Living Dead 97 Dress as Punishment 102 The State of Affairs Inside the U.S. Prison Regime (which is everywhere) 107 High Security Female Confinement – Lexington, Kentucky, 1988 111 The Striped Prison Uniform 118 High Security Nation Building/s 130 Federal SWAT Wear 139 Prison Wear and U.S. Citizenship 144 Forced Dress and King’s Captive Queer Bodies 147 Denim Archive 149 CHAPTER 4. SOUND IN DRAG KING PERFORMANCE Sound as Prosthetic 152 Drag Kings as Gendered Musical Subjects 156 The Sonic Rub 161 An Autre Écoute – Feminist Contestations to Listening Authority 170 Drag, Sound, and Subject Formation 178 CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION: DRAG KINGS AND BELONGING 189 Bibliography 203 viii LIST OF FIGURES Page Photo 1 Windy City Smarmies, International Drag King Extravaganza 10 69 Photo 2 Rusty Hips, San Francisco Drag King Contest 15 80 ix CHAPTER 1 SEXUALITY, DANCE, COSTUME “In other words she has fully embodied the costume and it is now an extension of herself” Ryan Jordon, 1997 Introduction Two curiosities and one great disappointment inspired me to pursue doctorate work in dance. The first curiosity came from observing the world of dance as an outsider to the community, while a resident of the greater Bay Area during the 1990’s. I observed that dance as a physical practice was filled with many gay male and some lesbian dancers, yet there appeared to be very few butch lesbians and even fewer transmen laboring as dancers in the field. As a drag king who took dance classes as a way to refine my technical skills as a mover, I found this absence of “my people” psychically jarring and a challenging intellectual puzzle. I wondered, was there something essential to the construction of female masculinities or female-to-male (FTM) gender identities in combination with queer, dyke, or lesbian erotic desires that discouraged most butches, gender-queers or FTM’s from pursuing dance, either casually or professionally? Or was this demographic simply the result of everyday butch, trans, homo, and queer discrimination in the culture(s) of dance, linked to the larger project of unifying the U.S. nation based on notions of a racially white and gender-normative, hetero U.S. citizenship? I knew I often felt uncomfortable in even 1 the most hip or “liberal” dance class because of the rigid gender binaries that organized the class’ activities and techniques. I experienced loneliness without other butches or gender-deviants in the classroom with whom to identify, rehearse movements, and create mini-narratives for dancer exercises that reflected our lives and interests in dance. Many of my drag king friends in the San Francisco Bay and New York City areas had access to dance, yoga, and movement classes filled with gender-queer people (with creeps and wierdos like me, as the 2009 Radiohead song goes), which was not my case in graduate school. The second curiosity that drove me to pursue doctorate work in dance arose out of my occupation as a wildland fire fighter for six years.