Politics of Respectability

Can everyone turn their dissidence into a place of resistance? Can what is found on the margins (wish to) be normative? How might we get around the rules or come up with our own codes of normalisation? While in some cases reclaiming difference and reappropriating insults and slurs might be an emancipatory gesture, living constantly on the edge can end up being unrealistic in the everyday life. Through different strategies of resistance  and subversion, such as drag or transvestism, we question how to negotiate our passability amidst structural and internalised forms of violence.

This “Improper Session” opens with the performance Me declaro travesti en cuatro escenas, by Frau Diamanda, musically accompanied by Margarita Tkachuk, in a piece that addresses the concept of transvestite mutation, charged with issues of gender, race, class and (neo)colonisation.