Intimate Investments in Drag King Cultures by Kerryn Drysdale

Author:Kerryn Drysdale
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030157777
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Queer Intimacies

If, as everyone seemed to convey, desire is key to the social relations sustained by drag king events, what more can we make of the experience of being together in this or any other scene? More precisely, why does desire matter as a condition of participation, especially when desire could conceivably be felt or oriented towards any number of things? In reviewing the implications of desire as a collective endeavour, I turn to the work of Lauren Berlant to engage with the possibilities of non-heterosexual modes of being in the world. Intimacy, as Berlant (2000, 1) tells us in her introduction to a special journal issue on the subject, “involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared” that is simultaneously “set within zones of familiarity and comfort”. Yet “the inwardness of the intimate is met by a corresponding publicness” (Berlant 2000, 1). For Berlant , the politics endemic to public spheres are affective in that they attach people to each other, to institutions, and to ideologies. But a public sphere can also be intimate when it “promises the sense of being loosely held in a social world” (Berlant 2009). Intimate publics thus link the ephemerality of individual experience to a broader collective trajectory. Thinking with both publics and intimacy—or how publics can be intimate—accounts for how relations between people can facilitate affective registers of belonging . Such relations “produce the sense—if not the scene—of a more livable and intimate sociality ” (Berlant 2009) amid the more formally stratified identity politics for same-sex cultures. Following Berlant, I suggest that what is central to expressions of desire is the desire for intimacy, the result of which is a small world .

Participation in Sydney’s drag king scene is both an inward-facing orientation towards intimate interpersonal relationships and an outward-facing demonstration of the affective register of collective desire. Taken as a whole, participants’ accounts demonstrate the desire to connect with others and the worlds brought into being through that connection. So while affective atmospheres are indeterminate, they are also deployed as resources in a sensory experience (Anderson 2009). That is, atmospheres have to be felt; they only come into being so that they can take on singular meaning through perceptive and perceiving subjects. As such, Ben Anderson (2009, 77) describes the atmospheres that Stewart and Brennan formulate as capable of organising subjectivity: I will argue that it is the very ambiguity of affective atmospheres —between presence and absence, between subject and object/subject and between the definite and indefinite—that enable us to reflect on affective experience as occurring beyond, around, and alongside the formation of subjectivity .

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