Queer Wales: the History, Culture and Politics of Queer Life in Wales by Huw Osborne

Author:Huw Osborne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Wales Press

Welsh drag(on)s: trans space and time in Erica Wooff’s Mud Puppy

Drag performance is also at the heart of Erica Wooff’s Mud Puppy (2004), which further complicates the relationships between bodies, place and belonging through a transgender incoherence and failure that drags the nation into a queer past of myth and fairy tale. Mud Puppy is set in Newport and told by two queer narrators who have conflicted relationships with their Welsh homes. The novel begins with Daryl’s homecoming from London following a failed art exhibit, and she returns to Newport nine years after discovering that her mother had not in fact died in a car accident, as her father had told her, but had committed suicide. Her connection to home in Wales is broken by her Welsh-speaking mother’s dismissal, through suicide, of the family’s future. Her alternative queer self is constructed in terms of London’s metropolitan anglophone cosmopolitanism, where she capitalizes on a chic trendy Welshness that never really touches her personal Welsh past. Returning to the family home and the childhood bedroom, she is thrown back into her past, the Welsh language, the memories of her mother and her mother’s fairy tales. Shortly after her arrival, she is also thrown into a present desire for the 17-year-old Ani. The younger Ani is equally unable to identify with her Welsh home, and lives in a dream world longing for a future life in New York. Her fantasy revolves around Carlos, a transgender man from New York (via Ohio) who initiates Ani into the world of drag kinging that she had previously associated with her stepfather’s Elvis tribute performances. As with Daryl, her disconnection from her Welsh reality is also a temporal dislocation, as the narratives of her fantasies repeat the same scenes with increasingly surreal differences.

Carlos is at the heart of the novel’s national drag. Echoing Davies’s border guards, he is a policeman who first appears in uniform policing the movement of queer characters. Early in the novel, he pulls Ani over one night as she drives to Newport from a night at the clubs in Cardiff. He is not immediately identified as transgender, and this ambiguity blurs the sexual, gendered and national categories at play:

I could hardly believe it when I heard him. This guy was straight out of some movie. He even had an American accent. America by way of Pontypridd probably, but it still sounded good on him. I mean the guy was a complete poser, right? There we were in the centre of Cardiff at two-thirty in the morning and he’s acting like he’s in an episode of NYPD Blue. You had to laugh. But at the same time you couldn’t help admiring him. I mean he did it so well. He was … he was a real dude. There’s no other word for it. This guy was a real dude.37

Although Ani is, at this moment, unaware that the performance is as much a gendered one as it is a national one, the two are conflated:

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