Psychoanalysis and Queer Performance Art
The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research welcomed drag performers for a rousing confrontation between Freud's theories and the world of drag.
Uncle Freak at IPTAR, photo by Aditi Das
By Eric Shorey
On December 10, 2022, The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research hosted an event titled “Psychoanalysis and Queer Performance Art.” Here are my opening comments as curator of the event:
Hello, my name is Eric Shorey. I’m a licensed psychoanalyst and an advanced candidate here at IPTAR. I’ve also been a DJ and a nightlife producer in New York City for over a decade. I’m so happy you could be here to join us today for this event. Let me get some thank you’s out of the way: Thank you to both the Arts and Society Committee and IPTAR-Q for hosting this event. Thank you to Anthony, Sam, Aneta, Anna, AnnieLee, and Tracey Simon for giving me the opportunity to curate this show and trusting me as a colleague and an artist. I have to take a moment to remark that an event like this would have been absolutely unthinkable when I started studying at IPTAR about 10 years ago, and this happening today is a sign of how much things have changed in our culture writ large, in our culture as an institute, and in the culture of psychoanalysis.
But being that many of us here are psychoanalysts, I think it’s worth asking: why was an event like this so unthinkable for so long? Why has psychoanalysis — which from its very beginnings has been in discourse with the art world and regularly engages with film, literature, opera, paintings, sculpture, etc… — absolutely scorned, shunned, and ignored queer performance art and drag in general? Considering the double life I’ve been leading as both a club kid and a psychotherapist, it’s a question I’ve had a lot of time to think about.
I think the first answer is a bit obvious: Psychoanalysis was, and unfortunately somewhat remains, a field for the wealthy, which means that interactions with so-called lowbrow forms of art and entertainment are somehow outside the scope of what analysts have shown interest in. In a city as segregated by financial class as New York, the wealthy’s interactions with the financially disenfranchised have become even fewer and far between, other than in the roles of server and served, and it often seems like we’re living in two different worlds with no bridge between them. To what extent is psychoanalysis’ classism and presumed high-mindedness something that remains under-examined? Does the psychoanalytic field have disdain for supposedly lowbrow interests, things like video games, sports, and various underground youth subcultures?
Secondly: I don’t think it’s melodramatic to say that the field of psychoanalysis remains guilty for its historically hideous treatment of LGBTQ+ and gender non conforming individuals — a history which this event is trying to reconcile with. It’s no secret that until frighteningly recently, homosexuality and transgender identity were thought of as mental disorders, and the psychoanalytic “debate” about the pathological nature of non-heterosexual identity remains frighteningly alive today. Outdated and patently bigoted ideas about trans people and queer people remain discussed and proliferated at psychoanalytic institutes, and I could tell you some blood curdling stories about the things people in this field remain unafraid to speak: insisting that “transgenderism” is a form of hysteria or psychosis, linking borderline pathology to non-normative gender presentation, suggestions that the goal of treatments of gay men should be to make them more masculine, or even the idea that transgender people simply don’t exist — these beliefs still have sway in our circles.
I think a lot of these misguided ideas about queer people, queer identity, and queer art are mostly born of ignorance, and it’s incredible to watch the analytic hubris of thinkers who pathologize gender non-conformity without ever having actually interacted with gender non-conforming people. The straight world and the gay world remain quite segregated as well. My hope is that by actually seeing queer art in person, some of it starts to make a little more sense.
Because of many analysts’ total unfamiliarity with actual, lived gay experiences, “gender dysphoria” and the surgeries that may or may not correct this condition take center stage in psychoanalytic discourse of gender non-conforming patients. Perhaps this is because that’s all that gets seen in the consulting room, or perhaps that’s because that’s all certain analysts want to see — because it confirms some conscious or unconscious belief about the inherent sickness of gender nonconformity. But what doesn’t get talked about is a phenomenon that’s becoming known as “gender euphoria” – experiences of ecstatic pleasure, solace, and perhaps even healing brought about when a person’s gender expression — which may or may not be typical in its presentation — is affirmed and celebrated. Drag explores the heights and depths of both euphoria and dysphoria, the agony and bliss of gendered experiences across the gender spectrum. In this way, drag may be considered an expressionistic negotiation of specific kinds of queer and gender-based traumas — or as a kind of (dare I say it?) sublimation.
People in general seem to have a lot of misconceptions about what drag actually is. In the book And The Category Is… writer Ricky Tucker explains how the house ballroom system — a specific subculture in queer nightlife predominantly created by trans, Black, and Latinx artists — arose due to the prevalence of family rejection of LGBTQ+ kids in those populations. The nightlife world is not simply a hedonistic landscape filled with depravity and indulgence. For many of us, it’s a kind of family that has taken on a psychological and social importance far greater than that of our biological relatives. These queer families provide structure, history, mentorship, tradition, work, etiquette, ethics, meaning, support, and most importantly purpose in the same way that biological families do. Despite the universal importance of the Oedipal complex in our psychoanalytic cosmos, psychoanalysts are quick to ignore the role of the gay father or the drag mother — parents who step in to guide the queer children when their biological families abscond. To what extent does the gay family recapitulate the Oedipal situation or to what extent does the queer family escape traditional Oedipal organizations entirely?
I’d like to propose that queer nightlife — at least theoretically — functions as a kind of temporary utopia, a playful inversion of the increasingly dystopian elements of our hyper-capitalist world. In the real world, the queer body is a magnet for violence, denigration, exploitation, and hatred. In the night club, the queer body on display is rewarded, cheered, praised, showered with money, perhaps even worshipped as a source of moral good. In the real world, queer pleasure is treated as a literal political threat — and right-wing legislation and right wing violence all over the United States is currently attempting to eradicate queer life from the public sphere, as we saw just last month in Colorado. But in the night club, queer life is treated as sacred, and queer joy is holy.
The saying that “drag is inherently political” — an idea that’s become a little bit of a catchphrase in queer circles — is quite radical for people who still assume that drag is simply a man dressed as a woman doing a silly little dance. Even amongst gay communities, and especially before the rise of mainstream drag performers on television, drag performers are and were often subject to ridicule and stigma. Drag to me is defined as “artistic expression in the medium of gender” — meaning that it has little to do with crossdressing at all. If we are to expand our idea of drag, or if we actually go look at drag in real life, we can easily see pure avant-gardism in drag’s provocative violations of normality and normativity. In truth, drag has always been political in the sense that the LGBTQ+ community's most important historical leaders have been drag artists and transgender people since the beginning of time. The recent right-wing characterization of drag as a form of “grooming” purposefully misunderstands the aims and aesthetics of drag in order to phantasmatically transform gender non-conforming people into boogeymen who threaten the “innocence” of childhood. Here I challenge fellow queer people: conservatives want so badly to outlaw drag for kids, but should the political power of drag be rendered inoffensive and family friendly to begin with? Is our attempt at shaping drag into a non-confrontational art form in fact a betrayal of its transgressive potential? What if drag actually is threatening to structures of power — and what if that’s been the point all along?
If psychoanalysis wants to make amends with the queer community, it will have to confront certain assimilationist assumptions inherent in its thinking. To what extent are psychoanalysts attempting to “normalize” queer patients by coaxing them into behaving more like straight people? To what extent are some analyses actually covert conversion therapies? To what extent does psychoanalysis continue to unconsciously pathologize gender nonconformity even as we supposedly accept queer lifestyles? This is where a confrontation with gender nonconformity in its most ostentatious form — drag — is necessary: for psychoanalysis to understand its own assumptions, it must actually see the thing it’s making assumptions about.
For our performances today, I will be introducing you to three of my favorite artists from the Brooklyn drag world.
Emi Grate is a Burmese asylee whose art explores the pains and resilience of immigrant communities in the United States. Her boundary-pushing drag ranges from confrontational avant-gardism to introspective cabaret. She also recently celebrated her 8th drag anniversary. You should clap for her for that right now.
The Illustrious Pearl is a poet and mixed media performer who almost always leaves me in tears. Their work to me is so moving because it showcases the surrealist potential of drag while also exploring the deeply personal from a place of both winking irony and heartfelt sincerity.
Uncle Freak is … pure joy. While many drag kings attempt to eviscerate the toxic qualities of masculinity, Uncle Freak instead celebrates the absurdity of manliness — while never losing the inherently political aspects of the art form or its seductive power.
While watching our performances today, please keep in mind that this setting is — well, pretty unusual for us. When drag is removed from the nightclub or the gay bar, it becomes something else — and the version you’re seeing today is indelibly different because of where we are. While there is a kind of subversive or disruptive pleasure in queering this space, we are truly not in our own home — and of course, I think of Freud’s uncanny here. Perhaps one thing to consider is how the setting of today — the clinic — changes the art itself.
Now a few rules before we get started: 1) Do not touch any of the performers without consent, and they will not touch you without consent. 2) Feel free to hoot, holler, scream, shout, cheer, and yell when you’re moved to do so. And 3) TIP YOUR PERFORMERS. This is actually an aspect of the performance itself and is also fundamental for the survival of queer artists. You can hand the performers a dollar during their number, you can drop it into a tip bucket, you can crumble the dollar into a little ball and throw it, or you can venmo the performers. I’ll have their accounts displayed on the screen later in the evening. If you’re straight, think of this part as a kind of reparation.