Translator: Robert Tucker Reviewer: Denise RQ
My name is Jacob Mallinson Bird and today I would like to take this time
to talk to you about the concept of queering the norm.
When TED came to me and asked me to give this talk,
they said that they thought I straddled these three seemingly opposing worlds.
The first one, as they say, of academia;
I have a first-class degree in music from Cambridge,
and I'm going to Oxford in October
as a candidate in the Master of Studies in Music.
The second world is that of modeling, I am an international male model
and I have worked for clients such as Jean Paul Gautier and Raf Simons,
and walked shows in London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo.
And thirdly, obviously, drag.
I am a drag artist and burlesque performer across the world.
And now if you think about them, admittedly it's a pretty odd mix,
but it's only the drag that really confuses the three.
I know we like to have our stereotypes of the ditzy model, the geekish academic,
but I think we can agree they're all pretty artificial.
But what is odd is that a drag queen can be both of them.
Not because we're ugly or stupid, far from it,
but because we are inherently queer,
and academia and modeling are so embedded in heteronormativity.
Academia is so steeped in patriarchal history,
and its history is so governed by great male minds,
often completely ignoring the contributions
from women or queer people.
And modeling upholds paragons of hypermasculinity and femininity,
which hilariously, I don't really live up to either of those.
So to have a queer energy in those fields is peculiar.
The drag queen represents
a queer transgression of heteronormative space.
Now, I first began thinking about this idea of queering the norm
when I was at Cambridge.
And before I was at Cambridge
I was a very chino-wearing, preppy schoolboy
who went to boarding school.
And then in my first summer at Cambridge I had an awaking of sorts.
I went to New York with a friend and I just met the most incredible people:
I met Amanda Lepore, I went to The Box,
I saw clubbing and saw these genderfucked club kids
and my eyes were opened
to a whole new way of expressing your gender,
and it really made me think about how I saw my own gender identity.
And when I came back to England, there was a decided change.
I started to see myself as more gender fluid, which is to say
I didn't really see myself as either male or female
but rather on a spectrum in the middle.
And my outward appearance began to change.
I used to wear fur coats to Unions, silk shirts, and chandelier necklaces,
and I had these really long talon nails.
Actually, my best friend Tom [used to call me Sue]
and we'd launch the library together.
And we used to have so much fun just playing with these gender norms,
until I experienced my first negative side of this at Cambridge.
And before I tell you this story, I just want to say this is in no way
reflective of Cambridge as an institution or institutions of the sort.
It was an incredible place for gender expression.
This story is simply reflective of one man and his opinions.
So, there was a very big fancy dinner at Cambridge,
and I thought it would be a really good time for me
to go in a dress.
I thought it'd be really good, that I'd be very confident in myself,
and I felt ready.
But I didn't want them to think I was trying to make an affront or a joke.
So, I emailed the master ahead of time explaining all this stuff I've just said,
how I felt more queer and I wanted to express my gender.
And he sent back the most wonderful reply, saying that was absolutely fine,
as long as I could wear my academic robes over the top, which I could.
So, there I was the night of the dinner;
I had my hair slicked back, my lipstick on, I was on fleek,
I was absolutely living,
and the night was decidedly fantastic, I had a great, great night.
Until the next day, when a letter arrived on my desk
calling me to the disciplinarian's office,
at which point I was told
that the night before I had put a Fellow off his food.
Now, however foully I may have whetted his appetite,
the truly disgusting thing was that comment.
Now, as you can imagine, I didn't take that lying down,
and I brought in Deans, and Fellows and Professors, and tutors,
and I fought this as hard as I could,
because I refused to be punished for something so outrageous.
And eventually the matter was swept under the rug,
as they realized it was such a ridiculous thing to say.
And I began wondering why it was
that outside they could see that it was so ridiculous;
but in that hall it seemed like a perfectly acceptable thing to say.
And I realized it's all about heteronormative space.
Yes, the world is heteronormative, but in those halls even more so.
It's a place where for the past 800 years,
great male minds have sat and broken bread.
A place where we sing Latin graces before we eat,
where the length of your gown says how high up in the school you are,
where we pay silence to a gong.
And in that space, my queer presence was an affront,
it threw the balance all off.
So I began thinking about this idea of queering heteronormative space,
and I wondered whether it always had to be a clash,
whether these had to jostle or whether they could live side by side.
Now here's where two queer theories are kind of coming into play.
The first one is of queer nihilism.
I'm going to give you a very reductive and biased view of queer nihilism,
because I don't want you to agree with it,
but what I'm going to say afterwards, public speaking.
(Laughter)
Queer nihilism essentially can be understood
as a complete segregation from heteronormative society;
it's almost reactionary in a way.
So if the heteronormative paradigm is to go to university,
to meet a lovely girl, to get married, to have children, to have grandchildren,
to grow old and then die a ripe old age,
the queer nihilist says: "Absolutely not.
I'm going to drop out of uni, have a string of sexual partners,
I'm going to eschew all normative relationship modes,
and die a young death from smoking, alcoholism, and unprotected sex.
I don't know about you,
but that doesn't sound all that life affirming to me.
I don't believe
gay and straight people need to be separated in these dissent communities,
and I really wanted to find some way of bringing gay and straight people together.
There I was, a 19-year-old on the search for a live-affirming queer theory
that brought gay and straight people together.
Easy. (Laughter)
And actually, it was quite easy because I found it at Sink the Pink.
If you don't know, Sink the Pink is a monthly club night in East London,
and what's so great about Sink the Pink is that it's just a club night.
It's not a gay [club] night.
So, gay, straight, bi, lesbian, trans, cis, intersex, asexual,
everyone is welcome and indeed everyone goes,
with about a 60/40 split between gay and straight people.
Now it's not that groundbreaking to have gay and straight people in the same room
(Laughter)
but what is is groundbreaking is to have gay and straight people coming together
to collectively queer the heteronorm.
And that's what happens at Sink the Pink, and that's what I'd like to focus on now.
So how does Sink the Pink queer the heteronorm?
The first way is just through its geographical location;
Sink the Pink is so perfectly placed at Bethnal Green Working Men's Club.
You may have, but I had never stepped inside a working men's club before
because I didn't feel safe,
it's such a bastion of British heteronormativity,
and I as a queer agent didn't feel like I was welcome there.
You know, it's a place of pulling pints, of playing pool, of watching football,
I wasn't really going to fit in.
But Sink the Pink said: "Absolutely not, that's ridiculous,
this is a space for everyone, gay or straight."
So we still have the brass pint drafts and the pool tables,
we even have the geriatric members downstairs eating scampi and chips,
but we also have tinsel covering every single wall.
Cartoon portraits of these creatures with giant erect penises covered in glitter
and drag queens running around everywhere.
The queer and the heteronormative come together
in a mutual sort of queering of the heteronorm.
It's not an invasion, but a cohabitation.
Another way in which Sink the Pink does this is through dressing up and drag,
and that's interesting
because we consider it something so stereotypically gay to do drag.
Whereas, really, if we unpick drag a little bit, we will realize
it's actually not that gay at all.
So, the drag at Sink the Pink ranges from the femme real,
trying to look like being a real girl,
to genderfuck club kid,
which is playing with gender so it complies in a more open way.
So, here we have myself in the pink, and Jonbenet Blonde in blond,
trying to give you femme real,
and you can be the judge if we succeeded or not.
And then here we have Mikey Woodbridge
and my favorite drag name of all time, Jacqui Potato
(Laughter)
clearly going for the more gender-bending aesthetic.
And she's going to love me for doing this,
but we're going to use Jacqui Potato as a case study
(Laughter)
in Judith Butler's performative gender theories.
So, basically, in essence, what Judith Butler says
is that gender is really nothing more than a series of socially constructed gestures
that we perform on the surface of our body,
and they have little or no ontological status in the anatomical sex.
And Jacqui is showing that to us here.
She's showing that, you know, society says
men shouldn't wear wigs, makeup or bras,
and women shouldn't have hairy faces or hairy chests.
But Jacqui's saying: "Well why not?
I'm doing it and it seems to be working out pretty OK."
(Laughter)
She's what Butler might call working the weakness of the norm,
showing that there is this division between sex and gender,
and all she's doing is going out clubbing.
She's working the weakness of the heteronorm.
If sex and gender have little to do with each other,
then where can sexuality fit in?
When gay men first come out,
Butler says they experience a crisis of gender,
because they feel like their masculinity is being taken away from them.
Because having sex with a man is thought of as feminine,
it's what we consider the anatomical female to do,
and therefore society has constructed that as feminine.
But if we agree with Jacqui Potato
in that sex and gender really have nothing to do with each other,
then suddenly having sex with a man - doing something feminine -
really has nothing to do with being a woman or being feminine at all.
Which works vice versa.
Doing something feminine, i.e. dress in drag, doesn't mean you're gay.
Logic: straight men, you can dress up in drag, too.
(Laughter)
And at Sink the Pink they do,
many straight clientele come dressed up in drag.
If they don't feel safe walking around
in the big, bad heteronormative world dressed up,
we have our own little station at Sink the Pink, Glitter my Shitter,
at which you can don makeup and wigs and glitter and whatever you like.
We even have a glorious pole-dancing drag queen, called Robyn,
and what's amazing about Robyn is that his most ardent, ardent fan
and fellow performer and wife is Fanny Minka.
And what's interesting about these two
is that in so many ways they uphold the heteronormative archetype.
They have lovely day jobs, they're married,
in the street you'd not look twice,
they look like perfectly normal heteronormative people.
And yet they so deny the heteronormative dictum
that says there's a singularity between sex, gender, and sexuality.
Sink the Pink gives them a safe space
to flout these infrastructures of the heteronorm.
And it really is quite incredible.
So all of this, to me, points so far away from queer nihilism,
to something so much more life-affirming,
which in recent queer theory has been dubbed as queer futurity.
The basic tenet of queer futurity
is that, admittedly, at the moment in society we do not have a queer utopia,
so the heteronorm and the queer still clash.
But the fact we have these pockets of heterotopia like Sink the Pink,
where they come together,
shows that it is possible.
The obvious argument is well, if it's possible, it's a fake world,
it's a club night, the moment you leave, it's all just going to go away again.
And I'm going to try and batten that a bit
by talking a bit more about queer futurity.
But first it is important to realize
that the world is a heteronormative space and sometimes aggressively so.
It's unfortunate that I can personally relate countless instances
where I've been threatened in drag
and even more instances where I've been physically attacked in drag.
Everything from being punched in the face,
attempted to be raped, or thrown out of a car,
all just because I was dressed as a girl.
The world is a dangerous place sometimes
and safety should always be our top priority.
Well, I'm quite lucky, because, I haven't been hurt too badly yet,
and I take more precautions because of it,
and I've had a few glam stories come by the side of it.
Few drag queens can say they were beaten up
on the Champs-Elysees in Paris Fashion Week,
and an Yves Saint Laurent model comes to their rescue
and then they go to the show the next day, but I can.
(Laughter)
So, how on the earth
can Sink the Pink begin to battle this heteronormative minefield?
And I think we can do that through music, because I studied music after all.
The music at Sink the Pink is lots of campy classics,
lots of Charlotte Church, which our DJ, Jono Kitchens, described as:
"So great but so shit."
(Laughter)
And lots of Spice Girls and stuff like that.
They're songs you would instantly associate with Sink the Pink.
And because you instantly associate them with Sink the Pink,
if you hear them outside of the context, you might think back to Sink the Pink,
you might think back to that queer heterotopia you experienced,
and you might start feeling those emotions again,
and then bring out this mental heterotopia around you.
And that's something really quite special.
It's a bit meta, but I think it's really quite powerful.
Because we all know music has that power to incite emotion,
everyone here can listen to a piece of music
and be recalled back to a memory, or a place, or a time, or a feeling.
And music has a great power to engender social change.
Take the disco movement for example.
The disco movement is a really, really great example
of music bringing together
a demoralized minority of black and gay youths.
And its success is in itself a queer transgression.
And also the disco demolition of 1979 in Comiskey Park,
where there was a mass burning of disco records,
is an example of the patriarchy being threatened and fighting back.
Music has an incredible power
and at Sink the Pink, I believe,
that it has the power to create this sort of queering of the norm.
So, that again is an intangible way, almost, through music.
But how else can you do it?
Simply by holding hands with your lover in the street,
by wearing nail varnish if you're a guy,
or showing your body hair if you're a girl,
or as a straight ally simply by not using the word gay pejoratively in a sentence.
And even this talk, this very talk,
having a drag queen stand up in front of you at Somerset House
invited by TED to give a global talk about gender norms
is such a queering of the heteronorm.
As this talk, and the event alike close,
I ask you to go out into that brilliant, marvelous world,
as heteronormative or as patriarchal as it may be,
and to be totally, unashamedly you, to be the best you can be,
to stand up for basic human rights,
and to queer the world one action at a time.
Thank you.
(Applause)