Queering the World Jose Esteban Muñoz describes the process of queer worldmaking as an effect of disidentificatory practice and performance. Muñoz defines "worldmaking" as
delineat[ing] the ways in which performances-both theatrical and everyday rituals-have the ability to establish alternative views of the world. These alternative vistas are more than simply views or perspectives; they are oppositional ideologies that function as critiques of oppressive regimes of "truth" that subjugate minoritarian people." Asco's body of work should be seen as one potential way of (queer) worldmaking by the minoritarian subjects represented by artists Valdez, Gamboa, Gronk and Herrón. The worlds they created through performances like Walking Mural and First Supper (After a Major Riot) are worlds opposed to oppressive regimes of the city, the art world, and the treatment of the minoritarian subject, in this case the Chicano/a artist, within them both. Likewise, Kent Monkman in his performances as drag queen Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, resists a strictly homonormative reading of drag and creates a world in which both Indigenous femininity and masculinity are contested for the sake of opposing a normative logic of gender created for but not by Native people. According to Muñoz, the performances of minoritarian individuals attempt to and often succeed at creating "worlds of ideological potentiality that alter the present and map out a future."[ii] In the same way, when queer Indigenous authors and artists called on their peers in 2011 to critically engage queer studies in their work, they were calling for the imagination of a future queer Native world of theory and critique. Queers of color, including queer Natives, have as their task, the continued project making worlds for themselves, in which their queer and minoritarian presences are not only felt, but are responsible for determining what the queer future looks like. |