# Children of the Night, Extravagant Monsters: Finding Liberation, Pleasure, and Joy in the Triumph of the Epicene Style
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Dedication: [William Dorsey Swann](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CqJikX3XrdvJngEaWX0kyZNDkJ-9Pzs6/view?usp=drive_link) (1860–1925)
This [video essay](https://youtu.be/dYW4Y6VeyF4?si=QhdDsRDNucPi6NKi) remixes film, music videos, and live performance to present a rhizome of connections in the evolution of queer camp, genderfuck, and afrofuturist aesthetics. It investigates the possibility of an epicene style that significantly overlaps with but is meaningfully different from Camp. These epicene figures include freaks, weirdos, oddballs, and every kind of outsider, whose gender ambiguity is just one aspect of their indeterminate corporeality. Some, but not all are monsters.
The phrase in my title, “Triumph of the epicene style,” comes from Susan Sontag’s 1964 Notes on Camp. Sontag emphasizes artifice and extravagance as definitive elements of camp, but insists that “the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized”. My subjects are not apolitical, and interpreting their deliberate rejection of norms as Camp mistakes a utopian refusal to conform for a mere failure to conform.
Gender drag denaturalizes gender norms through the decoupling of what Judith Butler calls “three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance.” (Gender Trouble, 174) Many of the performances presented here extend beyond troubling gender and expand the domain of drag to depict subjects with speculative, unfamiliar, and sometimes unintelligible forms and features, and alien temporalities, ontologies, and epistemologies.
Some of those performances are limited to the diegesis of a single artistic work, some span an artist’s career, and some seem to extend into the artists’ personal lives.
In the examples I studied, a succession of artists seem to be engaging aesthetic legacies to express queer human feelings, including feelings of alienation and horror that come from the inability to perform white/hetero/bio/neuro normativity; feelings of power offered by an illegibility which resists and disrupts the mechanisms of normativity; and feelings of communal joy found in sharing ante-normative pleasure and self-discovery.
I noted semiotic and aesthetic interrelations including: exotic fashions, colors, and hairstyles, that highlight norms’ artifice and instability; liminal spaces (nightclubs, subcultures) that offer safety and community; glam/glamour/glitter makeup as protective magic; baths as a site of pleasure and transformation; and delight in the disruption of oppressive systems.
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### The Epicene Style (trans\[human] drag)
#### LaMonda Horton-Stallings - [Funk the Erotic Transaesthetics](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gQtqVTbWlY9FlojqYF2pn-XKjGwhL0AC/view?usp=drive_link) 2015
From James Brown’s “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,” a song that addresses technology, capitalism, kinesthetics, and the automation of mankind, to Whodini’s articulation of the everyday spectacular and hidden performances of freakdom in “The Freaks Come Out at Night,” and ending with Lil Wayne’s unforgettable refrain “what’s a goon to a goblin,” there remains a conscious disidentification with the human in contemporary black cultural narratives. p.1
#### Phillip Bernhardt-House - “[The Werewolf as Queer, the Queer as Werewolf, and Queer Werewolves](https://drive.google.com/file/d/18vBgtf-oQ65NTFFycCPUtRDxFkMAsiN4/view?usp=sharing)” 2008
By ‘queerness’ in this context, I mean to indicate at least one of several conditions: the most common definition being homoeroticism of any sort… but equally important in the case of werewolves is the idea of ‘queer’ as anything which actively disrupts normativity, transgresses the boundaries of propriety, and interferes with the status quo in closed social and sexual systems.
#### Sara Ahmed - “[Queer Angles](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aFaiEdbdb84LKrBu3ICM52gGETSiKZ4G/view?usp=sharing)” 2014
This is how we generate a queer angle, when we offer a description of a body that is not lined up, or a body that is not at home in the world. We disturb a picture.
#### Margaret Gillespie - “[‘The Triumph of the Epicene Style’: Nightwood and Camp](https://drive.google.com/file/d/17onI887GKhYhoje_wxcvOYn6_Z-QLs2q/view?usp=sharing)” 2016
Rereading Sontag through Butler and queer theory then, a working definition of camp might tentatively run as follows: that it is the site of a “radical demystification of gender” (Cleto 31), which [camp] rejects the existence of an innate biological truth of sexual identity and by extension any fixed identity. Camp demystifies gender and “hollows out” (Dollimore 310) the depth model of identity through parodic enactment, the foregrounding of theatricality and the privileging of surface over substance. It valorises sexually indeterminacy—the epicene—and its metaphorical avatars the incongruous, the outlandish and the mismatched. With its ontological suspicion of stable selfhood, its wilful collapsing of the dyads of nature and culture, of authenticity and artifice, of seriousness and frivolity, camp posits identity as “performative, improvisational and discontinuous” (Meyer 2). p.4
#### José Esteban Muñoz - [Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tKGVOoJOVEMXfuawzCWu2t0ZvwlPyRWa/view?usp=sharing) 2009
LaBelle’s Afro-futurism was a strategic move to make the group look freakish and alien, to make blackness something otherworldly and uncanny… Aviance, like LaBelle, reconstructs blackness as a mysterious Lost-in-Space aesthetic. Other comparisons can be drawn between the punk performance style of Klaus Nomi, the deranged disco divinity of Grace Jones, the insane and beautiful drag of Leigh Bowery, and the spaced-out elegance of the hip-hop artist Missy Misdemeanor Elliot. But Aviance’s look is definitely his own. I have seen him in many outfits, including fantastic gold lamé jumpsuits, sheer polka-dot minidresses, and leopard-skin body stockings. Although he does not wear wigs, he sometimes adorns his bald head with a hat. Both his appearance and his performances are in no way attempting to imitate a woman.
To perform such a hybrid gender is not only to be queer but to defy troubling gender logics within gay spaces. p.76
#### Sonny Nordmarken - “[Becoming Ever More Monstrous: Feeling Transgender In-Betweenness](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MSXZHaoXWIl4fKqVe1aXpGD0cP89_2JT/view?usp=drivesdk)” 2014
We, as shape-shifters, resist abjection by making our own selves. In so doing, we question and deconstruct dominant epistemologies, which assume the existence of an essential “self.” We acknowledge that ideas of what constitutes the human and how we know this are just ideas. We create trans epistemologies, which locate authority to know in the feeling about our gendered selves. p.42
#### Caterina Nirta - “[Monstrosity as resistance: Rethinking trans embodiment beyond the rhetoric of the wrong body](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nm5eBHUzvfqGVABBVEam2KkZ_2e5Y17T/view?usp=drivesdk)” 2021
There is more to being a monster than epistemological boundaries of perceived transgression allow. There is an ontological reality that not only reclaims its specific and unreducible corporeality, but that constitutionally, ontologically and perhaps even imperceptibly, exceeds materiality in its resistance to representation. p.340
#### Susan Stryker - “[My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix.pdf](https://drive.google.com/file/d/133syRzGSwGtu8v9BM8Q8b8W8LkjtJHoo/view?usp=drivesdk)” 1994
I find no shame… in acknowledging my egalitarian relationship with non-human material Being; everything emerges from the same matrix of possibilities… p.240
### Liberation
#### Jack Halberstam - [Skin Shows](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l-QPapDXoyJI-lt5dLY1UKqmWpvjRLfI/view?usp=drive_link) 1995
The postmodern monster is no longer the hideous other storming the gates of the human citadel, he has already disrupted the careful geography of human self and demon other and he makes the peripheral and the marginal part of the center. p.162
#### Jeffrey Cohen - “[Thesis III: The Monster is the Harbinger of Category Crisis](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-GI1Pori66TkS8iqCWDXtsePnrBNsDuP/view?usp=drive_link)” 1996
Refusal to participate in the classificatory “order of things” is true of monsters generally: they are disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration. And so the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions. p.40
#### Sonny Nordmarken - “[Becoming Ever More Monstrous: Feeling Transgender In-Betweenness](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MSXZHaoXWIl4fKqVe1aXpGD0cP89_2JT/view?usp=drivesdk)” 2014
I feel a sense of amusement watching the eyes’ confusion, their concentration. I enjoy the chaos my body prompts. These eyes feel and imagine themselves to be legitimate knowers. How dare I, as Other, challenge their abilities to “know”? My very ambiguity challenges their understanding of themselves as omniscient. My ambiguity moves into their space, cornering their minds. They do not know which way to turn. My androgyny fucks with their imagined able-bodiedness: I impair their ability to categorize me. I challenge their conceptions of gender; I shake the foundations of their narrative. I upheave their ideas of Truth and their trusty methods to know it. I am successfully undoing gender (Butler, 2004) by being illegible. I am living the unlivable. Their failure to attribute a gender category to me makes my ambiguous gender performance a form of resistance. I take power in their confusion. I feel a rush of heat and euphoria in this moment of freedom—as I monster, gender-fuck and gender-terrorize. p.40
#### Susan Stryker - “[My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix.pdf](https://drive.google.com/file/d/133syRzGSwGtu8v9BM8Q8b8W8LkjtJHoo/view?usp=drivesdk)” 1994
I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic Womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself. p.247
The collective assumptions of the naturalized order soon overwhelmed me. Nature exerts such a hegemonic oppression. p.247
#### Donna Haraway - “[A Cyborg Manifesto](https://drive.google.com/file/d/18KRa0cffv7Wi8rqjeykF-mda-5i_ah8i/view?usp=drive_link)” 1985
Unlike Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden, that is through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and a cosmos; p.9
#### Michel Foucault - Language, counter-memory, practice : selected essays and interviews 1977
The play of limits and transgression seems to be regulated by a simple obstinacy: transgression incessantly crosses and recrosses a line which closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short duration, and thus it is made to return once more right to the horizon of
the uncrossable. But this relationship is considerably more complex: these elements are situated in an uncertain context, in certainties which are immediately upset so that thought is ineffectual as soon as it attempts to seize them.
The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows. p.34
### Pleasure
#### José Esteban Muñoz - [Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tKGVOoJOVEMXfuawzCWu2t0ZvwlPyRWa/view?usp=sharing) 2009
Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.
Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity. p.1
#### José Esteban Muñoz - [Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tKGVOoJOVEMXfuawzCWu2t0ZvwlPyRWa/view?usp=sharing) 2009
- of dance performer Kevin Aviance:
In his moves we see the suffering of being a gender outlaw, one who lives outside the dictates of heteronormativity… Some of his other gestures transmit and amplify the pleasures of queerness, the joys of gender dissidence, of willfully making one’s own way against the stream of a crushing heteronormative tide… Often, one gesture will contain both positive and negative polarities simultaneously, because the pleasure and pain of queerness are not a strict binary.
He stands center stage, and as he screams, he quivers with an emotional force that connotes the stigma of gender ostracism. His gender freakishness speaks to the audiences that surround him. His is an amplified and extreme queer body, a body in motion that rapidly deploys the signs, the gestures, of queer communication, survival, and self-making. p.74
#### Caterina Nirta - “[Monstrosity as resistance: Rethinking trans embodiment beyond the rhetoric of the wrong body](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nm5eBHUzvfqGVABBVEam2KkZ_2e5Y17T/view?usp=drivesdk)” 2021
it is necessary... to rearticulate the body of the monster as a site of desire, euphoria and affirmation. This is done through exposing, not concealing or repressing, the excesses of those bodies. p.341
### Joy
#### Caterina Nirta - “[Monstrosity as resistance: Rethinking trans embodiment beyond the rhetoric of the wrong body](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nm5eBHUzvfqGVABBVEam2KkZ_2e5Y17T/view?usp=drivesdk)” 2021
So, the monster cannot be seen as somebody who is averse to a widely shared idea of morality, for he or she is separate from relational systems governed by the transcendental other. p.341
#### José Esteban Muñoz - [Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tKGVOoJOVEMXfuawzCWu2t0ZvwlPyRWa/view?usp=sharing) 2009
Queerness is utopian, and there is something queer about the utopian. Fredric Jameson described the utopian as the oddball or the maniac. Indeed, to live inside straight time and ask for, desire, and imagine another time and place is to represent and perform a desire that is both utopian and queer. p.26
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