Abstract
Through the performative story-telling of Ceyhan Firat Hizal, a Turkish pre-operative transsexual living in Lausanne, Kutluğ Ataman’s Never My Soul! (2001) translates to video-art practice the critical potentials of mockumentary making and its pseudo-ontological relation to drag performativity. Queering genres of visual identification, Never My Soul! films and documents Ceyhan’s self-performance in drag, in which the drag act, the autobiographical revelations, testimony and self-confession are intentionally confused, supplemented and mixed with a strategically rewritten script of the so-called original conversations. As the artist also claims, the text, as well as the character performing and busily constructing herself in front of the camera, is made to operate as a travesty: “a transvestite itself”.1 Oscillating between and mocking the generic truth-claims of melodrama, porn and confessional documentary realism, Ataman’s video implicates a hybrid multilayered artifice and excess.
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© 2012 Cüneyt Çakirlar
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Çakirlar, C. (2012). Queer Art of Parallaxed Document: Visual Discourse of Docudrag in Kutluğ Ataman’s Never My Soul! (2001). In: Pullen, C. (eds) LGBT Transnational Identity and the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373310_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373310_16
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