Transformative Womanist Rhetorical Strategies: Contextualizing Discourse and the Performance of Black Bodies of Desire

Abstract

I enter this conversation through a community of watchers. I am an observer of women, men,¹ transsexuals, straight, straightish,² trans-gender, queer, and drag queen daily performances of identities whenever and wherever I see/hear/read them. As a heterosexual black American woman scholar, I am often transfixed by the performances of gendered identity. My research often takes up questions of identity that focus on the ways in which we construct identity through communication. Recently, I have focused my attentions on the ways in which social justice and gender equity are gained through social critique. In other words, is it possible to move outside of the liminal boxes of identity narratives to create spaces for transformative body politics? To this question, I insert womanist rhetorical strategy within the efforts of drag queens to focus on femininity and womanhood through the construction of clearly made choices about how to drag, or, rather, shift the fixed boundaries of the feminized “queen.”³ Drag queens, unlike most women, chose every aspect of woman they perform.⁴ There is deliberation not only over clothes, make-up, hair, and nails, but walk, voice, body, movement, and gesture also.

I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their comments and feedback in the construction of this chapter. I would also like to thank my conversational partners (Gayle Baldwin, Amber L. Johnson, and Darnell Moore) without whom this chapter would not have come about.