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10. Queerly Canadian: "Perversion Chic"; Cinema and (Queer) Nationalism in English Canada
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opened up between that hegemonic call to normativizing gender and its critical appropriation.”23 In his videos, Campbell focusses on critically appropriating gender norms through the free circulation of artifice. As for Lazano, the voice is the representation’s main dissonant factor. Mildred’s voice is the narrator Campbell’s voice, the only one not disguised. Mildred’s voice is already an interpretation that deconstructs the camera’s representation and in a sense contradicts the denotation. The voice emphasizes that it is not a woman speaking. There cannot be a straight denotation because immediate identi fication poses a problem. Because this is puzzling, viewers must go beyond the medium’s reality effect and recognize what is wrong. Through dissonance , the voice becomes a crucial interpretative factor. The Strange Other to Whom I Am Linked Another confessional video with a dual figure is Stefan St-Laurent/Minnie St-Laurent’s Stand by Your Man. All the characteristics of the confessional video are respected here using minimal staging. In his apartment, a male transvestite street impersonator, Stefan/Minnie, is lip-synching a song by Tammy Wynette, the singer he is trying to be. It is mainly the singer’s voice that is heard, although the actor’s voice gives a couple of short commentaries on his performance, which acts as a distancing element. The performer repeats his performance several times in a temporal loop that becomes disturbing. As well as the very unkempt-looking female image that he displays along with significant male anatomical traits such as a penis and a flat chest, the character wears a denture that hampers his speech. Stefan/Minnie’s scrawniness, neglected look, and denture all eliminate any eroticism or desirability the transvestite figure might have. The compulsive repetition of the sequences accentuates the parody and even the pathetic aspect of transvestism. Cathy Sisler presented the rarer female drag butch character in Mr B. Mr B does not speak, and he wanders anonymously around the city. The relatively normal male types that Sisler resorts to are concerned as much with accessories—a hat and a large overcoat to disguise her body—as with behaviour—spitting and smoking. Few anatomical traits are exploited; the character simply has her hair cut very short and scratches her cheek as if her beard is itching. It is evident that when we try to distinguish what belongs to the male universe and what is part of the female world, using stereotypes becomes inevitable; and stereotypes are much more pronounced when they concern the conventional cultural markers of a gender, as we 206 Performing and Disrupting Identities have seen in the chosen examples. However, this is a sensitive issue and can be tricky because some elements typically belonging to one gender category can slip into the universe of the other through fashion: earrings and ties, for example. The use of these types is nevertheless inevitable when defining characters, and I consider them here as a gender’s social conventions and not as essential characteristics. To make her character more convincingly male, Sisler constructs an identity by exploiting several cultural stereotypes: she creates a male gender fiction, mixing together pornography, Humphrey Bogart, GQ, and Modern Bride. Category takes precedence over the individual and type dominates the personality. Mr B is one man among many in the urban mass. Here, the ego is diluted through an increased number of alter egos. These men merge into a prototype that is homogenous at first glance: they wear similar clothes and adopt the same posture. Only the few surprised looks that MrB receives remind us of the character’s ontologically female nature, which is difficult for the audience to identify with, not so much because of her masculine look but because of her lack of individuality. Parody of the Sexes I will end on the aspects of parody and caricature used often in many of these performance videos. As I have already mentioned, Karen Kew and Ed Sinclair’s Chasing the Dragon, Paul Wong’s Miss Chinatown, and even Michael Chaowanasai’s TheAdventures of Iron Pussy 3 employ stereotypes and caricature to shape the identities of their represented characters. Chasing the Dragon openly questions notions of exoticism. On the one hand there is Cherry, a female impersonation of the typical Asian sexual stereotype, a gentle and submissive curvaceous beauty, and on the other, the representation of a fantasy, the stereotype of an Asian woman created through erotic conversations at 1-900-number. The videomakers...