Blog Response 7, Courtney

I was interested in Iris’s and Cody’s blog posts for these readings, especially in relation to the Auslander reading. The three-part structure that Auslander lays out and that Iris probed—person, persona, and character—seems very relevant to Cody’s discussion of the problems that he had with the authenticity of the performances of queerness. The positioning of the person, the “real” David Jones (David Bowie) or the “real” Marc Feld (Marc Bolan), seems to be the problem here, and the fact that the go under assumed names is significant. What Cody’s post makes clear is the way that the real person is radically divorced from the persona in the case of the glam rock performer, I would argue especially in these cases of celebrity, and the way that this division has been historically ignored in the cases of those participants in drag subcultures. It seems to me that the reason that David Bowie or Marc Bolan would have not been under the same kind of physical threat as those who performed drag or queer identities in other spaces also has something to do with our cultural willingness to separate a performance identity from a personal identity. Thus, the “bodily risks” that Cody speaks of were prevented by both literal policing forces (bodyguards, crowd control) and a cultural policing of identity layering. It seems that the violence erupted in the cases of “everyday queer subjects and drag performers” because of an inability to see these people as performers of identity. The person and the persona are read as one in the same, and if these did not conform to standards of identity, violence ensued. Identity distance seems as important here as physical distance.