"Sissy that walk”: The queer kinaesthetics of mobility-through-difference

• Main Author: WOODS, Orlando
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2023
• Subjects: Queer kinaesthetics; bodies; movement; mobility-through-difference; RuPaul’s drag race; Gender and Sexuality; Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication; Sociology of Culture
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3792; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/5050/viewcontent/Continuum_SissyWalk_sv.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This article advances the idea of ‘queer kinaesthetics’ to show how moving through difference can enable disaggregated individuals to realize a new sense of becoming. Doing so involves rejecting the categories of identity that lead to disaggregation in the first place, and reorienting the self by developing a distinctly and radically (dis) embodied subject position. I illustrate these ideas by exploring the queer kinaesthetics of drag. Drag is most commonly associated with queer, cisgender males embodying otherness in order to come to terms with the disaggregation that many experience in heteronormative society, and through the heterological norms of representation. By learning how to ‘sissy that walk’ they transcend the cultural codes of social life by embracing a process-oriented ontology that involves moving through difference in search of a more autonomous sense of self-realization.