Drag in Quarantine: A Photo Essay

By Patruni Chidananda Sastry July 22, 2020July 20, 2020 In Culture, PHOTO ESSAY, PHOTO ESSAYS, Pride, Wear what you want wednesday 0 Indian Drag 0

Drag in Quarantine is essential. Why so, you ask?

Queer people live half of their life in closets, so it would seem a cakewalk for them to be isolated for a few days. Still, it allows us to put the heteronormative society within a confined space, so they experienced some version of the closet experiences. And, that is being in drag during the lockdown is important to me.

Post-lockdown, confined within four walls, I decided myself peace amid a global pandemic and quarantine was possible. For me, this means sharing my drag art with people.

The first week spent retrospecting and telling myself: don’t stop creating.

For the next couple of weeks, I created each of these five looks to showcase different aspects of myself and drag art in South Asia.

Looks I created, photographs by Rakesh Assileti

Drag Is Art

Every day I picked up a look. The first week as I started, I got the very inspiration from the excessively heard term over the week “Corona Virus”.

Drag Is Dissent

From the 1960s – 70s, Japanese artist, Hijikis Tatsumi danced in the Butoh. The performance took place after the end of the postwar reconstruction of World War II.

Japan entered a high economic growth period, but manufacturing plants contaminated coastal areas and rivers by dumping their waste — contaminated with garbage, heavy metals such as mercury and cadmium that caused mutations in human cells, causing a number of pollution diseases. Many people developed illnesses due to mercury poisoning. And, many people were victims of severe Minamata disease.

Tatsumi Hijikata collected the limp bodies, incorporated it into his own dance with the most profound resonance in distorted limbs of Minamata disease patients.

Drag As Dissent, Drag in Quarantine: A Photo Essay — Cucooned

This was the idea to decentralize drag to the representation of disease in human form. When you rationally present something, there is an awareness, reliability and imagination which makes people be aware.

Drag Is Body Positive

As the days dragged on (pun intended), I started picking up trash or lump material which I already had and started using it time and again to create an image of what art needs to look like. As I went on, I created a drag Art specimen called “Hairy Fairy“.

Society’s double-standards on body hair are no secret. Women are expected to be cleanly shaven, and even the slightest hint of hair is seen as ‘gross’ and ‘unsexy’.

This series of photography was to challenge the idea of beauty and natural hair.

I used some of my wigs to create this S.A.S (my drag name which stands for Suffocated Art Specimen) named “Hairy Fairy” through which I wanted to pass the message of being bold and embracing the body and its every part of it.

Drag Is a Message

My obsession of converting trash into beauty had me looking at everything in a renewed light. Without any cigarettes but lots of empty packets, it seemed natural to create this look.

From the 50 empty cigarette boxes I managed to collect with the help of a friend, I conceptualised and brought to living colour this piece titled “Smoking God”.

It is more than a lewk; It’s a performance art sitting and making it while passing the inhibition to choking oneself with smoke. This calls out a wave to end the choking game. My campaign to ensure there is no more smoke lighting up.

Drag Is A Challenge To The Status-Quo

Drag serves as the subversion of gender, revealing the ideology of capitalism, though more often and less correctly identified as detached patriarchal structures.

As the days passed my madness of creating drag grew. Trying to work on placing a specific object in a particular space to create a specific outlook, I tried my hand at something avant-garde.

Working with discarded and wasted silk clothes, collected for a while, and Ocalled the work “Rotten Silk”.

The #Tranimalization of fashion, colour needs scrubbing into a deformed structure, and that’s how the rotten silk was born.

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Creating these images made me realise how time, money and affordability was the experience going and buying my drag materials from outside. I still remember the stares the society shoots when a boy steps into a Women’s wear shop or a cosmetic shop and asks for Kajal.

Drag in Quarantine taught me to be free within the walls loving myself daily. It taught me that how we abuse privilege for art and how can we get inclusive and bring the essence of creativity in everything around.

This quarantine helped me to relook Drag art. I got space to develop and create a new version of the art-form.

A function of subversion is to reveal the absurd, the intermediary between the day-to-day and the intrinsic ideology creating it, which then opens up that ideology to responses of judgement, mockery, quiescence or anything that satisfies the immediate, visceral shock. Drag serves as the subversion of gender, revealing the ideology of capitalism, though more often and less correctly identified as detached patriarchal structures. Drag in Quarantine, more so.