Post-Human Drag
This project was produced during my final year at Loughborough University studying Fine Art.
As it is well understood in mainstream culture, traditional Drag Queens, predominantly homosexual males, exaggerate and parody traditional female gender roles to critique heteronormative culture and gender roles.
Post-Human’ Drag however was a term I personally conceived to denote an emerging and at the time (2020) unnamed niche form of drag that visually spliced and hybridised the human body with natural, animal, cyborg, and alien forms through techniques such as digital manipulation, make-up and prosthesis. Pioneers of the Post-Human Drag movement at the time were 'Hungry' (Johannes Jaruraak), 'Fecal Matter' (duo Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran) and 'Salvia'.
Post-Human Drag artists; at the point of my dissertation study (‘'Drag Queens of the Anthropocene'', 2020) were exclusively Non-Binary and Transgender. This is because Post-Human Drag seeks to displace not just gender, but what it means to be human.
Post-human Drag seeks to subvert and interrogate the concept that being ‘human’ was never a neutral or universal term. The dialectics of self and other imposed by heteronormative culture in many ways means that any human which is not western, white or male is considered in/subhuman, and as such this form of drag seeks kinship with non human forms through its unique and often disturbing aesthetic, blurring the lines between human and animal, human and nature, and human and machine.
Loughborough University Final year exhibition 2020 website: https://artshow.lboro.ac.uk/students/luke-ellis/
