Queer of colour hauntings in London’s arts scene: performing disidentification and decolonising the gaze. A case study of the Cocoa Butter Club

Abstract

This article analyses the representational stakes of queer of colour performance, by taking the case study of the Cocoa Butter Club: queer of colour cabaret night in London. Within a British landscape that has silenced queer subjectivities of colour at the intersection of race, gender and sexuality, I explore the potential of QPOC performance to redress historical erasure. To enact their presence, I argue that the Cocoa Butter Club’s performers showcase their collective disidentification from the scripts pre-assigned to their bodies within the European imagination. By doing so, they disrupt hegemonic representations of queerness and racialised otherness, making room for a multitude of queer of colour becomings kept otherwise invisible from public view. Such disidentifications unleash ‘ghosts’ into the public space, spectres of elided subjectivities and unresolved coloniality within a city that likes to think of itself as a post-racial LGBT haven. Drawing on ethnographic material and interviews with performers, I analyse what happens when such queer of colour hauntings reach the audience’s gaze. I consider their unsettling effects in relation to the white gaze, as well as their empowering function in relation to desiring QPOC subjects, seeking reflections of themselves in spectatorship.

Keywords

Decolonising disidentification gaze haunting performance queer of colour

Introduction

‘IDENTITY’

THE TERROR THAT FINDS ME EVERYWHERE I AM

IS THE SAME ONE INVISIBLE TO EVERYBODY ELSE

I GET CLOSER TO THE CENTRE YET SO FAR AWAY FROM MYSELF

TEAR DROPS/PEACH EMOJI/FALL BACK

MY SIDE PONYTAILS ARE MY ARMOUR

ANXIETY MY SUPERPOWER

IM NOT FOLLOWING ANY OF ITS RULES

MY BODY/DISSECTED

NOT REPRESENTABLE

(Nashad Sharpe, 2018).

This poem, inserted into a zine entitled Brighton QTIPOC¹ Narratives, is an illustration of the forms of disorientation endured by queer bodies of colour in white hetero-patriarchal societies. The first and last lines of the poem – “Identity”, ‘Not representable’ – capture the impossibilities placed onto those whose bodies do not conform to the scripts pre-assigned to them within the European imagination (Dhawan, 2013: 196). Colonial legacies have imprinted contemporary stereotypes of non-white sexuality as hyper-libidinous, adventurous and exotic, but also as hegemonically heterosexual (hooks, 1992: 21–40, 61–78; Alexander, 1994; Dhawan, 2013: 200). On the other hand, queer of colour critique has drawn attention to the ways in which a ‘homonormative neoliberal model of sexual identity […] mainstreams and depoliticizes a white, middle-class gay and lesbian positionality while at the time silencing communities of colour and their alternative models of (queer) ethnicity’ (El-Tayeb, 2011: xlv). The coloniality of these concomitant discourses weighs on the daily efforts of queer² people of colour to exist and make sense of their presence within a European landscape that has erased their subjectivity at the intersection of race, gender and sexuality (Bacchetta et al., 2015: 769).

Yet, Malik Nashad Sharpe’s poem published within a QTIPOC Narratives Collective zine is also a declaration of presence, the sign of a ‘collective push against the violence of fleshy, experiential and epistemological erasure’ (Lewis, 2017: 4). It manifests ‘the ways in which identity is enacted by minority subjects who must work with/resist the conditions of (im)possibility that dominant culture generates’ (Muñoz, 1999: 6). As a result of their failed interpellation within such dominant culture, as well as within hegemonic scripts of queerness and diasporic identity, queer people of colour have gathered to build their own discourses and counterpublics (Muñoz, 1999: 7). Theorised by José Esteban Muñoz (1999) as a survival strategy deployed to navigate both racist and queerphobic exclusions, this process of ‘disidentification’ has often taken artistic forms.

In the UK, the Cocoa Butter Club has been one such intervention. In September 2016, Sadie Sinner The Songbird founded this people of colour cabaret night in resistance to the erasure of performers of colour in London’s art scene. Since its inception at the North West London queer venue Her Upstairs, the initiative has grown into a collective of POC artists regularly showcasing various performances, from singing, burlesque, poetry and dancing, to voguing, drag, spoken word and performance art, with a strong emphasis on non-conforming expressions of gender and sexuality. The initiative got off the ground rather precariously, highly dependent on the un(der)paid labour of Sadie, Cassie and Cynthia, the three queer women of colour who worked permanently on production and promotion, as well as on artists’ willingness to perform for a small fee. These were the necessary sacrifices to maintain an accessible entry price for audience members: a suggested donation of £5, with no obligation.³ About fifty to eighty people were thus able to attend their monthly shows at Her Upstairs,⁴ in an atmosphere mixing queer extravagance and warm baroque messiness in the heart of Camden Town.

As the initiative gained visibility, the Cocoa Butter Club started receiving requests to perform several times a year in larger spaces like the Arcola Theatre, Camden People’s Theatre, the Roundhouse and Underbelly Festival, thus growing its capacity to confront mainstream spaces and institutions who had failed to make room for performers like them. After two years of ceaseless activity, they received their first official funding from the Arts Council of England in Summer 2018. Over this period, the Cocoa Butter Club became a space for (Q)POC⁵ artists to disrupt what is typically expected from queer bodies as well as from bodies of colour, a space of collective disidentification (Muñoz, 1999). By staging their absence from the mainstream arts scene into an alternative showcase, the Cocoa Butter Club’s performers creatively enact their presence, as well as the social violence at play in their erasure, thus inviting non-POC subjects to acknowledge such violence. Each showcase indeed signals to the audience that what has been dismissed as artistically valuable is ‘very much alive’, and has found other circuits to ‘come into view’ (Gordon, 2008: xvi).

In this article, I argue that the Cocoa Butter Club’s disidentification from the mainstream arts scene conjures the spectres of elided subjectivities and silenced histories into the public space, within a city that likes to think of itself as a post-racial LGBT haven. Can such enactments of disidentificatory presence unsettle coloniality? How can they disrupt normative scripts of identity and performance to make room for the previously excluded, and thus redress historical erasure? What is the role of the audience’s gaze in such a process? I will address these questions in three sections. The first will examine how the coloniality of London’s mainstream arts scene functions to silence (queer) performers of colour and their artistic subjectivity. In the second section, I draw from performance acts to analyse how the Cocoa Butter Club navigates such constraints through disidentification from the mainstream arts scene. As performers gather to produce such collective, embodied disidentifications, they conjure the ghosts of coloniality haunting their lives into the realm of public space. I analyse the unsettling effects of such announcement of presence in relation to the white gaze, before considering in a third section its empowering effects in relation to a (Q)POC audience, longing for reflections of itself in spectatorship. I argue that subjectivities overshadowed by colonial legacies can resurge through the erotics of witnessing each others’ queer of colour presence. A decolonising of the gaze is fostered by the experience of sharing space amongst (Q)POC subjects, allowing us to disrupt normative orders as we seize visibility for and amongst each other.

Methodology

I provide a local account of disidentificatory performance based on participant observation at the Cocoa Butter Club over eleven months at almost all of their shows from December 2017 to November 2018, combined with a set of six semi-structured interviews conducted during March–April 2018 with the founder and curator of the initiative, Sadie Sinner The Songbird, their producer Cassie Leon and four other regular performers: Silver Tears, Zayn Phallic, Rudy Jeevanjee and a last artist who preferred to stay anonymous. My writing was based on the assumption that the people I interviewed – (queer) performers of colour – harbour and mobilise certain forms of knowledge to navigate their social environment, and that such knowledge, when circulated, can map out social dynamics that have historically remained unaccounted for (Howard, 2014: 43). Rooted in feminist theory, queer theory and standpoint theory, I assert that those who participated in this research do not simply share stories and experiences but also generate meaning around them, which is itself a form of knowledge production. Regarding participant observation, I drew from autoethnography as a mode of researching and writing to critically locate myself as a queer of colour attendee. This was especially relevant in the third section, where I analyse the encounter of the Cocoa Butter Club’s disidentificatory performances with a (Q)POC audience which I was part of.

Lastly, although I benefited from access to interviews as a fellow queer person of colour, it is important to note that my middle-class, educational and light-skinned privilege, as well as my newness to the community, can work in various ways to alienate me from other London-based POC queers whose experience of classist, racist and xenophobic violence can be more prominent than my own. In this regard, I can only emphasise that the experience of queer people of colour in Europe is heterogenous and affirm the impossibility for me to speak on anyone else’s behalf. However, I encourage readers to consider this account of disidentification as a local facet of a broader refusal to bear in silence and isolation the alienating status quo within European cultural production, and as a collective will to make worlds beyond what has been constructed as ‘European’, as ‘queer’ and as ‘of colour’.

The Other can’t speak in London’s arts scene

The interviews that I conducted revealed a strong frustration about the under-representation of people of colour in London’s arts scene, reflecting altogether their lack of visibility in British media and cultural production at large. A review of recent reports on diversity within the arts sector reveals indeed an under-representation of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) people in the workforce as well as amongst those who engage with arts and culture in England (Arts Council England, 2016; Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2016). In 2011–2012, for instance, only 7 per cent of employees were BME across the creative and cultural workforce as a whole (Consilium Research and Consultancy, 2015: 31), whereas 14 per cent of England’s total population is BME (ONS, 2012). Because of this structural lack of diversity, BME artists are less likely than their white counterparts to get work opportunities, to be funded or simply to find themselves on stage. Yet, the performers I interviewed reported experiences of being told, when they raised issues of under-representation on main stages’ line-ups within cabaret or queer performance, that performers of colour were not good enough or were not applying for castings, or simply that there were no performers of colour. Interviewees not only felt that this was an excuse to cover systemic racism, but they were also aggrieved by the appetite of mainstream audiences for exoticism and ‘otherness’, as long as it remained on their own terms. POC performers’ overall under-representation from main stages had indeed coexisted with strong patterns of cultural appropriation. Such patterns depict an ongoing will to use otherness while erasing the voice of the Other. To quote Sadie, founder of the Cocoa Butter Club: ‘Producers were saying that there were no performers of colour but there was all this blackfacing and cultural appropriation going on, and it was like “Okay, we exist!”’. Whether it is about white performers wearing banana skirts or belly dancing, for instance, Sadie is here referring to the ways in which non-western cultures tend to be essentialised and trivialised in mainstream cabaret, thus satisfying desires and fantasies about an Other who has been constructed and imagined as such through centuries of colonial representation. But this Other cannot speak (Spivak, 1988). What is indeed portrayed through cultural appropriation is not the Other as subject (‘we exist!’, as Sadie reminds us), but rather otherness made intelligible by and through the white gaze, eager to consume ‘other’ cultures while actually re-inscribing coloniality (hooks, 1992: 21–40).

The essentialising often inherent to cultural appropriation resonates with a long history of exploiting otherness to please and entertain the white European gaze. The success of minstrel shows or human zoos in London and throughout Europe in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries testifies to this legacy of displaying bodies of colour as extraordinary curiosities, while depicting them as somewhat less than human (Blanchard, 2008). The representations crafted out of such colonial enterprise were key in the transition from scientific to popular racism, as they imprinted racial difference as ‘exotic’ into the psyche of tens of millions of visitors across the western world (Blanchard, 2008).

I argue that such visual legacies hinder the ability of (queer) performers of colour to assert their artistic subjectivity, as they remain trapped within an imaginary which was never their own. When there is space for performers of colour on cabaret line-ups, they remain expected to fit into the mould of what their identity represents to the mainstream, constrained by scripts of gender, sexual and racial performance that have long and violent colonial roots. Black bodies keep being associated with exoticism, for instance, and with a particular conception of what is considered to be ‘black’ culture. During a show in March 2019, Sadie Sinner mentioned how black performers keep being asked to bring some ‘sass’ or some ‘twerking’ to cabaret line-ups. Zayn Phallic – drag king of colour of Nigerian heritage – also related during our interview how he was asked to perform for the ‘hip-hop night’ of a mainstream drag king show, although his performances have nothing to do with hip-hop. Such examples illustrate interviewees’ general frustration of having to be manufactured Others and tokens under the constraints of a white gaze that most of the time directs and decides the content of the shows.⁶ Silver Tears, dance artist and burlesque performer at the Cocoa Butter Club, reflected on such constraints as a black woman navigating London’s performance scene: ‘when I come to other castings and for other jobs [other than at the Cocoa Butter Club], it’s still like you have to be this type of black, or you have to be this type of mixed race or they want you to be black but with a weave and following every single European beauty standard possible …’. The phrase ‘they want you to be black, but’ signals the ongoing power structures delineating the conditions of black bodies’ presence in the arts sector. Inclusion remains here conditional on Silver’s ability to conform to scripts and ‘beauty standards’ that were originally set to alienate and exclude performers like her (Puwar, 2004). Although such racialised constraints cannot be equated with the colonial primitivism of human zoos and minstrel shows, they too are shaped by coloniality as a condition spurring performers of colour to re-centre the white gaze in their artistic expression and to satisfy visual expectations conditioned by a past within which racialised Others were silenced and subordinated.

This power dynamic is amplified by the fact that BME people are largely underrepresented within audiences. For example, in London, only 6.6 per cent of commercial and 8.3 per cent of subsidised theatre audiences are BME, compared to over 40 per cent of the total city’s population (BOP Consulting and Graham Devlin Associates, 2016: 8). As a result, any cultural expression that is not deemed valid and satisfying to the white audience’s gaze and its expectations of otherness is at risk of marginalisation and trivialisation. In this context, Silver accounted for the racialised self-censorship that she routinely carries out to avoid ‘turning off’ her audience:

I have to water down my music choice. I have to be like: okay, do these white people even know this song? [laughs] I feel like even with things like that, I have to pick a popular black song just because I need a song that they would understand and be okay with hearing. Whereas if it was at the Cocoa Butter Club, if I introduce a new song by a black artist, people are gonna be like: hey girl! This is new! And maybe some people won’t like it but it won’t be that they’ll be completely perplexed and turned off by it. Because I think that’s what my experience has been.

This example illustrates the forms of violent discomfort which are imposed on Silver through the gaze of a white audience, ‘completely perplexed and turned off’ when her performance does not conform to their expectations of ‘blackness’. Judith Butler’s concept of normative violence accounts for the ways in which certain norms have indeed the power to delineate cultural intelligibility from invisibility and social death (Butler, 1999: xx, cited in Dhawan, 2013: 196). Besides, because mainstream representations have historically coded queerness as white and blackness⁷ as heterosexual (Muñoz, 1999: 8–9), queer performers of colour have had to compose with visual legacies that have made them impossible subjects for performance. Rudy Jeevanjee (see Figure 1), who debuted at the Cocoa Butter Club as a burlesque performer and vocalist, reflected on how this initially held him back:

I wouldn’t have performed if I hadn’t come across the Cocoa Butter Club. I’ve wanted to perform ever since my early teens, and only now having turned 30 has the Cocoa Butter Club given me a place to feel welcome and comfortable enough to do so. In the back of my mind, I always felt that because I was someone of colour, queer and didn’t fit the mould of what a performer looked like, that there was no space for me. That my experience was not as valid as someone else’s, or that no one would care.

Figure 1.

Photograph of Rudy Jeevanjee by Henri T. Art, during the preparation of a show in Hackney, 2019.

For queer performers of colour, this experience of not fitting in can be repeated in mainstream queer spaces. While white gay men appear to be the ideal occupants of such spaces, certain classed, gendered and racialised bodies are made to feel uncomfortable and hyper-visible when they try to enter (Puwar, 2004; DasGupta and Dasgupta, 2018). In addition, queer people of colour rarely own spaces for queer sociability themselves, as they structurally command fewer resources than white people in the UK (Corlett, 2017). This was identified by Cassie as a source of frustration for the QTIBPOC community as a whole, as they constantly struggle to access spaces for the purpose of their activities:

It’s always tricky because we don’t have spaces. […] If you look at anybody who is doing anything, we’re always hiring and paying white people to use their space or their venue. Apart from this person called X, who owns Y, in Dalston, and I think he’s from South Pacific. So he’s probably the only queer person of colour who owns a venue in London for queer performance.

All in all, (queer) performers of colour are forced to navigate the coloniality that resides in the relations of power marking areas of artistic and economic authority and racial and sexual normativity in the cultural industry as well as within mainstream LGBT spaces. But as Nikita Dhawan reminds us, ‘while the subject is always already caught within and dependent upon webs of norms that enable its (un)intelligibility, it is never fully reducible to them. Normative orders are always vulnerable to disruption, always haunted by which they exclude’ (2013: 198). In the next section, I account for the ways in which (Q)POC performers negotiate normative orders through collective disidentification.

Cocoa Butter hauntings: performing disidentification

Collectively performing (Q)POC presence is a way to refuse the impossibility placed upon our bodies at the intersection of race, gender and sexuality. Whether it is Zayn Phallic performing a comical drag king act as a black boy ‘lyp singing’ Abba songs, or Rudy Jeevanjee performing drag and burlesque in an Afrocentric costume on a Janet Jackson track, the Cocoa Butter Club’s performances seize visibility by working both on and against hegemonic scripts of performance (Muñoz, 1999: 6–11), while conjuring the ghosts haunting our lives into the realm of the public sphere.

Muñoz’s concept of disidentification is particularly useful in accounting for how performers ‘scramble and reconstruct the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identitifications’ (1999: 31). Let us take an example. During a Cocoa Butter Club show called ‘No Direction Home’, which took place in November 2018 at Camden People’s Theatre, the performer Bae Sharam (Figure 2) arrived on stage wearing a burqa, inviting the audience to close their eyes. They moved on to tell their story and describe the lonely life of a young niqabi girl living in an Islamic dictatorship. They weigh each silence between their sentences, accompanying the spectator’s imaginary into the familiar narrative of the victimised Middle Eastern Muslim women. Out of the blue, a popular pop song bursts the silence and Bae Sharam initiates an unexpected, mischievous, gender ambiguous striptease. By fooling the spectator into believing their initial narrative, Sharam unveiled the essentialising and exclusionary script assigned to niqabi women and moved on to perform what such script has made unthinkable: a humorous intertwinement of the brown Muslim body with neo-burlesque, burqa, drag and pop music. By doing so, they short-circuit the terms of the white western gaze to call something else into view: an agentic performer disidentifying from disciplined femininity, from mainstream burlesque, as well as from anti-Muslim representations which keep coding Muslim women as voiceless. Neither mere opposition to mainstream representations, nor assimilation to their rules, Cocoa Butter Club acts such as this one recycle hegemonic scripts of performance to make worlds beyond their initial scope, attempting to break free from the impossibilities they generate from the inside (Muñoz, 1999: 11).

Figure 2.

Photograph of Bae Sharam by Holly Revell, taken during a live show at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, 2017.

When these disidentificatory performances finally hit the audience’s gaze, it unveils not only elided (Q)POC subjectivities, but also the social violence at play in their erasure. Within a society that disavows or minimises the impact of coloniality and hetero-patriarchy on the present, being aware of the weight of such violence – through the daily experience of inhabiting non-white queer bodies – can at times feel like the haunting of ghosts that only we can see. Elisavet Pakis argues that ‘in a hegemonic white social world, [queers of colour] have to encounter and deal with racism (isolated and institutional), social and historical “amnesia”, and the colonial legacies of domination and exploitation that structure these histories and haunt everyday lives’ (2014: 29). On the other hand, our incapacity/refusal to satisfy the visual expectations that society’s gaze places onto us – through normative violence (Butler, 1999) – can be experienced as a constant inner tumult. Queer decolonial artist Jacob V. Joyce puts it in these terms: ‘The fantasies and fears of our families and peers wander through our bodies like ghosts. When the mechanisms that project these perceptions of identity are fuelled by white supremacist, capitalist, hetero-patriarchal values, those ghosts can start to haunt us in traumatic ways’ (2014: 2). Performing disidentification can thus be a way for queer performers of colour not only to unveil but also to confront such spectres of ‘unresolved social violence’ (Gordon, 2008: xvi) to the public sphere that has conditioned their silencing.

The Cocoa Butter Club’s use of terms such as POC signals indeed a collective identity that does not emerge from strict racial identifications, but from a shared experience of oppression and non-belonging – whether it is in the family, the classroom, the gay bar or on the cabaret stage – and a refusal to accept the European dogma of colourblindness⁸ that erases such experiences (Bacchetta et al., 2015: 773). This rejection of colourblindness is enacted each time Sadie Sinner The Songbird marks the difference between POC audience members, whom she welcomes ‘Home’, and white audience members, whom she welcomes to ‘Our Home’; or when she introduces every show by explaining how underrepresentation, cultural appropriation and racism within the arts scene have made a Cocoa Butter Club indispensable.

Many performers also designate whiteness as an oppressive force through their acts, aligning with a broader European QPOC activist rhetoric which has centred its critiques on white supremacy⁹ rather than on political distinctions between LGBT, queer and trans, or left and right (Bacchetta et al., 2015: 771). Some of them directly address white people in the audience, using a playful or sententious tone. Lasana Shabazz’s ‘Black Power’ is one of such performances. Combining drag, voguing and performance art, the artist concludes their act with a solemn lyp sync which asks white people to stand up if they would like to be treated the way society treats black people. In another show at Underbelly Festival in September 2018, the loop artist Xana also addressed whiteness through a humorous live music performance calling out cultural appropriation by mimicking a white woman who deems herself legitimate in wearing the bindi because her ‘great great great great great grandmother’ was of Indian origin.

At the ‘No Direction Home’ show mentioned earlier, Lasana Shabazz (Figure 3) also performed their act ‘Minstrels’. They arrive on stage, a light-skinned black male with a beard and red lipstick on. They ask the audience: ‘Do you find me attractive?’. They move on to discuss their Caribbean heritage and colourism. They tell the story of their Jamaican grandmother and how she used to tell their mom to pinch Lasana’s nose to make sure they would look better growing up – less black. The performance evolves into Lasana sitting on a chair, putting make-up on. They are now mimicking two white women getting ready for a party. The one Lasana portrays is trying to make herself worthy of attention from a man that she is quite obviously fetishising: ‘I’ve never been with a black guy before; is it true what they say?’. And as they mimic this white woman, Lasana starts putting black paint on their face. The weight of their gesture fills up the room with intensity and discomfort: they are turning into a blackface minstrel. Suddenly, they jump out of their chair and start dancing, throwing the audience back with them into the violence of minstrel shows and their dehumanising mimicry of black bodies. The act dives deep into such violence, shifting from the ‘terrifying’ to the ‘stupid’ black man, a poignant spiral that brings the n-word to the surface and unveils the horror of such representations – before they stop and ask again: ‘Do you find me attractive?’.

Figure 3.

Photograph of Lasana Shabazz in their ‘Minstrels’ performance costume, taken by Holly Revell during Lasana’s artist’s residency at Limewharf, 2015.

Through this act, Lasana ties together colourism, fetishising and blackface minstrelsy within one act, pointing to the inescapable violence of racism, colonial invention which keeps haunting and shaping our present. More precisely, they point at how current patterns of colourism and racial fetishising are in fact lively legacies of colonialism, as they continue to code darker bodies as Other.

Violating the powerful narrative of Europe as a continent free from ‘race’ and ‘racism’ (El-Tayeb, 2011), such disidentificatory performances produce moments of disruptive unease, ‘when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done’ (Gordon, 2008: xvi). Avery Gordon’s concept of ‘haunting’ captures this ‘animated state’ produced when performers bring to the surface colonial legacies whose ongoingly oppressive nature has been denied (2008: xvi). By conjuring the ghosts that haunt (Q)POC’s social experience into the realm of public space, the Cocoa Butter Club enacts a call to action that ties together the present and the past (Gordon, 2008), a demand for a response to their call-outs and some form of reparation and accountability from mainstream institutions for centuries of erasure and racist essentialisation suffered by minority subjects in cultural production. As these subjects encounter the dominant public sphere that has elided and punished their existence (Muñoz, 1999), unsettling queer of colour hauntings spill into the now.

Yet, the Cocoa Butter Club’s refusal to be invisible has not necessarily meant that their cultural productions are always intelligible to the white gaze. The ghosts of coloniality creatively conjured through performance can constitute a challenging reminiscence for white people who enjoy the privilege of the ability to ignore ‘race’ as a shaping force of their social realm. Being haunted by its violence is a frightening and uncomfortable experience which registers the structural harm that has been inflicted on (queer) performers of colour (Gordon, 2008: xvi). In our case, it produces affects of white fragility amongst audience members: the defensive attitude that white people often adopt when challenged about their racial privilege, or when confronted with information about racial injustice (Diangelo, 2018). Such attitudes can be a serious hindrance to the Cocoa Butter Club performers’ ability to speak and to be heard on their own terms. Cassie recalled an example of a defensive reaction from a white woman, after Sadie’s usual ‘welcoming words’ to the Cocoa Butter Club: ‘Sadie said on stage “It’s so important that we have this space in a white-washed industry” so this white woman then turned to me and said “But doesn’t that mean that she’s black-washing?”’. This occurrence of white fragility during a show resonates with other interviewees’ accounts of how uncomfortable some of their white friends feel when they invite them to the Cocoa Butter Club. During our interview, an anonymous performer explained:

I’m very surprised that not as many of my white friends come. And it really annoys the hell out of me. That’s … difficult. And I don’t know why! […] I think they just don’t quite get how amazing it is. And it’s many people I’ve worked with before, many people that are on my line-ups you know … And I tell them ‘come, come, come!’ and they just don’t get it.

The Cocoa Butter Club also regularly invites producers to their show, but Sadie explained during our interview in March 2018 that none of those she was targeting when she started the initiative ever came. And if gatekeepers in the arts industry get anxious about the ‘something-to-be-done’ that the initiative produces (Gordon, 2008: xvi), so do certain white queer subjects who struggle to grasp how whiteness functions to exclude and alienate others from seemingly ‘safe’ queer spaces. Zayn recounted an instance of racist abuse experienced by a drag king of colour and friend of his within the drag community itself, alongside many instances of having random people touching his afro hair at his own shows. He reflected on the lack of support from white peers whenever POCs try to call out such behaviour:

Stop making problems, stop splintering the [drag] scene. That’s what the POCs get accused of. Because we’re being too noisy about the fact that they’re casually racist. And that’s a problem for them. […] the drag community is a very tight family, but what happens is that we’re family to some degree. And then these things happen and all of a sudden people disappear.

All in all, the Cocoa Butter Club’s disidentification from London’s arts scene produces queer of colour hauntings, reminders of ‘lingering trouble’ (Gordon, 2008: xix) threatening to erode and challenge power structures by holding them to account for their colonial legacies and exclusionary workings. But can they be heard? I argue that QPOC disidentification can be intelligible much beyond the uncomfortable experience of confronting ‘unresolved social violence’ (Gordon, 2008: xvi). When performed for the queer of colour gaze of others, it becomes an avenue for silenced subjectivities to resurge into collective forms of emancipatory presence. In the last section, I thus argue that disidentificatory performances can redress historical erasure when considered not only in relation to hegemony, but also in relation to a desiring (Q)POC audience, longing for visibility and identification in the face of shared erasure.

‘Speaking to versions of yourself’: decolonising the gaze

I went to the Cocoa Butter Club for the first time in December 2017, as I was craving so-called ‘queer spaces of colour’ where I would be free to be both unapologetically queer and Caribbean. Such spaces became particularly important for me to access, as I experienced strong feelings of alienation and identity conflicts after I migrated from Guadeloupe (where I am from) to Europe. As a brown¹⁰ queer Caribbean European person, I resonate with what Gloria Anzaldúa has articulated as the experience of the ‘mestiza’: ‘Like others having or loving in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision’ (1999: 100). Indeed, migration has led me to navigate the intersections of many different cultures in which I can be alienated in different ways, whether because of my failed European subjectivity, my failed homonormativity or my failed Caribbean heteronormativity (Alexander, 1994). This alienation at the intersection of race, gender and sexuality can be experienced as loss, causing me to instinctively seek alternative modes of identification in the face of absent reflections of myself in society.

Muñoz (1999: 5, 8) highlighted that while the fiction of identity is accessed with relative ease by most majoritarian subjects, queer people of colour encounter intersecting obstacles when enacting a sense of self, especially as they inhabit more than one marginalised social identity: non-white and non-heterosexual. My own experience of facing such obstacles thus resonated with other interviewees, including Zayn: ‘I didn’t grow up with those kind of images of somebody that I’d look up to and that I’d identify with. And that really leaves a void in trying to formulate your own identity’. As queer people of colour do not find places and representations to inhabit as we are, we thus create and re-appropriate space for ourselves, attempting to carve moments of belonging from alienating environments (Bacchetta et al., 2015: 773). This is precisely why the Cocoa Butter Club’s audience has become predominantly queer and POC over the years, even though the initiative initially emerged from a demand for inclusion into mainstream shows. It became a physical space for (Q)POC audience members to feel safe twerking, sharing their lived experience of queerphobia and racism, kissing their teeth or openly displaying affection to a queer partner, without fear of judgement or social reprimand. This shared experience of space amongst (Q)POCs is also pivotal in allowing challenging counter-discourses to come into view:

If Sadie says the things that she says on stage, which are true and important, it’s because she knows that she is in a space where she is the majority. […] you couldn’t by yourself stand in a bar, and speak the way that Sadie speaks; we can do this at the Cocoa Butter Club because it’s our people anyway. They understand exactly what you’re saying and you’re never gonna be threatened by those people. (Cassie)

Considering the desiring (Q)POC spectator as an active participant in relation to queer of colour performance allows us to move away from systematically locating initiatives like the Cocoa Butter Club as a margin, a periphery to be considered only in its relation to the establishment. The ‘fugitive knowledge’ that circulates within the Cocoa Butter Club, across (Q)POC artists and audience members and outside of mainstream institutions, has a value of its own and ‘the capacity to be something other than a local knowledge governed or interpreted by a putative superior’ (Gordon, 2008: xviii). It is thus relevant to assess the ways in which (queer) people of colour can redress historical erasure by announcing their presence to each other. The Cocoa Butter club is indeed not only a disidentification from mainstream cabaret and queer performance. It is also a counterpublic space (Muñoz, 1999), where minoritarian subjects get to identify with each other by collectively and simultaneously disidentifying from a white hetero-patriarchal world.

In this context, the ghosts of coloniality conjured through performance are no longer ‘reminders of lingering trouble’ (Gordon, 2008: xix) threatening to erode power structures. When confronted by a QPOC gaze, the conjuring of such ‘ghosts’ into the public realm becomes instead the precious acknowledgement that the coloniality haunting our lives shapes a collective experience beyond the self; that there is a ‘we’ and that this ‘we’ has a voice. The Cocoa Butter Club’s performances become the artistic embodiment of such collective voice on stage, objects of identification and desire in the face of shared loss and erasure (Lewis, 2017: 4). Looking at each other as part of such QPOC collectivity fundamentally transforms the nature of the audience’s gaze. As performer and spectator recognise and embrace their common struggle for humanity, visibility and subjectivity, the gaze shifts from alienating to nurturing. The hierarchy that structures the relationship between white audience and non-white artists, and the processes of othering it entails, are indeed temporarily suspended. Sadie Sinner explained it in these terms:

Travis Alabanza made an interview in which they described how it is to perform at the Cocoa Butter Club, because there are so many aspects of yourself looking back at you. Whether it’s the fact that people are queer in that space, or whether because they are people of colour, a marginalised group … And it just becomes so much more intimate because it’s not a spectacle anymore. You’re not performing for people who will not understand. You are speaking to versions of yourself.

Here, the possibility to ‘speak to versions of yourself’ allows (Q)POC subjects to seize cultural intelligibility amongst each other. This momentary bypassing of normative violence enables the hauntings of our elided subjectivities to finally escape their ghostly shadows, thus becoming celebratory spectres of queer of colour possibility. As our presence is collectively embraced and recognised through the (Q)POC gaze of others, we can reach a ‘here-ness’, an ‘aliveness’ through which ‘counter-histories, counter-spatialities, subaltern epistemologies and modes of being are created and announced’ (Lewis, 2017: 4). In her article ‘Questions of Presence’, Gail Lewis argues that for those who have been excluded from hegemonic conceptions of subjecthood, such collective ‘presencing’ is in fact ‘a decolonising move in which presence becomes something warm, fleshy, substantial and rooted – an ego-syntonic and communal experience of “completeness” for those who have not even been counted/imagined as “person”’ (2017: 14). As performers enact on stage a world where queer bodies of colour are visible and valid, such a world is indeed brought closer to reality, while the status quo of marginalisation and erasure is denaturalised to our gaze (Muñoz, 1999).

The collective disidentifications that take place at the Cocoa Butter Club allow queers of colour to identify with blackness and queerness despite the phobic charges in both fields (Muñoz, 1999: 11), and to re-create representations comfortable enough for us to inhabit as we collectively re-work the scripts of our shared identities. In this sense, Silver Tears described the Cocoa Butter Club as a primary source of inspiration for her burlesque character. Interested in broadening the scope of what black female bodies are perceived as able to do in space, she described her performance art as a way to empower other black women to take ownership of what their own bodies can do. She thus explained how this artistic dynamic could have only ever flourished in (Q)POC spaces like the Cocoa Butter Club, through interaction with its audience. Besides, the possibility of being in a space that centres our disidentificatory identities is a source of strong affects of excitement and joy that all interviewees have accounted for, either as performers or spectators, and which I have experienced myself. Zayn explained it in these terms:

I go to the Cocoa Butter Club to be cleansed, as an audience member. Just a way to wash off all of the bullshit! And it’s just a really nice place where the buzz of casual racism just isn’t there and you can just relax and truly be yourself. And from that point of view … It just gives us life!

I argue that such affects directly relate to the idea of erotic knowledge as articulated by Audre Lorde (1978), who defines it as the embodied knowledge of our ability to experience intense joy. Lorde insists on the power of such erotic experience when shared in ways that can ground collective empowerment. Indeed, building an entitlement to this joy and wholeness lessens one’s likelihood of accepting oppression, resignation and self-effacement elsewhere, within a European landscape from which minorities have been violently excluded. As Zayn put it: ‘If you can give a space for people who are so beaten down by everything going on around them to the point where their mental health is in shreds … and you give them a place to feel loved and where they can recharge, they get this energy and go back into their lives stronger than ever’. According to bell hooks, the radical power of such a fantasy (sharing a space to feel loved and seen) can be enacted when histories of oppression and marginalisation are not ignored but rather engaged with (1992: 145–156). Acknowledging collectively that such reality is not acceptable reinforces one’s capacity to challenge the status quo beyond fantasy. In other words, the erotic joy circulating in the (Q)POC counterpublic does not exist independently from rage, which is sustained and ‘pitched as a call to activism, a bid to take space in the social that has been colonized by the logics of white normativity and heteronomativity’ (Muñoz, 1999: xi–xii). Interviewees accounted for how their being part of the Cocoa Butter Club provided them with the energy to keep pursuing ‘what they deserved’ outside of such a ‘safe space’, for instance. In Silver’s words, ‘it’s a community which really really reminds each other we’re valid. And it reminds each other that we never need to apologise for who we are, and we shouldn’t have to apologise for who we are. And we shouldn’t have to settle for less than what we deserve’. This ‘we’ that Silver refers to testifies to the collective subjectivities which resurge through the embodied experience of sharing space and erotic power (Lorde, 1978) at the Cocoa Butter Club. Such power can translate much beyond the scope of the counterpublic sphere, by fostering (Q)POC’s entitlement to occupy a social realm which they have been written out of, and to keep disrupting the imagined coherence of a British space assumed to be white and straight. But more importantly, finding a home in each other’s gaze offers a powerful avenue towards decolonising our own – the gaze we place onto others as well as onto our queer of colour selves. This is, I believe, a crucial tool for empowerment and survival as we keep envisioning worlds beyond the murderous logics that characterise our current context of colonial capitalism (Bacchetta et al., 2015: 776).

To conclude, within a cultural landscape that has silenced their subjectivities, QPOC Others enact their presence through disidentification. The Cocoa Butter Club is a home to such disidentifications: it provides a platform for (queer) performers of colour to unsettle the terms of the dominant gaze by subverting the scripts pre-assigned to their bodies within the European imagination. By doing so, they open up space between the cracks of existing representational regimes for a multitude of sexual, ethnic and gendered becomings kept otherwise invisible from public view. What I have highlighted in this article is that such representational resurgence is conditional on who is looking and how they are looking. The erotics of sharing space for and amongst QPOCs is indeed pivotal for disidentificatory subjectivities to be not only acknowledged, but nurtured into collective forms of emancipation.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Heartfelt thanks to Alia Schwelling and Véronique Belinga for providing feedback on earlier versions of this article, and to the journal reviewers and editors for their constructive engagement.

Notes

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